Political theatre

Philippa Domville, Geoffrey Pounsett (middle) and David Jansen in a scene from Wendy Lill's play Chimera. (John M Currid/Tarragon Theatre)

If there’s one Canadian playwright with an insider’s knowledge of that comedy-drama known as federal politics, it’s Wendy Lill. For seven years, Lill set aside her writing career to serve as the New Democrat MP for Dartmouth, N.S. The role allowed her to participate in making public policy and, as an opposition critic, bang the drum for public broadcasting, arts funding and the rights of the disabled. Although she calls the House of Commons “a wild and wonderful place,” when she retired after two terms in 2004, she had no plans to put its Byzantine inner workings onstage.

“I really wasn’t intending to write about that experience,” says Lill, on the phone from her home in Dartmouth. “However, as I took some distance from it, I found there were some thought-provoking themes that I hadn’t really explored enough [as a writer], and they all turned out to be about that place.”

Those themes include the ethics of stem-cell research — in particular the creation of cross-species “chimeras,” the mixing of genetic material from humans and animals. Such experiments could hold the key to curing many diseases, but to their detractors, they conjure up sci-fi nightmares out of The Island of Doctor Moreau. To explore this controversy, Lill created a chimera of her own: a hybrid play that’s part Parliament Hill exposé, part examination of the efforts to regulate genetic engineering.

Chimera, which has its world premiere this January at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, is the kind of issue-oriented human drama Lill is known for. In it, a rookie cabinet minister named Clare McGuire struggles to defend her government’s biotechnology bill against attacks from right-wing opposition MP George Fanning, who has discovered that a Canadian scientist is implanting human stem cells in rhesus monkeys in the name of autism research. Stirring the pot is the play’s troubled narrator, Roy Ruggles, a muckraking reporter with a twin brother who has Down syndrome; and Eddie Lloyd, a cunning lobbyist for the biotech sector.

The production is directed by Mary Vingoe, artistic director of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival and a longtime Lill collaborator, and boasts a first-class cast led by Philippa Domville as McGuire, David Jansen as Ruggles and David Fox as Fanning.

Playwright Wendy Lill. (Tarragon Theatre)

Lill says the play sprang out of her own experience as one of the 301 MPs who passed a major law in 2004 concerning human reproductive technologies. “It was an important piece of legislation around issues that are so complicated that I know there were many of us who felt we didn’t really have a grasp on them as much as we should.” Lill recalls being in a conference where the spokesman for a pharmaceutical company boasted about the array of new pre-diagnostic tests being developed to detect anomalies in fetuses. “I was sitting in this room with many people with disabilities,” she says, “and I realized that, in a sense, what he was saying is that quite possibly a lot of these people would not be around [had these tests existed before] today. They wouldn’t have been born.”

The implications had a personal resonance for Lill, who has a son with Down syndrome. “What a different world science is offering us,” she says. “‘Babies by design’ is not our understanding of what humanity is. I became fixed on this idea of what it means to be human in this genetic fantasia that we live in now.”

For the scientific side of her play, Lill picked the brains of Françoise Baylis, the Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Baylis, in turn, put Lill in touch with scientists from across North America who are engaged in debating cross-species research. “It’s important to realize they’re subject to ambition and frustration and fear, all the range of very human emotions – they’re not immune to those things,” says Lill. “And they’re also buffeted about by commercial forces.” Lill captures that human side in Chimera’s “monkey scientist,” Dr. Nell Harrier, a distinguished geneticist who becomes a reluctant pawn of the biotech industry in return for much-needed research funding and a shot at the Nobel Prize.

For the play’s political side, however, Lill only needed to draw on her own experiences. In fact, she seems to have put a little of herself into all of her Ottawa characters: the novice MP, the opposition critic trying to get attention for his cause, even the reporter ravenous for a scoop. (Lill was a journalist with CBC Radio in Winnipeg before she turned to playwriting.) At the same time, some of them could almost be thinly veiled portraits of her colleagues from the Hill. A fundamentalist Christian from rural Alberta with creationist beliefs and an image problem, the character Fanning can’t help but recall Stockwell Day, currently the federal Minister of Public Safety. But Lill insists any resemblance to real-life politicos is coincidental. “[These characters are] all based on what I gleaned from a whole range of people.”

Lill, 56, came late to politics, but her social conscience has informed almost everything she’s done. Born in Vancouver and raised in London, Ont., she was a political science student at York University when she helped start a drop-in centre for mothers and children in a Toronto housing project. After graduation, she spent time as a community health worker before switching to journalism. In 1979, while with the CBC, she wrote her first play, On the Line, to dramatize the plight of striking Winnipeg garment industry workers – a story that she felt couldn’t be told in sound bites.

Joan Gregson (left) and Philippa Domville in Chimera. (John M Currid/Tarragon Theatre)

Since then, her plays have gone on to examine the Canadian women’s suffrage movement (The Fighting Days), aboriginal-white relations (The Occupation of Heather Rose, Sisters), pedophilia and mass hysteria (All Fall Down), the slashing of social programs (Corker) and the dangerous lives of coal miners in her adopted province of Nova Scotia (The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum). Her skill at turning the potentially deadly “issue play” into compelling, emotionally charged theatre has resulted in four nominations for the Governor General’s Drama Award.

Lill says going from playwright to politician “wasn’t a total mismatch for me. I am interested in communicating and understanding ideas, which is what I was doing as an MP.” She misses the job’s “intense level of engagement,” but not the daily stress, which became harder to cope with after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2000. She found politics was also tough on her personal life.

“It’s very hard leaving your family and going away every week to Ottawa,” says Lill, whose two sons, Sam and Joe, were preteens when she was first elected. Her husband, journalist Richard Starr, became the main caregiver for the duration.

Not surprisingly, she also found being an MP left no time for creative work. “I wrote speeches and letters and one-minute statements for the House of Commons. But did I come home at the end of the day and try to write dialogue? Never,” she says. “I couldn’t. It wasn’t in me. But nothing ever leaves you. When you’re able to remove yourself from a situation, then things start flooding back.”

Chimera runs until Feb. 11 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.