After performing at local festivals and cultural events, the play Kateryna and Havrylo launched as an independent production onto Winnipeg’s theatre scene.
The play has taken many forms, with variations performed at Winnipeg’s Folklorama and the Fringe Festival. Rachel Smith, who plays Kateryna, added a new feather to her cap as a first-time producer. She says running the play, which took place from January 23-25, was much more work than expected.
“I put on a lot of work every week just to do the producer side of things, and it’s a lot of little things that you don’t think about, like event insurance. Oh, I guess we need that. It’s not something that you have to think of as part of a festival the same way. So that, for me, has been the biggest difference. It’s all of those extra things that you don’t really think about as, oh yeah, you have to do in order to put on a play.”
Smith says finding a theatre, promoting the event, and finding staff were just part of the process. Another was developing the play itself. Anthony Erens, who plays Havrylo, says further developing the script was interesting.
“For the Fringe show, we only had the first three scenes, so it was the fall, winter and spring. And then at the end, we did a little bit of, there might be more, which was moving us towards this, where now we have a summer scene. This process has been a lot to get that scene up to where the other three are. And it’s been a process of ironing out everything that we felt worked but didn’t work, or we had to rearrange and rework. When we added this scene, some things changed, and we wanted to keep it consistent.”
Written by the playwright and director Clair Borody, Kateryna and Havrylo were inspired by the stories her father told her. The play takes an elderly Ukrainian-Canadian couple who live ordinary lives in rural Manitoba and suddenly puts them in a fantastical world. It highlights how immigrant communities blend old and new traditions. Smith says this offers a sense of connection and familiarity for newcomers to Canada, particularly Ukrainian refugees, but it also introduces them to something new.
“We do have cultural representations. We do have a lot of Ukrainian dance. There are quite a few Ukrainian dance schools, actually, considering how small a city we are. There are quite a few of them, but I haven’t seen, personally, a lot of theater. And so, to me, it feels like a unique opportunity to be able to present something like this that is completely original.”
Organizations like the Shevchenko Foundation supported the play, and local Ukrainian groups promoted it in newsletters and on social media.
With the play now behind them, Smith and Erin are excited to see how other Winnipeg performers use stories from their backgrounds and cultures to create something new.
– Ryan Funk, U Multicultural
