There’s a special magic in talking with Gillian Clark, the Montréal-based playwright, theatre creator, and co-artistic director of Keep Good (Theatre) Company. Her constant smile and innate warmth invite you deep into her creative process. And her whip-smart erudition makes you marvel at her observation and insights.
We’re discussing the development of her play Adventures, which is the opening production of Centaur Theatre’s WinterWorks festival. Adventures explores themes of parenthood, grief, love and risk – and it has lived many lives before arriving at WinterWorks, a festival known for pushing theatrical boundaries.
The question “Am I a good enough person to bring a child into this big, sad, and beautiful world?” – deeply personal for Clark – lies at the play’s core. “I think about that question a lot,” Clark admits. “I’m 33. I’m with a partner who I can imagine having children with… I really started taking birth control as I started writing this play. I started my journey with my multiple IUDs throughout writing this play.” The play’s creative gestation has “naturally intersected with that” fact, shaping Adventures into something intimate yet expansive: a solo show that navigates life-altering choices and the unknown.
Starring Ann-Marie Kerr and directed by Christian Barry, Adventures is a poignant blend of fairy tale and raw reality. With an original soundscape by Jackson Fairfax-Perry, the play takes audiences to the roots of the Mother Tree, where PJ and Wendy stand at a life-altering crossroads. There, in a time of collective grief, Adventures explores hope, uncertainty . . . and that profound question that has so long preoccupied Clark.
WinterWorks, running from February 25 to March 15, 2025, is Centaur Theatre’s newest initiative. The next evolution of the former Wildside Festival, WinterWorks showcases theatrical productions, readings, and gallery performances that defy convention, selected by curator Rebecca Gibian and artistic director Eda Holmes. The festival embraces works that challenge form and expectation, making it the perfect home for Adventures, a play that has metamorphosed across nearly a decade. The production, a collaboration between Imago Theatre and Keep Good (Theatre) Company, began as a site-specific show in a tattoo shop, then evolved into a multi-character play, before returning to its distilled essence: a solo performance, anchored by Ann-Marie Kerr.
Setting out on Adventures
Every story starts somewhere. And in the case of Adventures, that beginning was… unexpected. Clark was an Emerging Artist-in-Residence at 2b Theatre. Having recently graduated from the National Theatre School’s Playwriting Unit, she was pondering which new play she wanted to work on with mentors with Christian Berry and Anthony Black. “I was really in quite a generative state, so I was just writing all the time. It was kind of a beautiful place to be in,” she shares. While out on a walk, Clark saw an unneutered Great Dane. She was taken aback by the sight of “dog balls – because you don’t see them that often.” She laughs. “I wrote a monologue from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy about seeing dog balls. And that was the first seed of this play.”
That oddball observation grew into a layered exploration of adolescence, responsibility, and magic. Clark was finding herself increasingly drawn to the Peter Pan archetype, and the people in her life who seemed reluctant to grow up. “I was 23 or 24, and just feeling like I could identify who these people were,” she recalls. That insight led her to create characters PJ and Wendy, who are two teenagers navigating an unplanned pregnancy. Clark observes that the decision to become a parent is made at the nexus of external expectations, internal readiness, and anticipation of the world the child will grow up in.
But as she worked with these characters, she began probing a broader generational hesitation: “There’s sometimes amongst millennials a performative questioning that happens. Like, ‘Oh, the world, it’s so messed up. We shouldn’t bring children into it.’ Sometimes I question, ‘what is that?’ What is that questioning? Why does that exist?” She concedes that yes, “it’s very rational and logical, but is it emotional” at its core?
Adventures in adolescence
As Adventures developed, it assumed new forms. When Outside the March put out one of their first calls for site-specific work, Clark submitted a bold proposal: to have the play performed in a tattoo shop, where audience members could get tattoos while watching the show. “I was kind of like a punk ass,“ she laughs. “I felt very radical as I was proposing it. And they selected it.”
The play was chosen to be part of Outside the March’s TD Forward March, a training and commissioning program that supports underrepresented artists in immersive performance, and helps emerging theatre creators develop their skills in site-specific and experiential storytelling. “So we started making it together.” The play continued to morph. Initially a “two-hander”, it became a four-character piece when Clark joined Tarragon Theatre’s Playwrights Unit. But something about that expansion “felt kind of… not right,” she observes. “So we distilled it back down to two.”
Then came 2020. The play was slated for production, but COVID-19 had other plans. Instead of shelving the piece, Clark, Kerr, and sound designer Jackson Fairfax-Perry transformed it into an immersive Fisher Price-like, children’s-book-inspired audio experience. “We worked with Jackson to create an original score to go along with the text. And we worked with Jen Bulthuis to create illustrations for this book,” she explains. That experiment—one part necessity, one part creative spark—gave Adventures a whole new texture, layering sound and imagery into the storytelling.
During the development of Adventures, Clark reimagined the story as a solo piece told through the perspective of the Mother Tree. As she wrote, she envisioned her close friend and mentor, Ann-Marie Kerr, in the role – a realization that stemmed from both creative and personal needs. “Part of it was that I just wanted some guidance in writing this play, and also in my life. And I wanted to hang out with my cool friend, who I really admire and whose work I admire.” Wanting that collaboration, Clark brought Kerr on board. Then when theatres reopened In 2021, the play finally found an audience – outdoors, under an old growth tree in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park. “It was under the stars, and it was very beautiful.” And “there was something about it that also felt quite radical,” Clark remembers.
Adventures fully grown
Yet despite the unique magic of the outdoor setting, Clark felt a “yearning of feeling” that Adventures needed to take place in a theatre. “Something about physical theatres and their conversation with artifice and reality seemed really important,” she explains. “And the magic of hearing lights and sound inside a theatre…. particularly as we’re exploring [questions like] ‘Do we believe in magic in the world?’ and “Do we believe in hope?’ There was something about the containment that I really craved. So I’m very grateful that we’re finally doing it inside.”
And despite all of Clark’s introspection, she knows that she is no solo act. Theatre is as much about collaboration as it is about storytelling, and creating from connection has been integral to her process. She smiles, “I think of my relationship with Ann-Marie, which is a really valuable intergenerational friendship that I feel is rooted in joy. And when we are in the room – when we’re having difficult conversations – I don’t feel like joy is separate from that. I feel like it has to be enmeshed.”
And this spirit of collaboration extends beyond Kerr. Adventures carries the fingerprints of many artists – mentors like Barry, who helped Clark embrace the unknown; designers who shaped its evolving form; actors who, though not present in this final version, contributed to its DNA. “It is a solo show, and my name is there. But as Adventures prepares to take its place on the WinterWorks stage, she has been “thinking critically about who has actually intersected with this work, and where can we feel the pulse of their involvement?”
Clark ultimately remains pleased – and at peace with – the uncertainty at the play’s core. “If Adventures can leave audiences with one lingering thought or feeling” she offers, it’s “the comfort in the unknown. We’re maybe acknowledging a collective comfort in the unknown.” And she recalls a specific moment in rehearsal when director Christian Barry helped to crystallize this. “I was working through this particularly hard and personal passage. And Christian said something like, ‘I think maybe what you’re trying to say in this passage is that you don’t know – and maybe the audience doesn’t know either. And maybe that’s okay.’” She pauses. “There was something in that moment… I could just feel my shoulders drop.”
Adventures past and still to come
The insight reverberates beyond the play. Adventures isn’t about having the answers: it’s about being willing to ask the questions. In the play’s act of asking, Clark has found a way to balance wonder and fear, magic and reality, theatre and life.
And widening the aperture, the play’s 9-year development arc has become a time capsule for Clark—capturing the voice of her younger self, while challenging the artist she is today. “There’s parts about the writing that I absolutely love, because they’re really full of risk, which a 24-year-old would write – but Gill, as a 33-year-old, wouldn’t. I love that I have this document that contains the multitudes of who I’ve been throughout my 20s and early 30s.”
As she looks backwards, there’s “something that really, really excites me . . . a grit and a hunger, and, I don’t know… a right kind of feeling, which sometimes I wonder as a 33-year-old if I’ve distanced myself from. So I love that part of the play. I love this younger part of my play that exists, as well.”
As she looks ahead, she senses that Adventures will continue to “shift and grow.” And for Clark this is both an exciting theatrical prospect and – “because it feels very connected to me” – a critical life lesson: “If I can allow a piece [like Adventures] to shift and grow, can I allow myself the same permission?”
Adventures runs from February 25 to March 1, 2025, at Centaur Theatre as part of the WinterWorks Festival. For tickets and more information about WinterWorks, visit centaurtheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
