Posted July 8, 2024

The Interview – Jessica B. Hill

Jessica B. Hill

Jessica B. Hill is an actor-playwright originally from Montreal. She was part of the Stratford Festival’s Birmingham Conservatory and graduated from McGill University and Dawson College’s Dome program. Jessica has worked as an actress across the country and has starred in a number of Shakespearean plays in recent seasons of the Stratford Festival. Her own plays include Pandora and The Dark Lady, which both premiered in 2023. Jessica also teaches at the National Theatre School.

Jessica, you’re having a very busy 2024! Tell our readers what you’ve been up to so far this year.

Yes! This year marked the publishing of my first two plays: The Dark Lady and Pandora! I’m also currently starring as Viola in Stratford Festival’s Twelfth Night, and also appearing as Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet. 

This is my eighth season with the Stratford Festival, and it’s been a particularly special one: Viola has been a role I’ve held dear since first reading Twelfth Night back in high school! Our production is filled with actors I love and admire, we’re having a blast. It was also directed by the inimitable Seana McKenna, one of Canada’s most cherished and superlative actors. I’ve admired her for years. Working with her has been a dream come true.

The Dark Lady and Pandora were published a week before we opened Twelfth Night! It all kind of happened at once. While we were in rehearsal, I’d spend my down time proofing the final drafts of both scripts in preparation for the book’s release.

There’s been a sweet serendipity to it all: The Dark Lady features Shakespeare as a character, plays with gender bending and gender politics…and even includes a scene where we watch Shakespeare come up with a speech of Viola’s from Twelfth Night. (All this before I ever knew I’d get a chance to play the role.) 

Pandora and The Dark Lady both premiered last year, so your playwriting debut was a double-whammy. What was that experience like, opening two new plays within the space of just a few months?

2023 was a whirlwind! Pandora premiered in January at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. The Dark Lady premiered in June, also in Winnipeg, and then transferred to Saskatoon in July (a co-production between Shakespeare in Ruins and Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan).

It was a fast-paced year full of growth, travel, discovery and so many firsts. I learnt how to edit my scripts on-the-run as we built both shows. Since I was acting in both my plays, I also needed to learn how to switch hats between playwright and performer throughout rehearsals: it turns out you can’t be both at once! Learning how to bounce back and forth between the two while discovering how each artistic practice can thoroughly enrich the other has been thrilling. Both shows helped me discover new facets of myself as an artist, and profoundly deepened my connection with an audience.

Then, a few months after we closed, The Dark Lady had an unaffiliated second production in Calgary that October, (a co-production between Lunchbox Theatre and The Shakespeare Company). I was able to make it to Calgary for their opening night and was absolutely bowled over. Watching actors I didn’t know connect to the material, be emotionally invested in characters I had written…that was the moment everything truly hit. I was so moved and so grateful to witness how the play resonated with those wonderful artists. The Calgary production of The Dark Lady has actually just won five theatre awards, including both a Betty Mitchell Award and a Calgary Theatre Critic’s Award for best production of the year.

Pandora is a one-woman show about…well, everything! It centres on the mythological Pandora, who ponders the meaning of life by exploring subjects as wide-ranging as ancient Greek theatre, the Hadron Collider, and weasels. The Dark Lady is about the romantic relationship between Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano, who is assumed to be the mysterious “Dark Lady of the Sonnets” and who was one of England’s first published female poets. What do you think the two plays have in common? 

They’re very different subjects, but they do have certain themes in common!

Both plays are about theatre and storytelling. Pandora digs at the essence of live theatre, connecting us to one another and to the first story ever told. Shakespeare and Emilia strive to hold a mirror up to nature and open people’s minds through the plays they write together. 

Both plays are about belonging. How we find belonging in history, in our place in the world and in our relationship to one another. I think both Pandora and Emilia, in their own way, are seeking to bridge the space between the past and the future.

Both plays question the meaning of legacy, either on personal or global scale. Emilia Bassano endeavours to leave her mark on history, to not be forgotten. Pandora traces the history of human curiosity and its legacy, both good and bad.

Both plays also shed new light on female figures whose narratives had been written by men. I wanted to give Pandora a chance to apologize to us, to question her own myth and to share where her curiosity has led her now. Emilia Bassano-Lanier was more than the possible mystery lady behind Shakespeare’s sonnets; a published poet in her own right, her passionate writing calls for equality between men and women. Astonishingly, her life story seems to mirror so much of Shakespeare’s work that it was impossible for me not to link the two and give her voice.

Obviously, with your work at Stratford over the past few seasons, you have inhabited a lot of Shakespeare’s characters. And with The Dark Lady, you also got inside the heart and mind of William himself. What sparked your love for Shakespeare? Do you remember your first exposure to his work?

I fell in love with theatre and Shakespeare at the same time. Repercussion Theatre, a company that performs Shakespeare across various parks in Montreal, would perform in a park behind my childhood home. Six-year-old me was always there half an hour early, securing my front row spot with a blanket. I’d return two, three days in a row to see the same play. I was captivated. The poetry of the language, the vastness of the story, the costumes, the magic, the wonder of it all. One year they brought me onstage as audience participation… I was hooked.

Shakespeare’s poetry is imbued with so much lyricism and truth. A well-crafted, well-delivered verse line can feel like your heart is floating outside your body, as if something deep within you has finally been understood.

In high school, I was lucky enough to have an English teacher who loved Shakespeare too. She took our class to Stratford and I remember seeing Seana McKenna and Graham Abbey in The Taming of the Shrew. I adored every second. The idea that a place like Stratford could even exist boggled my mind. When I got back home, I wrote Stratford on a piece of paper and stuck it on my ceiling.

How utterly wonderful and how grateful I am to realize that, this season, I’ve been directed by Seana in Twelfth Night and play Graham Abbey’s character’s wife, Lady Capulet, in Romeo and Juliet. 

You’ve taught both Shakespeare and Chekhov at the National Theatre School in Montréal. What do you think makes these two masters relevant to our 21st-century lives?

OHHHH.

Both playwrights capture what it means to be human.

Shakespeare’s poetry is overarching. Like a prism, it encapsulates so many facets of the human soul and every interpretation, from every walk of life, will shine light through the prism in a new way, illuminating something hidden. It’s why we keep coming back to the same plays over and over again.

Chekhov’s writing requires disarming honesty and simplicity. Like a magnifying glass, he focuses on everyday yearnings, simple discomforts and mundane tragedies. While Shakespeare’s characters wrestle with complex comical misadventures, epic story arcs, or tragedies of fatal flaw, Chekhov will show you a man, at his kitchen table, slowly sipping his soup, as his life crumbles around him.

There’s a beautiful quote from the stunning movie Drive My Car: “Chekhov is terrifying. When you say his lines, it drags out the real you.” With great playwrights, the text reads you, and reveals something of yourself to yourself. Both Shakespeare and Chekhov drag the truth out of an actor in opposite ways.

I believe both are essential to training young actors today because they expand empathy and curiosity towards humankind while also stretching an actor both inside and out. Both require a wealth of imagination and imagery to bring the characters to life. Shakespeare will give you beautiful words to do so. With Chekhov, the beauty is often in what’s between them. 

Funnily, Twelfth Night has often been called the most Chekhovian of Shakespeare’s plays. All of its characters dance between joy and sadness, smiling at grief, crying at life’s joy, sighing wistfully at love’s bittersweetness. They all yearn for what is missing, with many filling that void with excess instead (obsession, drinking, zealous grief, austerity.) It’s such a profoundly human, gem of a play.

What’s happening now with Pandora/The Dark Lady? Can you tell us what is in the future for both plays?

The Stratford Festival organized a book-signing on June 30th, after a matinee performance of Twelfth Night. It was such an extraordinary way to celebrate the book’s publishing! Writing and performing both plays has been such a surreal, utterly cherished, magnificent adventure. I’m so joyful to now be able to share both plays with the world.

As for their future…

Red Bull Theatre in New York City will host a public staged reading of The Dark Lady this coming November. They’ve asked me to reprise the role of Emilia. I’m excited to share the play with NYC and so happy to get the chance to play her again.

I’m also in early talks with a film producer in London, England to turn The Dark Lady into a screenplay!

And, finally…how about a sneak peek into what you’re working on now? 

I’m working on three different scripts!

I’m currently under commission to write a seed script for the Stratford Festival. It’s a piece about John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and their quest to establish the early tenets of Liberalism. I’m writing it in collaboration with New Yorker writer and novelist, Adam Gopnik. 

I’m also writing a play for Prairie Theatre Exchange. It’s a piece about the nature of Time, how it sculpts us and can bend our perception of reality. I’ve been fascinated by this quote: “We don’t have time, we are time.”

I’ve also just become the playwright-in-residence at Necessary Angel for 2024–2026. This winter, I’ll be starting work on a piece about Shakespeare’s youngest brother, Edmund… who followed William to London to become an actor!