Director Lauren Taylor is making her Belfry debut with her take on Rosa Dolores’ Kindred: A Fairy Tale for Adults. Taylor—who is from Australia and has lived in Canada for 15 years—says that the play focuses on the real struggles of being an adult.
“The play deals with four characters, and they are all parents of young children, and each of them are experiencing separation or divorce,” says Taylor. “So it’s about how they negotiate their very busy lives and try to find themselves in the face of separation, and sort of go through the hardships of co-parenting and separation and what that means, and also coming out the other side of that, so working through all those difficult and complicated situations in order to move on with one’s life.”
Taylor says that the meaning of her play means various things to each of her characters.
“For some of the characters it means recognizing that they have a responsibility when they’ve done things wrong, and for other characters it’s about finding love again after such hardships.”
Taylor says the main thing she loves about directing is the collaborative nature of the craft.
“One of the things that I love about directing is this very sort of humbling process of being in a room with all my collaborators—the designers, the technicians, the actors—and we all work together to fulfill this common vision of putting the show on, but it’s everybody’s vision all put together, so it’s kind of like making a big soup, and everyone sort of brings a different ingredient to the soup,” she says. “I guess I’m the person who tastes the soup at various times and adjusts the seasonings. That’s a kind of funny metaphor, but that’s how I feel about directing, and I love it because, as I said, it’s a very humbling process for me to see everyone’s vision come together and emerge and really shine.”
Taylor says that her directing style is heavily influenced by her past teachers and other directors.
“I would say that I’m very influenced by people who have been my teachers in the past,” she says. “One is a woman from Australia named Jenny Kemp, and she’s a director. There’s another director from Australia called Bruce Gladwin, and both of those people’s approach to making work is very deeply inclusive and very process-based, so it sort of means everyone in the room gets to collaborate together. Some people view directing as you being the person who’s just the boss of everything all the time and everyone just has to do what you say and those two directors influenced me in a way that is the total reverse of that.”
Taylor says that the best plays are the ones that reach their audiences and stick in their minds.
“There’s been a handful of plays that I’ve loved so much when I’ve seen them, because they’ve really reached me and stayed in my memory,” says Taylor. “One of them would be from a long, long time ago, seeing Ex Machina, Robert Lepage’s company, do The Seven Streams of the River Ota. The river Ota is a river that runs through Hiroshima in Japan, which was bombed by the Americans in World War II. This play was like eight hours long, and I saw it at a festival, and I remember thinking I’ve never seen anything like that before. It had a dinner break and two little coffee breaks as well, there was seven one-hour stories that made up the entire experience of the play. Everything was done so exquisitely and the set was incredible, it was quite amazing.”
Taylor says that she wants the audience to be able to relate to Kindred and also to just have a fun outing.
“I hope that people will come away having had a good time out,” says Taylor. “But I hope that they get a bit of hope, the idea of atonement, and joy, and relief, and also just maybe a nice time with each other at the theatre after this tricky two years that we’ve had. It would be nice to feel like we’re a community coming back together again. That what I would hope for.”
Kindred: A Fairy Tale for Adults
Various times, until Sunday June 12
Various prices, The Belfry
belfry.bc.ca