Jordan Tannahill takes on tough subjects in Late Company

The young playwright, who’s just won a Governor General’s Award, looks at bullying, teen suicide, politics, and more in Late Company

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      Playwright Jordan Tannahill is intent on getting the framing right and one can see why: he’s dealing with tender subject matter.

      Tannahill is talking about his play Late Company, which Touchstone Theatre is producing in Vancouver with a stellar cast: Kerry Sandomirsky, Michael Kopsa, Katharine Venour, Gerry Mackay, and Daniel Doheny, under the direction of Katrina Dunn. As the playwright speaks about his script, he is uncomfortable with saying that it was inspired by or even written in response to the suicide of gay Ottawa teenager Jamie Hubley, who was bullied at school, and who took his own life in 2011. Asked if it would be acceptable to identify Jamie’s death as the place where his script started, Tannahill replies, “ ‘Starting point’ is actually the perfect wording for it. For me, the incident was a kind of departure point for a more fictional investigation of some of the questions that it raised.”

      Hubley was the son of Ottawa city councillor Allan Hubley and his wife, Wendy. In Late Company, Joel, the dead boy, also the victim of bullying, was the son of Debora, who’s a sculptor, and Mike, a Tory MP. As the play opens, Debora and Mike are preparing to have the main perpetrator, Curtis, over for dinner, along with his mom and dad, Tamara and Bill. The mothers, Debora and Tamara, have decided that it would be a good idea to attempt to find closure—over a kind of truth-and-reconciliation meal.

      Tannahill is based in Toronto, but he’s speaking to the Straight by phone from his hotel room in Montreal, because he’s doing a temporary teaching gig at the National Theatre School. The 26-year-old reveals that it wasn’t Hubley’s death as much as the response to it that got him going. He says that teen suicide “has become so normalized that it’s part of our narrative of queer adolescence. But if the suicide itself wasn’t shocking, how it was misconstrued and politicized was.”

      The writer’s anger was fuelled, in part, by the It Gets Better video that the federal Conservatives released in the wake of Hubley’s death. In the It Gets Better campaign, which was initiated by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, queer adults speak directly to the camera, reassuring queer youth, the inheritors of their legacy, that the pain they may be suffering will lessen as they become self-realized adults.

      But according to Tannahill, there’s a problem with the Tory video. “It features 10 straight-identified MPs staring into the camera—and totally missing the point. These MPs have voting records that often run against the interests of LGBT youth. Here’s a party that’s cutting funding to LGBT health programs and youth programs and outreach programs across the country—the very initiatives that could prevent suicide. The hypocrisy, to me, reeked.”

      The playwright, who just received a Governor General’s Award for Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays, a trilogy about queer youth, was also frustrated by some of his supposedly progressive colleagues who couldn’t understand why the Tory video was so offensive to him.

      These various levels of obliviousness made him want to explore “the kind of sociopolitical and sexual hypocrisy that I think exists across the board—and even within a supposedly socially progressive middle-class family”.

      In Late Company, sympathies lie with Joel’s parents in the early going, but, as Tannahill says, “I think the spectre of blame shifts throughout the play, and by the end everyone has been cross-examined.” This includes Joel’s mom, Debora. “Perhaps she convinces herself that she wants to forgive the perpetrator and the parents of the perpetrator. But I think what’s revealed in the piece is that she wants to punish. She really wants to exact the pain that she has felt on those who have caused it. And, as her husband wisely points out, it’s not their pain to feel.”

      Tannahill also wants to open up the terms of the discussion. “The discourse around queer teen suicide is sometimes reduced to being about sexuality and tolerance, but I think it’s more complicated than that.” He points out that a predisposition to depression can also be a factor. “I don’t have any personal experience with queer teen suicide,” he says, before adding: “What I do have more direct exposure to—without getting into too much detail—is depression, the tyranny of depression and how that can cloud one’s judgment and world-view.”

      Then there’s grief and how we deal with it. In Late Company, Debora and Tamara are seeking closure, but, Tannahill says, “I think closure itself is a bit of a fallacy. Living in a self-help culture that idolizes happiness, we get closure shoved down our throats, when, in fact, closure is something that may never come. Or it may take years and years to come. And tragedy is certainly something that we can fall back into. It can be cyclical; it’s messy. And yet we attempt to deal with grief in this clean, sealed way.”

      Perhaps the character who provides the most hope is Curtis. “He’s the person who has the most honest reaction,” Tannahill observes. “He’s come to truly seek forgiveness. He really wants to reckon with what he’s done.”

      Nearing the end of the conversation, the writer returns to the relationship between his script and Jamie Hubley’s death. “To me, Late Company is not a biopic,” he says. “For me, it’s mostly about parents in the 21st century contending with the very real, new questions that face them.” And the inquiry goes beyond biological parenting: “It asks about our collective responsibility in child-rearing. What sort of agency do we have in improving the lives of our children, and our neighbours’ children, and the children of strangers?”

      Touchstone Theatre presents Late Company at the Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from Friday (November 21) to November 30.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Michael Puttonen

      Nov 20, 2014 at 11:32am

      Go see this play. This guy is a very interesting playwright (Feral Child in t.o. made me think of PAL theatre, it should be done there, has it?) and he seems to be in for the long haul. Vancouver gains from Touchstone's continuing mandate of doing contemporary Canadian work, and the way they put heart and soul into realizing it. Wish their season was twice as long. Touchstone's production ambition is bedrock, doesn't feature the coiling and release of techno-heavy "career-makers", but the slow unwinding of a wise tape, taking the measure of our years.