Kanika Ambrose.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Kanika Ambrose writes stories that linger.
More often than not, her plays deal with the realities of human migration: the sights, smells and heartaches that accompany a fresh start in a brand new country. A librettist as well as a playwright, Ambrose writes like a musician – there’s a rhythm to her dialogue, a melody.
This month, Ambrose will premiere two new plays: The Christmas Market, a collaboration between b current Performing Arts, Crow’s Theatre and Studio 180, and Moonlight Schooner, a co-production between Necessary Angel Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre and Canadian Stage.
On first glance, the plays might not seem to have all that much in common. The Christmas Market explores the inner lives of three Caribbean migrant workers during a contemporary holiday season in Ontario, while Moonlight Schooner, set in 1958, takes place on the island of St. Kitts-Nevis in the aftermath of a harrowing storm.
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On paper, these stories are separated by time, place and narrative thrust. According to Ambrose, The Christmas Market was created to subvert audience expectations of what a “Christmas play” might entail, while Moonlight Schooner, since its earliest drafts, was envisioned as a sprawling, meaty epic.
But Ambrose, who also serves as associate artistic director of Necessary Angel, says the two plays overlap more than you might think. Both contend with feminist values and ideas – a common thread throughout her canon of work – but they also respond to oversimplified portrayals of Black men.
“I grew up in a time where nuanced portrayals of Black men in the media were few and far between,” she says, adding that she’s seen the impact of negative stereotypes first-hand. “I also love the Black man I’m married to, and I’m raising two young boys. There needs to be broader representation of Black men, and more love given to them.”
“We’re in this constant process of understanding and unpacking the traumas they go through,” she continues. “It’s this tough, constant grappling … Slavery was not all that long ago, and it continues to have a direct impact. The purpose of enslavement was to deliberately break Black men, to treat them like animals.”
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Ambrose has spent much of her writing career exploring Black diasporas. Truth, produced at Young People’s Theatre early last year, takes an uncompromising look at a Virginian tobacco plantation and the people enslaved there. Our place – which will play at Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop at the end of November – follows two Caribbean women through the gruelling process of immigrating to Canada while working for pennies at a jerk chicken restaurant. Of the Sea, an opera co-produced by Obsidian Theatre and Tapestry Opera in 2023, centres a father and his daughter as they come to terms with exile during the Middle Passage.
Truth and our place both won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding new play in their respective divisions and years. But Ambrose says their successes were never a given.
“I wasn’t sure if anybody would care about these stories in the ways I hoped they would,” she says, reflecting on her recent years of creative output. “There are lots of Black writers, lots of folks bringing forward different Black stories. I remember sitting in a dress rehearsal of our place and saying: ‘I don’t know if this is terrible. I think it’s special and I think we did our best and I’m proud of that, but I just don’t know.’”
Truth and our place director Sabryn Rock, who will also helm Moonlight Schooner, says Ambrose is remarkable for her willingness to experiment and play. “She’s fearless,” Rock tells me. “She wants to try many, many things... She leaves clues, and it’s all mapped out in the text; I get to be a detective when I interact with her plays. She’ll never tell me if I’m right – that’s part of the frustration and the fun.”
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When it comes to the content of Ambrose’s work – often gritty stories of exploitation – Rock speaks with reverence.
“She writes for the voiceless,” she says. “She’s creating new Canadian classics – plays I wish I’d been exposed to in high school and in theatre school.”
Veteran theatre artist Philip Akin, set to direct The Christmas Market, feels similarly. A long-time mentor to Ambrose, he says their “brains work well together,” and it’s notable how she’s able to write shows steeped in social justice without feeling like a diatribe.
“I believe in making fully formed human beings onstage,” he says. “Not simplistic stereotypes. I’m bored beyond tears when a play is lecturing me, preaching at me.”
As The Christmas Market and Moonlight Schooner approach – a slate of back-to-back world premieres that Ambrose says is coincidental – the playwright is taking stock of the life she’s built around herself. She never gives even the appearance of resting on her laurels. She drafts stories in her head as she plays with her young sons, and every new line or page break is treated with the highest respect.
“I have this privilege as an artist to really look at folks and consider how they’ve been affected by things,” Ambrose says, referring to the temporary foreign worker policies that appear in The Christmas Market as an example. “It’s a privilege for me to just sit in that rage for people, and to get to be upset about it. My hope is that these plays open up the conversations that need to be had about who we are.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the name of b current Performing Arts.