Interview with Kate Cayley, Playwright of “The Bakelite Masterpiece”

Kate Cayley HeadshotKate Cayley, author of our 2016 Main Stage production The Bakelite Masterpiece, co-produced with the Berkshire Theatre Group, is a fiction writer and poet as well as a playwright. She has written a short story collection, How You Were Born (Pedlar Press), which won the 2015 Trillium Book Award, a collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End (Brick Books), which was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press), which won the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Stranger Theatre, and has co-created, directed and written eight plays with the company; her work with Stranger Theatre has been seen in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City and Istanbul. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre since 2009, and has written two plays for Tarragon – After Akhmatova and The Bakelite Masterpiece. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their three children.

WAM Theatre: Tell us about the genesis of The Bakelite Masterpiece. How did you come to write the play?

Kate Cayley: Some years ago, I read a piece about the real-life Van Meegeren in an article in The New Yorker describing the fraud and the trial. I had just finished the production draft of a play that was very dense and politically serious (possibly humourless),and the morally reprehensible outrageousness of the story immediately caught me. I worried it might be a novel at first – there’s so much there. I’ve always been fascinated by forgery and compelled by the idea that there is something in the development of every artist that flirts with forgery, with fraud. Bluntly put, we imitate to learn and the lines get blurred. And the opening monologue of the play came to me, almost intact, right away. A man in a crumpled suit, telling entertaining lies. The rest of the play came much more slowly and involved a great deal of making up and tweaking of facts (I hope he would approve). The female prosecutor did not exist. Their story came about through thinking about painting itself, the symbolism of women in religious painting, and the problem of forgiving the absolutely unforgivable. Geert became a figure who had lived through the worst of the war, and who was in the dubious female position of being both prosecutor and model, the watcher and the watched.

WAM Theatre: How did you meet Kristen van Ginhoven and make the connection with WAM Theatre?

Kate: Irene Poole, who played Geert in the original production, has known Kristen for a long time and sent her the script. I was in Berlin with my family when I heard, very much not in playwright mode, and was so pleased.

WAM Theatre: What appeals to you about WAM Theatre?  Why choose our co-production with the Berkshire Theatre Group for this play’s American premiere?

Kate: I love WAM’s emphasis on social activism as well as making art. And the Berkshire Theatre Group has such a long history and strong reputation for quality productions. I know my play is in good hands with this collaboration.

WAM Theatre: What do you hope audiences will take away from the play? Do you think an American audience will react differently from a Canadian one?

Kate: I hope they will leave the theatre discussing the different points of view and unable to come to any conclusion. That’s a very interesting question about different reactions. I think Canadians tend to be much more guarded and quiet in their opinions. So I’m curious.

WAM Theatre: Talk about the theatre company you founded, Stranger Theatre.

Kate: We called ourselves a feminist theatre company, without realizing that feminist was a loaded word (existing in a scene in which it wasn’t). I started this company with three other women straight out of school, in 2001, and we were active for ten years, as a fluctuating group of collaborators, doing shows in Toronto and across Canada and the States (we spent a lot of time in vans, heading to performances at anarchist puppet festivals). Our work was always collective and to some extent “devised,” meaning made by the collaborators, but I was the main writer and sometimes the only writer, and it was through that process that I began to write seriously. We also used puppetry, found text and objects, video installations, and a lot of music. Our last show was in 2011, though we haven’t yet disbanded formally. My wife is also one of the founding members, we have three young children and my work is now exclusively writing, and there’s only so much you can do in one life.

WAM Theatre: In addition to your plays, you are the successful, published author of several pieces of fiction and poetry. How do you experience the differences between writing in these three genres?

Kate: I think each one informs the other in pretty interesting ways. It feels like nose to tail eating sometimes, in which one’s mission is not to waste anything. A poem becomes a story, a story becomes a play, and so forth. The commonality between the forms is compression. Short stories, poems and plays all require a great deal of cutting away, of stringency around language (at least for me). As for differences, poetry is a moment in isolation, a solitary kind of listening, theatre entirely public, and fiction feels like a cross between the two. Governed by story and unfolding in time, but still enclosed in the privacy of a book.

WAM Theatre: WAM has a special mission to tell the stories of women and girls. What women’s rights issues are important to you right now, and how do those interests affect your work?

Kate: The rights of parents matter to me a lot right now, probably because I have young kids. The right to childcare, but also financial support for women (or men) who want to remain with their children but can’t do so for practical reasons. This intersects with marginalized women, such as many caregivers – I am dismayed by the way that mainstream feminism seems so concerned with extending the power of the white upper class to include more women, rather than questioning that power at its heart. I don’t really care very much about more women in the boardroom, if the woman who cleans the toilets is still unprotected. As a queer person, I am also concerned about trans rights – there’s still so much work to do.

WAM Theatre: What are you working on now?

Kate: A novel about a slightly scary commune. My second collection of poems, Other Houses, which comes out in summer 2017. And a play with Zuppa Theatre, The Archive of Missing Things, which will premiere in summer 2017. Incidentally, when Kristen and I were first talking about WAM and the BTG staging The Bakelite Masterpiece, we realized that Zuppa Theatre was co-founded by Ben Stone, who was Kristen’s roommate in college. What a small world!

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