Theatre Passe Muraille is coming alive with a stunning physical theatre piece Erased by Coleen Shirin MacPherson. Coleen is a multi-talented artist who has collaborated with artists all over the globe to create this new work. I got to ask Coleen about her inspiration for this play, why make it about greeting cards, and what other stories she’s looking to tell.

1. Could you please introduce yourself to my readers and talk a bit about your role with Erased?

I’m Coleen Shirin MacPherson and am the playwright and director of Erased and also the Artistic Director of Open Heart Surgery Theatre; a small, but mighty, independent theatre collective with an international scope.  We create work that is physical, relevant and experimental – often focusing on female voices and developing work cross-culturally.

This is the first time that I have directed my own work, and it has been exhilarating and also challenging.  It’s hard to ask the playwright to leave the room if you are the playwright.  So you learn to be rigorous with cuts and actors’ feedback and work towards collectively telling the story you want to tell.  I feel really lucky to have some exceptional artistic collaborators on the team who are defending the vision and helping shape the piece in all its complexity.

And also, as a producer my role was also to raise the funds to make this play’s scope possible.  I teamed up with Theatre Passe Muraille, who are our partners on the show, and also with York University and began envisioning how we could get 11 performers on stage.  It’s pretty rare to have this many bodies on stage unless you’re at Shaw or Stratford – so there has also been a lot of strategic work happening in the background to make this all happen.

2. Where did you get your inspiration for Erased?

The inspiration for Erased began in 2016, when I was still living in the UK and Brexit was happening, Trump was elected President of the U.S. (for the first time …) and I found myself feeling disillusioned and powerless about the direction humanity was going.  From a rise in individualism to a race towards climate catastrophe, I was feeling the intensity and the absurdity of the moment and how our systems, (ahem capitalism), has ultimately entrapped us into this illusion of ‘progress’.  How can we unravel this knot? I was inspired by Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism where he speaks about neoliberal ideology and its effects on work and mental health and our contemporary society.  And so, I started writing a comedy. Like, I was thinking, how the hell do I actually write about these things right now? I was thinking of humour and how we need to laugh and about poetry’s ability to speak to the heart, and so, that’s what came out – a dark poetic comedy about our modern world set in a greeting card factory.  

3. The development of this play is very international! What was it like getting to collaborate with so many people on this project?

There is a kind of magic that happens when you work with actors on a new play and find I really only ‘find the play’ through an exploration with actors. The play has developed across continents: from the Arcola Theatre reading in London, UK where I worked with some exceptional artists to developing the piece through improvisation and exploration in Toronto, where Susanna Fournier was on board as my dramaturg – she helped me really focus on the language of the piece and to push the visual storytelling.  The work was further developed in the pandemic when I found myself creating a film-play version of an earlier draft and this was broadcast live to audience through La MaMa Experiments in NYC.  Here I felt I was given permission to just go for the strange and not hold back.   Through Buzz Development Series at Theatre Passe Muraille I was able to work with actors in the Mainspace and  investigate how we can use the space to create the factory world (which I recently learned used to be — at one time–  an air conditioning factory!).

I believe that theatre is about the present tense – and since the past 8 years so much has changed, the play has evolved because I had more to say or I wanted to say something in a different way. 

While I was in Argentina in 2017 I spent time with a friend of mine whose aunt was one of the Disappeared people during the military dictatorship from 1974-1983.   I witnessed the country’s largest-ever trial that culminated in the final sentencing of the military dictators and pilots who were held accountable for the deaths of many political dissidents to the military regime.  I found myself in the court-room with my friend holding up the image of his aunt amidst many other families whose loved ones were disappeared. I then was working in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a place that also has a history of The Disappeared during The Troubles. The story of the disappeared emerged in Erased as a way of speaking about all the erasures of peoples that occur in our world today, and that is currently happening now. 

Working with so many people has made me realize more and more that theatre really is a collaborative artform and that nothing can be done in solitude, that through the design and the visual elements of the show (Set / Lighting by Nick Blais; Costume by Jung A Im), to the music and sonic world (Music by Amy Nostbakken / Sound Design by Richard Feren), to the movement that is layered and integral to the piece (Movement Direction by Alix Sideris) – the play becomes more complex and exciting and less and less “mine”.  It is more a piece that I feel everyone has made because it takes all of us to make it. 

4. I’m the kind of gal who likes to keep the greeting cards she receives! I understand that’s not the norm though! Why did you choose the greeting card industry for this production?

I think there’s something about ‘ready-made sentiments’ in the play that I was interested in exploring, that greeting cards are so innocuous.  I liked the idea of using this sort of cute activity of people making greeting cards (make-work crafts) within an authoritarian regime under a post-climate collapse world.  It felt so deliciously full of juxtaposition, and yet, somehow was speaking about all the products we make in order to continue to churn the system.  If it was a bullet factory, would we be able to see the play in the same way? Maybe!  But that’s another play.

5. Is there a story that you haven’t told yet that you’re really yearning to tell?

Wow, okay, maybe I need to start thinking about my next play! I feel generally I love how stories help us understand ourselves within the world and I feel it’s the only way to create meaning from the chaos. Theatre is telling stories together in the dark, while laughing, sighing and breathing together.  But what story am I yearning to tell …   Can I get back to you on that when I mount the next show?

I want to thank Coleen for taking the time to so beautifully answer my questions! Erased runs at Theatre Passe Muraille from November 20-30. For more information and tickets, visit: https://www.passemuraille.ca/erased/

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