August is a bittersweet month because its hazy summer days portend the end of summer and the inevitability of autumn. They also mean that Capitol Theatre Port Hope’s amazing summer season is beginning to wind down – this year, with the venue’s fourth and final mainstage show Christmastown by celebrated Canadian playwright Briana Brown.
Christmastown is a heartwarming and hilarious exploration of small-town life and community, based on Brown’s own rural roots. And it’s fitting that the play is receiving its world premiere not in the big city of Toronto, but in picturesque Port Hope, nestled along the shores of Lake Ontario and the Northumberland Hills.
The play centres on Kringle, Ontario – a small town that finds itself in a predicament after deciding to celebrate Christmas year-round as a spur to tourism. At first, the town embraces the idea with enthusiasm. But when an August heat wave hits, the festive spirit begins to wane.The central hub of Kringle’s community is the convenience store and gas station – where a diverse cast of characters navigates the comical and chaotic aftermath of their perpetual holiday celebration. Nora (Alison Deon) is the overworked store owner who desperately needs a vacation. The production is directed by Capitol’s Artistic Director Rob Kempson and also stars Christy Bruce (in various roles), Alison Deon (Nora), Deborah Drakeford (Mary), Darrel Gamotin (Sam), Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski (Jeff), and Mirabella Sundar Singh (Adeline).
Brown began working on Christmastown in 2016 when she was part of the Playwrights’ Unit at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ontario. But the inspiration for the play struck her much earlier: “There was a town 10 minutes from where I grew up that attempted a 24/7 Christmas situation that was ultimately unsuccessful. I was in high school at the time and never fully understood how it came to be, but it really stuck with me. That was the initial kernel of the idea.”
Around that kernel, Brown unintentionally built a world where every character in the play is an amalgamation of people she has encountered in real life. She describes how she was recently discussing the play with an old friend over dinner. “Suddenly this lightbulb went off,” and she told him, “‘Actually, there’s a bit about your grandma in it.’” She realized just then that she “had pulled in this detail about his grandma from somewhere” in her memory: “Only when he was right in front of me and we were talking about the play did I realize or remember that that’s where I’d pulled it from.” She laughs, “Writers are always collecting material, even if we don’t realize it. It’s dangerous to befriend a writer!”
While Christmastown is undoubtedly a comedy, it explores significant social themes – among them family, economics, faith, religion, creativity and community. Brown appreciates the complexities of rural communities and aims to portray them with nuance: “I often see the depiction of rural communities painted with a very broad brush, as though only one type of person inhabits them. That just isn’t the case in my experience,” she says. Although people in smaller communities may have less exposure to different cultures and lifestyles, many are willing to listen and learn when they are given the chance to do so – even if they occasionally “misstep while they are on that journey”. Brown wanted to use this play as an opportunity to highlight that dynamic in a safe and humorous way: “Especially in an era when there is believed to be a ‘war on Christmas’, I felt like it needed to be addressed in some way.”
Another important theme that emerged during the writing process was grief – and the idea that because of grief, times of collective celebration might not be celebratory for everyone. Having experienced deep grief herself over the past few years, Brown wanted both to name some of those feelings and acknowledge the unexpected humour that accompanies them: “I was inspired to satirize (in the form of Holiday MC Incorporated) how truly absurd it felt to be suffering through the greatest of existential questions and the petty frustrations of paperwork and bureaucracy simultaneously”.
As she developed her characters, Brown found particular satisfaction in crafting the dynamic between Nora and her teenage daughter Adeline – which she describes as “perhaps the most complex, because there are so many simultaneous layers, including mother/daughter and boss/employee relationships, plus a critical transition due to recent events in their lives. As a consequence, she explains, “there is a lot of delicacy that I am continuing to pay close attention to in rehearsals.”
It also took careful consideration for her to craft the character of Sam, an outsider who moves to Kringle with romanticized notions of small-town life. He initially verged on caricature, and it took some time to find the path to making him a distinct, three-dimensional individual among so many other “big” personalities. “Though continuing to poke gentle fun at his urbanity, I thought about the romanticism of a person who decides to make such a huge change in their life for the potential of a dream – and how one might respond when that idealism bumps up against a tougher reality,” she elaborates. “That’s how I ended up finding him.”
When asked if she has a favourite character, Brown demurs – though when pushed, she admits that daughter Adeline is her “heart character”, and she especially enjoyed writing her because of her “bravery and vulnerability.” Adeline combines elements of Brown herself and the young writers Brown has taught. Brown believes strongly in the importance of young people having “a safe space to explore what they think, rather than what they’ve been told – about the world, and about their own work”, and where they can have their feelings taken seriously. For these reasons, “I feel a kind of protectiveness towards Adeline,” she admits.
The rehearsal process for this world-premiere production has also yielded an unexpected affection for the actors bringing her characters to fresh and vibrant life: “Having created these characters and spent so much time with them alone in my own mind, when I see the actors embodying them so beautifully in real life, I feel a false sense of closeness to them—as if they are old, close friends. When in reality, I’ve only been working with them for 3 days.Then to mask those strange feelings,” she laughs, “I end up acting really shy around them in the greenroom.”
Excited at last to share Christmastown with Port Hope audiences, Brown delights in the prospect of creating moments of humour, recognition and emotional connection. “There is truly nothing better than making people laugh. Sitting in a dark room among the audience, and hearing their laughter around you – knowing that you were the starting point for those laughs to exist – is one of the best feelings in the world,” she smiles. But audiences should not expect cheap or obvious laughs. With Christmastown, as in all of her work, Brown builds her comedy atop something more serious beneath it: “Ideally, that ‘something’ doesn’t detract from the comic aspect, but rather deepens it.”
She continues, “Though the pandemic looked different for us all, we’ve all experienced a lot of challenges these past few years. I do think some of the difficult experiences I faced during that time carved out more room for silliness in my writing, and that’s why I’m taking bigger risks as a writer than I did before.” Ultimately, she hopes these risks – and the play that displays them – will resonate with a broad audience, including those who do not celebrate Christmas or hold mixed feelings about the holiday. “There is a lot in this show for them, too!” she emphasizes.
Christmastown is on stage at The Capitol Theatre Port Hope’s Sculthorpe Theatre until September 2, 2024. Visit capitoltheatre.com to reserve tickets. On August 27, 7:00 pm, audiences can also attend “Playwright in Person with Briana Brown”, a conversation between Brown and Artistic Director Rob Kempson. Click here to reserve general-admission tickets to the event.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesyArts Magazine, 2024
