![]() “The more I worked with it, the more I found it extremely frustrating,” says Patterson of the comedy, which centres on the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen Hippolyta. When the pandemic started, class moved to Zoom, developed during residencies with the Stratford Festival, Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival and the London Ontario Media Arts Association as part of its Queer Frontiers series.Īfter running for the first time at this year’s SummerWorks Festival, the show now returns to Plett and Patterson’s hometown, making it one of the first productions to run the COVID gamut, moving from live to digital and back again.įor Patterson, who wrote the show with Plett’s dramaturgical assistance, i am your spaniel became not just an examination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but an economic and social analysis of Shakespeare’s era as reflected in the play, which became less and less funny over time. Soon, the show settled into its current setup, posturing Patterson as the fictionalized lecturer, trying to capture students’ imaginations. ![]() For both Patterson and Plett, that meant applying a queer and trans perspective to the comedy, while playing with the truth that theatre-goers bring their own experiences to bear each time the curtain goes up. ![]() “The idea was about applying a really sort of skewed personal lens to a work that was a very well-known, canonical text,” Patterson says. I am your spaniel began four years ago with a staged reading at the Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Festival of New Works under a different title, presented as a high school book report prepared by a student who develops their own non-traditional understanding of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During the pandemic, the show was reproduced completely within a Google Doc.įor the Stratford Festival, they also produced a low-fi, low-stakes talk show called Men Explain Things To Us … And We Like It!, produced in the vein of a broadcast for the transgressive adult programmer Adult Swim. Since collaborating for the first time in 2018, they have produced one show called 805-4821 entirely on an overhead projector, a “group reading exercise” that functioned as a trans coming-out for Patterson. “There are no rules except for the ones we make ourselves,” Plett says. “It’s a long title, we’re sorry,” says Plett, 29.Īs a duo, Plett and Patterson have an out-of-the-black-box approach to theatre-making. I am your spaniel, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson runs at Videopool’s the Output today through Sept. That line led Patterson and Plett to develop We Quit’s newest show, a “conspiracy-theorist metal concert crossed with a clown show” starring Patterson as a fictionalized version of himself, an overzealous university professor delivering an introductory lecture that turns … feral. Relatively early on, Patterson fixated on one line spoken by Helena to Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a four-word avowal that could easily be read as submission or confession: “I am your spaniel.” “I went through a serious First Folio phase,” he says sheepishly. He has spent hundreds of hours diving into research rabbit holes, searching for hidden meaning and fresh insight. “People can find very specific clues and extrapolate their own meanings,” says Patterson, 30, who co-founded the We Quit Theatre company with Dasha Plett. Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit to chew on in the world’s most famous playwright’s enduring body of work. I am your spaniel, the latest show from We Quit Theatre’s Gislina Patterson (left) and Dasha Plett, will be playing at the Output from Sept. Warring camps emerge, rabidly defending their own theories. Studying Shakespeare’s First Folio might seem tame, but it can get a little bit hairy, says Gislina Patterson.Įver since it was published 400 years ago, scholars have pored over the Bard’s collection of prose and poetry with Talmudic severity, finding points of disagreement embedded within every noun, verb, comma and period.
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