Season 1 / Church & The Other: Who is Wise - with Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Editor: Ariana deVries
Mastered by: Joshua Snethlage with Mixed Media Studios

In this episode, Ariana has the pleasure of chatting with Birgit Schreyer Duarte; a director, translator and dramaturg. She is from Germany and currently resides in Toronto. Birgit shares her thoughts and the journey behind how the production Nathan the Wise came to be and how people from varying religions can share the same space and learn to do life together regardless of differences. Listen in as she shares her experience of being "the other" and how that personally affected her.

To learn more about Birgit and upcoming productions, you can visit her website. To read the parable that is mentioned in the show, click here.

For more information or if you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard, please email us at activelistening.life@gmail.com

Ariana deVries

Well, welcome Birgit! I'm so glad to have you! [Laughter]

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Thanks for having me.

Ariana deVries

I'm really glad that we get to meet in person because a lot of my interviewees are over Skype so this actually really nice to see you face to face. After Scott and I saw Nathan and the Wise or Nathan the Wise. It really resonated with us. And I read your playbill afterwards too and what you wrote in there. I was like, "This lady has some really good things to say. She sounds very wise". So I just decided I would reach out. So great, thank you for saying yes and joining me today, which is wonderful.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

It's really special when you get any response from audiences and that kind of response of course is really welcome; when you feel like something really landed and, you know, sparked new thoughts and had a trickling out effect.

Ariana deVries

Right, because you probably don't hear that too often, do you?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Not all the time. And we get we get feedback from audiences through colleagues, through my cast. I get emails when they hear over, you know, over the course of four months you hear responses.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Sometimes we get personal responses - people email us who obviously have known me or have known a colleague and we then get forwarded a beautiful response, and that's super special. So those are the moments that really make it worth it.

Ariana deVries

That must be so reassuring knowing, "Okay, you're making a difference". Yeah, that's great.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Mhmm.

Ariana deVries

So tell me a little bit about yourself. You're a theatre director and translator and a dramaturg? How do you say that?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Well, there's two camps. There's the dramaturgs and then there's the dramaturges.

Ariana deVries

Okay.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But since I'm from Germany, and it's essentially a German word that was taken over into the English language, I say dramaturg.

Ariana deVries

Okay. Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So a hard G. [Laughter] But there you will hear that in different ways.

Ariana deVries

Sure.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

That's true.

Ariana deVries

So then explain to me what does that actually mean.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So funnily enough, it was actually Lessing himself who was the first sort of recorded dramaturg.

Ariana deVries

And Lessing is the the writer of Nathan the Wise.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Exactly. And he was a writer and a philosopher, but he was also a critic and someone who worked in what we would now call the artistic team of a big company. And that was the theater in Hamburg at the time.

Ariana deVries

Okay.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And so he actually worked for two years, from 1767 to 69, I believe, as a critic, but also as what is now called the dramaturg with the artistic director of the company very closely, and he basically made sure that the quality remained really high and he was, you know, researching and reading and that he would write about the shows that he saw.

Ariana deVries

Okay.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And, and he would report back to the artistic director, and so he was sort of The the outside set of eyes that a director and an artistic director often need to stay focused and to keep the standards up. And to be kind of the artistic meter, if you will. So, he wrote a work called The Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which is where that word comes from dramaturgy. So the Hamburg dramaturgy, which is essentially a collection of essays of all his critical writings of these two years. That's, I think, where the term first was recorded.

Ariana deVries

Yep.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

You could become a dramaturg through very many different paths, like you could be a German studies graduate or you could be a writer or you know, say historian, or maybe philosopher. There's not always a direct path to this.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

It's someone who helps with the season planning of a company. So we help pick up the projects. We assist the artistic director with putting a mandate together for the season, or for the whole company. We help with casting sometimes, depends on what the directors want. We read a lot.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, I can imagine.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Research a lot. And so not every company uses dramaturg, in Canada anyways. But also, not every company uses a dramaturg the same way. So in Canada, there aren't as many what we call it company dramaturgs; people were part of the staff. And often it's mediation, really, between all the team members, often the dramaturg becomes the person they all come to and want to talk to about something they don't fully agree with, maybe, or they don't fully understand. Sometimes the dramaturg is used as like sort of a walking dictionary. Well like an Encyclopedia that someone will have a question and they will pose it to them. So I have that training from Munich where I grew up in Germany. But I didn't come here to find this one position as a dramaturg. It just means, you know, you have a background in theatre studies or say in whatever language maybe another foreign language, or like I said, history, maybe or design. So you come with not only some knowledge, but most importantly, you come with a knowledge of where to find answers.

Ariana deVries

Yes. That's very important.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

We always...I remember this, we learned sort of the main thing you need to learn as a dramaturg is where to look up information.

Ariana deVries

Yep.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Like have a pen on you. At all times and know where to look. That's more important.

Ariana deVries

That's what my husband says, even with the work that he does, “I'm smart because I know where to look”.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Exactly. And so that's my training, but I did my PhD at the University of Toronto, and then, you know, always worked on the side just to make some money, but also get to know in the field here and to get to know these individual artists and the companies with the different methods. And so I often work in player development at the time, like, basically people who are writers say, “Well, can you look at my script? Can you give me some feedback on my draft?” That's usually how it starts.

Ariana deVries

Mhmm. Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And then you notice all these different metaphors for dramaturgy, actually. I like one that one of my good friends always uses is, “Dramaturgy is like a midwife.”. Like the playwright is the one who births the work.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But you're there to make that the best possible event.

Ariana deVries

Wow. That's really cool.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And you're there to support. In the end, you're part of it, but you're not the one who can claim the work. [Laughter]

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So is that helpful then being the director of Nathan the Wise? Did you also...were you your own dramaturg?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

In this case, very much so. But I had a fantastic assistant, who was also trained similarly to me. So yes, I would say we both were also our own dramaturg. You know, she would come in with these amazing charts of all the research we did, like the, you know, the history of Jerusalem was a big, big topic.

Ariana deVries

That was something my husband really noticed actually, when we were watching it is how real to life it was the feelings that he experienced, cuz he's been to Jerusalem. He just went earlier this year. And yeah, he was saying as it was progressing. He's like, “I feel like I'm in Jerusalem again”.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Oh wow. That's such a great thing to hear.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So there were people in the cast who had been there from there, but neither my assistant or I had been there, and so we relied on a lot of imagery a lot of, of course, media, YouTube, but we also just read a ton of books about Jerusalem. Like actually some novels set in Jerusalem.

Ariana deVries

Okay.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I mean, I listened to all of them on audio books, I can't really read anything anymore. [Laughter] But I probably read about six books, fiction and nonfiction, about Jerusalem just before that to get a sense of what's typical; like the lighting, the materials, the presence of the soldiers of course was a big component of how we wanted to build that World having different colors, different fabrics, and different languages clash and sort of the, the constant juxtaposition of violence, or at least risk of violence, and the commerce and celebration of commerce, and of tourism, and opportunism that comes with it. We wanted to show that as a specific aspect of the city.

So yeah, all of this is done in advance. And a lot of it is then further developed with the designers and the cast when you're working on it. But in this case, a lot of research went into Development Division in advance, just so that we feel like we know where we're setting this.

Ariana deVries

Right. Yeah. And then that makes your audience connect a lot more when you've put that much work and effort into really knowing part of the story.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah. And I just want to mention, so it's not being misrepresented, I am a translator, which also came about by just writing the transitions people asked me, or like people would find a German play, or had heard of a German player or a playwright and wanted me to, make it accessible for Canadians. And so then I, that became sort of a niche for me over the last 15 years or so. So I've done a lot of translations of German plays and staged some of them myself, and some of them are staged by others. So I've done that a lot, and I love it. And it also really feeds into, I think, what you stage. So in a sense if you, if you translate the same text that you can stage yourself...

Ariana deVries

So you translated Nathan the Wise?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

No. So I just wanted to sure that’s not being misrepresented.

Ariana deVries

Okay, yeah. That’s what you wanted to make clear. Got it.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So I do that a lot and a have staged my own transitions a lot.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But this was a translation that was given to me at the proposal by the festival. And I thought this was a really successful adaptation. So I was very happy to have that. And there was no, there was no talk of me having to do my own translation, because you can’t do that at the same time.

Ariana deVries

Yes, that’s a lot. So then what got you interested in the more philosophical and emotional and intellectual type of plays? Have you always been interested in that or is it just more lately?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Wow. That's a really interesting question. I don't know that I would have even identified them as that. Yeah.

Ariana deVries

Instead of me asking what first got you interested in the Dramatic Arts? Because that one seems a little bit more specific.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Well, it's, I'm yeah, I'm happy to hear that. That's how you classify the work I do. But this show was proposed to me by Anthony Timolino. So it was sitting on his pile, I think of absolute favorites for a long time. It seemed to fit this year's mandate of the playbill. So the topic of this season was crossing boundaries.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I’d love to be able to claim this show as my proposal, but it was just very, very intelligent season planning.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But of course, you know, I'm very honored that he thought that I'd be the good person to direct this. So yeah, of course, I mean, I, I always think that every director will say the same thing. That's why I'm just hesitant to answer that question because to me, it's obvious that a text has to intellectually challenge you and emotionally stimulating.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And if it only does one or the other than you're just not going to be fulfilled, or think about it for much longer afterwards. At the same time, Lessing I think maybe was a good, particularly good, text for me at this point, because I have been thinking about faith a lot, for example. Partially because, you know, I had my daughter and the idea of bringing her up or being a kid up in a certain faith or deciding and not bringing a kid up in a certain faith is something that comes up at some point and obviously we had to decide, do we want to baptize her because both my husband is Catholic.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And we did baptize her and we were very clear on that. And for us, it wasn't the big discussion, but knowing so many other families who either struggle with that decision because they are a bi-religious couple, or bi-racial or bi-ethnic, or bi-cultural. Or because they both abandoned whatever religion they were brought up in. But they feel like they now have to reclaim something for themselves and for their family as new rituals.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And I find that fascinating and even harder. I can't imagine what I would do if I abandoned all my Christian upbringing, and then wanted to recreate some kind of ritual around the holidays, for example. Do I need them? Why would I need them? What are they supposed to do for the family? What does it do spiritually? How do I offer something to the child? If I don't...If I already know I don't want to communicate my own spirituality?

Ariana deVries

Right. Oh, man, these are so many conversations that Scott and I have been having.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Sure. Right. It must be on most people's minds now who are non religious?

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Or who are struggling with religion.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So I found that fascinating. And I mean, these questions come up in very practical conversations. People asking me, you know, or people are showing me, whatever, like they made a, say they made a Christmas tree, but they don't maybe really care about the Christmas aspect of it. And so I'm just fascinated by, what does this do then? What is the Christmas tree for?

Ariana deVries

Right. Why do we have it?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Or a friend of mine telling me that she's trying to come up with customs and rituals herself now that mean something. And just working through that. What does it mean for for them? And I also, I don't know. Maybe I've changed my mind over the last three, four months about this, too, but I've always thought that it might be easier for a child to have been given some kind of religious background or upbringing and then they can decide decide later if they want to reject it.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But not to learn anything about any of the religions. It's going to be even harder later to to catch up on. Well, like, how do they know that they don't want this to if they don’t know about it?

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So I feel this is somewhat related to your questions. I feel like I probably didn't know enough about other religions because I was only raised Catholic.

Ariana deVries

I would 100 percent agree with you on that one.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And I'm not saying that I would now change my mind about that, you know, picking the religion, necessarily. But just as a context, I think it's so important to learn how they're all connected and what caused what, when. [ Laughter]

Ariana deVries

Right!

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And how are the conflicts really connected and that so much of it as much more common between the religions, then maybe we thought we know what we have been taught. And so I don't know, I found this, I found this fascinating for a while. And also, and I think I've mentioned this in my program note, the fact that as someone who's still part of a church, it's even harder now to say that then to say, “I don't believe anything”.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I find it so interesting. And maybe that's not the same in Germany, but definitely in my time here in Canada. I've experienced that many times. Where, you know, you even think twice about whether you want to say to someone that you want to go to church on Sunday, so you can meet at 11 and not at 9.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Is that odd? You know? And I find that so interesting that it's turned around almost within a generation. Whereas it was weird, and maybe not respected as much, even just the generation, maybe two generations ago, to not be part of a church or any religion. And now it's the other way around.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, totally. So then on the topic of church and upbringing, you mentioned you're a Catholic. So then what was your church and religious experience like growing up?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, so we didn't really, again, we didn't really question it too much. I think like we grew up in a smaller town outside of Munich, but my father was from there from Bavaria, which is largely Catholic. My mom is from the former East Germany. So they, for a while had to abandon religion in Communism, but then they fled to the west when she was 12. And they grew up Protestant. So there was always that division within the family.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

The division between Protestant and Catholic, but I think as children, my sister and I didn't really think too much about that, like, we just thought, it's all the same, really. [Laughter]

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

We just noticed later that we didn't like the Protestant churches as much as the Catholic ones because they're just not as opulent and not as inspiring as architecture. But in terms of a belief, I don't think we had a strong opinion on whether we're Catholic or Protestant. We were just kind of we were and yet like we, as children, were Protestant - sorry, Catholic. They had to decide, obviously, my parents. But it was pretty clear because my father had, I think stronger Catholicism then my mom insisted on from Protestantism. So it wasn't, I think, a big conflict.

So I always really liked going to like Bible studies and I really enjoyed the first confirmation those those times when you learn more, and you intensify the relationship with attraction as a teenager, I remember that being an enriching time. But I don't think I was one of those precocious kids who didn’t really question it much. I think I just went along and was interested in intellectual aspect of it and maybe an historical aspect and the musical aspect of it, but I was never sort of aware enough of the problem.

Ariana deVries

Right. So has that changed for you over the years then?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, of course. And I think coming to Canada, you’re just bombarded with these different options that you have.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Everyone coming from a different background, and suddenly the playing field looks just very different and you're no longer part of the majority, necessarily. And at the same time, there is a through line for me because I've been singing in choirs since I was 10. Until today, and so, as a child, you know, I was singing in choirs that would not necessarily create church choirs, but you would still occasionally sing sacred music. Then I became part of a choir who was mostly singing in a church. And now I've been seeing a church choir ever since I've come to Toronto. So, for me, that has always been a really strong connection. Music and spirituality, I guess. And so I found that question really interesting because I don't think I would have necessarily claimed that until I saw that question. That singing, to me, has all almost always been something that's connected to the sacred canon.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And so I find that also something interesting. Like what does it mean if you're an unbeliever and using sacred music or you end up singing in a church? Does it matter? I don't know.

Ariana deVries

You can't really separate spirituality from the arts.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah. Or I don't know the answer to it, but it's definitely, I mean, I believe that I can sense that the people that I'm singing with have similar spiritual beliefs or backgrounds or experiences. I mean, obviously, I don't know that.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

But there's something familiar about it.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. I heard someone say the other day, I believe it was Eugene Peterson. And he was talking about spirituality and how it's a word that doesn't mean what we think it does, or it doesn't hold the same meaning anymore. And he was talking about how it's, essentially, we're all spiritual because we have breath, and we are breathing. So whether you are religious or not, and whether you're a believer or not, you are spiritual because you are a human living on this planet Earth. I thought that was very profound and very thought provoking. And that if I'm just a human then yeah, I can't separate spirituality from anything else, because it's just part of me. I thought that was very interesting. But yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, and I think, like I said, we grew up celebrating religion, with music, like we celebrate a god or divinity with this music. And I always thought of music as something...I should revise this. I don't think I always thought of it like that, but I have come to think of it much more as a divine tool, like something that connects the heavens and the earth. I feel like singing in a church choir, performing sacred music, it's almost like you can't separate that, you can’t feel like you're not somehow being used as a tool of some kind of divine entity.

Ariana deVries

You're giving me goosebumps.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Maybe that sounds very cheesy, but I do think that I'm now way more aware of that connection than I probably was when I was younger.

Ariana deVries

Yes. So then, you mentioned that working on this play, caused you to look at the makeup of your identity. This is a quote that you have, it says, “it caused you to look at the makeup of your own identity along with your beliefs, perceptions and fears with greater honesty”. So tell me a little bit more about that.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So, I found, I found out a few things about myself during this experience that I probably didn't really know about myself. And that's what I meant with that, like, I just got to, you know, experience some new responses that I hadn't really been aware of, or expected. And one was actually very closely related to stuff we've been talking about. If you ask me in theory, “Are you familiar with different religions, or are you also familiar with people of different religious backgrounds”? Living in Canada specifically in Toronto where, you know, you have such a huge diverse diversity of people around you at all times. I would have said, “Yes, of course”. It doesn't really matter where anybody's from, doesn't really matter what belief they have. I connect on an either emotional or intellectual level. That's always something that comes up later or doesn't come up at all.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

That's how went into this. And I've made this really disorienting experience that. I do think that we intuitively look for commonalities in a group. And that's why we go around the table and ask about people's names and maybe where they're from and who knows whom maybe in the group or like just the very basics at the beginning when you first meet a new cast and team. And and of course, you go deeper into that and you learn more about them, hopefully, early on, so you get to know whose history who has which history and preferences and styles and whatever they do personally and in their private lives. So I think there is a reason why we do that because we feel much more safe when we find that there's other people who have something in common with you. But I didn't know that that was so strongly related to Spiritual background or religious backgrounds in this case. So what I mean by that is that I thought, Okay, this is going to be really interesting, we're going to have to be very honest and very sensitive in the conversations we're having about faith, we're going to talk about what people's faiths are, how they feel about them, if they abandon them, if they still adhere to them, how they stand, where they stand, how they changed in their relationship to their faith, how we all differ, and so on. And after about three days, it turned out that I'm the only one in this group of about 20 people, if you count the cast and the creative team, that was still a believer.

Ariana deVries

Wow.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And I don't think I expected that just because I thought that the odds were maybe half and half or I don't know, maybe there's like 10% or so go to some kind of organized religion of some sort. And that was really interesting in terms of just assessing this slice of demographic that we're with. But also assessing what that meant for me as an individual like, what, what made me feel like, and I don't think I expected it to have this impact. I remember thinking, Okay, so I can't really share that with anyone. I mean, I shared the information fairly early on, because we like I said, we had many different conversations about family histories and our own relationship to religion.

And so, obviously, that came up early, but I was wondering what people would be thinking and if they all thought that that was so naive and backwards; that everybody has moved on to a more advanced state and that maybe they would think that's odd, you know that still. Even just the fact that I'm using the word; still someone who sings in a church choir and believes. Yeah, but then also having a feeling of otherness myself, like not actually feeling like I could share this experience. So that I would know that if I mentioned this, they would know this or if I listened to a certain song, or like a piece of sacred music, that means a lot to me, for example, to feel like they could potentially share that experience with me on a similar level; I always felt a bit a little bit like a dinosaur or something. You know what I mean? Like a little bit like, “Oh, well, I still live in this kind of configuration, and everyone else has shed that and they have all experienced and explained very clearly, in this rehearsal context and in this debate that we had over the last over those three months, why they've abandoned religion or why they never had a bond with religion or when it happened, how it happened, what their intellectual standpoint is with their new philosophy”.


So yeah. It's interesting; like they all felt...seemed to me like they all felt like we should be done with this. And so the questions that the play Nathan the Wise poses and challenges you with, became very real and personal, I think, very quickly for all of us. And to actually listen to others and consider their standpoints and their experiences, as equally relevant as your own, is really, I think, not quite as easy as we all like to think.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Because I do think we all consider ourselves relatively tolerant and open and educated. And we know that there's not one truth. We kind of know that, but then I don't think that that's really how we behave and how we speak.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Until you come face to face with what do you really believe about this person or this belief or whatever. Until you actually have to make a decision, so to speak. Yeah. We can be a little bit wishy washy about it or, or I don't know, but yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, so I definitely felt personally challenged like in both sense of the words. Challenged as in It was a challenge but also was being challenged. I felt like I had to challenge my own belief system that, like I said earlier, I didn't really question as much as I could have probably; even just learning about the Crusades and just getting the bigger picture. Putting some of the puzzle pieces together on how those three legs religions related and how one came out of another. I did see different perspectives much more clearly and felt a bit disoriented in my own standpoint.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So I think that was probably the biggest challenge personally for me. And to not make it about that. And not be deterred by that, but actually be inspired by that.

Ariana deVries

Yeah, that's really good. So then you chose to have a female act the role of Nathan, which I thought was fascinating, and she did such a brilliant job. I forgot half the time that it was even a female. She did so well.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I heard that from several people.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Just the way she body the role and just everything she did really fantastic. But can you explain to me some of your reasons by why you chose to have female actor that role?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, absolutely. So it wasn't something that I had settled on from the beginning. Not at all, I was actually just thinking of Who are the people I like to watch on stage who has really amazing artists who can, you know, read the phone book to me and I'd still be glued to their faces, and to the performances. And then I started to think more about what does it really mean to me that we claim someone as wiser than the others. What does that mean to us individually; today to me? And then it became, again, it became relatively pretty personal for me. I thought if I want to talk about a wise person in the community I need to at least think through for me, who are the people that I consider wise in my life or who have I encountered even if I've only met them once now we think of as wise and why are they wiser than others? And what does that mean and how does it actually differ from intellect or cleverness or just being an intelligent thinker? Like, what's wisdom?

And so I thought of a few people and I just kept coming across women in my in my circle of colleagues or friends or even just people, like I said, that I heard of, that I know about, doesn't even have to be someone I'm friends with. I just thought of more and more women I thought,, There are a lot of wise women that I look up to or that I would ask for advice. Then I was interested in finding out for myself what I would think if I saw the title Nathan the Wise and saw a woman. What are the questions that are elicited by this juxtaposition?

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And then I thought, okay, I can answer them for myself. But isn't it just as important to know that these questions will come up in the first place? So in other words, if we have a title that suggests a wise person, a male and a Jewish person, it's all in the title - Nathan the Wise.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Do we want to show a male, Jewish looking, let's say or Jewish mannered, or whatever it is that the theatre can do.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Whatever it is you think of with the stereotypes of Jewishness. Do we want to see that? And what does that achieve? It became more and more clear to me that there is just another layer that we can discuss and discover when we have a woman doing that. So again, it wasn't so much a concept idea from the beginning, it crystallized over time. And then when I saw Diane Flax in the audition, it was really clear to me that that kind of wisdom that she as a person brings is what I want to talk about.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Who is she as a, you know, as a Jewish person, as a non religious person at the same time, as an intellectual, as a comedian, as an incredible performer, as a mother, as a person who's also very aware of performativity, of our roles. Who is she and what can she bring to this conversation? Then it became clear that I wanted her and then we also felt like more and more these, these women came up in conversation. While we started in the first week, I think in March, we heard about the New Zealand attacks, the terror attacks towards Christchurch.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And then the female prime minister who spoke and then offered the families of the victims to pay for the funerals, for example, and for, I think, some some compensation afterwards. I remember thinking, yeah, there are some really important female voices that if we had more leaders have that kind of quality and have that kind of mindset, maybe that will make a difference and what are the female and the male qualities that these people bring to their role?

So then I also thought, even if people disagree with it, and are bothered by the fact that watching very clearly a female with a costume piece and artificial beard (we made it very clear that she is not trying to be a man). But even if that's the experience that they're having, then that's enough for me. For them to start thinking about what that means.

Ariana deVries

To make them a little bit uncomfortable and cause them to question. Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah. And I actually heard people, in the first preview, I believe. I heard people talk about it in the washroom. These older ladies who had incredibly important and intelligent questions about what does it mean that this is played by clearly a woman and clearly a woman who's not quite as old as this character suggests to me. This was very early on. This was a preview in previews that's what you do you reassess what was working and what isn't; make adjustments. So I was very pleased that in the very first preview that had an audience The question was already being brought up and discussed and in a productive way.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So then what was one of the more challenging things of directing this play? And then also, what was one of the most rewarding things?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah, so the challenging things, I probably mentioned some of it already in one of the other questions, but I would say trying to find a balance between everyone being very personally involved and invested in the story and in the tackling of these issues; and at the same time, keeping a distance and not making it all about our personal experiences. So on the one hand, you wanted to know how everybody felt about these issues, because you kind of had to, to know what the trigger points are, and each of the cast members and what their family backgrounds are and where they were from, and if there were some histories of trauma in the family or persecution. We had people who had lost their family in the Holocaust or something, and then, for example, knowing that my assistant and I were the only Germans in the room, there was always this underlying awareness of, Who was your family? Where do you stand now?

And even if we hadn't posed those questions, they would have been there. And then so we decided at some point early on, we’d create this exercise where we all ask each other really honest questions. We wrote them all on a piece of paper. Everybody was allowed to write one or more questions. We didn't write the names underneath and then we collected them all the Put them on a pile. And then we sat around in a circle and picked a question each and read the question out loud. So it wasn't necessarily my own question and I was reading, and then people could or could not respond if they want to if someone wanted to say something about it, they could if not, we just moved on. And so I felt that was, on the one hand, really useful to get right at the heart of the issues, and to actually engage with these questions and not make it just about the piece. But at the same time, it was a fine line, I think, that we were walking in terms of making it maybe a bit too personal at times, or maybe a little bit too much that it may have been easier if I hadn't known. And I think we gave permission to be personal through that exercise, which is incredibly important in this kind of context and process, but at the same time sometimes you just don't really want to make it too personal. And I knew about some people's backgrounds, their fears, their hopes, and obviously the play in the end is infused by this passion and all this shared experience and the sharing of these experiences.

But it sometimes can be hard to just keep it professional and not make it about ourselves all the time and just move on and move past that and just think of what is the audience seeing and am I maybe reading it this way now, because this text because I know the person was reading it has this attitude towards this, or am I actually reading it this way because the text suggested it. So then you start to fuse the actor and the character at times. And, again, that can be very productive and very inspired. But it's sometimes hard to work through that.

Ariana deVries

Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I think in an ideal case, in the end, you have both. You have the personalities infuse the characters, but you have a piece that shows the characters and doesn't show the cast.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. Right.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

So I found that probably the most challenging of all my directing experiences with this particular project, because it was all about who we are, what we believe I couldn't really separate those conversations on history. And the most rewarding, I would say, is kind of the same thing. [Laughter] You get to know so many different perspectives that you just never really considered. And you just learn so much.

Ariana deVries

The other as you have said.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Yeah. And that was just incredibly enriching. And I do believe that I started to think about some perspectives and statements and beliefs a bit differently than than I had before. Just because I, I was constantly faced with them. And I think I've felt like we're taking the tiniest step towards opening up something and yet just allowing ourselves to ask questions and not be so sure of ourselves and not claim to know something that we've always grown up with to be the truth. And then, again, that sounds so very, very trite somehow, but it's a huge, I think, it's a huge recognition that happens and I feel like that happened to some of us, maybe to some more than to others and maybe some people were already that wise. I certainly wasn’t.

Ariana deVries

Well, there was a moment in the play when Nathan begins to share the parable of the rings. And that was a really impacting moment for me in watching it, and seeing how the other is played out in that in how they came to the end of the story. And they all realized that they had a ring and they were all, they were all loved by the Father. They all had a role to play, and then learning how to walk that out. That's the part now that it's like, Okay, how do we do this for real?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Exactly. So the most rewarding I think is for me as a director is when you're in the audience, sometimes I mean, it can happen in rehearsals, too; but with an audience you're literally hearing the penny drop with the audience it’s so incredibly meaningful. Like that moment that you're describing at the end of the ring parable when you understand that everybody was fighting each other because they thought the others robbed them of something that's obviously the metaphor for all the religious conflicts and that they're all loved by the father and when Diane as Nathan looked out into the audience during that I feel like like there was always something happening. You could sense it. Like, it's hard to describe, but it's actually it's there. It's like some kind of vibration.

And another moment where I felt that very strongly was the moment you already quoted earlier is when Nathan says to the Christian lay Brother, "What makes you a Christian to me makes me a Jew to you". I felt like the fact that this was slightly comical and therefore pointed out the absurdity of the conflict it was based on made it so incredibly impactful; people always chuckled inside. And like something really happened in that moment. People really thought, I think, thought of this conflict differently because of that line. And so to feel that is incredibly rewarding when that happens, because a lot of moments are hoping something is gonna happen and nothing happens.

Ariana deVries

Oh yeah. So then, in what ways, and I think you may have answered this a little bit already, but how have you become more curious and more courageous through the process and journey of directing Nathan the Wise?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

I think I'm more aware of, as I said, not knowing and being okay with not knowing a lot and being okay to have to ask questions. There's a lot that I felt like I should know and even we talked about Judaism and holidays of the different religions and customs and what the certain dress codes mean and what certain clothing attributes meaning. And I just realized it's okay to not know this and it's okay to ask and people will much more likely happily share what they know then you know, reproach you for not knowing that was a big, I think that was a big insight for me as well. And that also others don't know everything and they'll also ask.

So I think that makes me a bit more courageous in terms of learning and and approaching people at the same time. I also think we have a lot more in common than we think. And that changes my outlook a little bit. That we may think of others as more different than common. And I think that's, that's okay, too. But I think to learn that we probably have similar fears, and hopes and thoughts is encouraging. Yeah. And so I feel a little bit more I think, generous towards myself and others, if that makes sense.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So, as we bring this to a close, I have one more question for you. And that is how do you think that we could be more gracious than shift our views of the other?

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Probably start by really listening to the others more and not shutting down? what they have to say right away by putting forward what are you already thinking, you know, you think and you already have come to some kind of conclusion. It wasn't about and I thought of this incident the other day when I read your question where we walked home from the church service in Toronto, and as you know, it's election times coming up and there was this young woman who came up to us with with a flyer, and she wanted to talk to us about Andrew Schreer. I just remember having all these thoughts in a short time about how Okay, how is she going to convince us that we should vote Andrew Schreer? Should I listened to her rant about Trudeau right now? Maybe I learned something maybe I should actually find out what it is that she means. And she did a semi-good job, I think. She didn't just rant. She was a Catholic, I think, oh no, she was a Christian. She kept talking about being Christian, and from a Christian standpoint, the Conservatives are really the only party that, you know, would keep values intact. And, of course, coming out of the church and being in that particular environment at that moment, I was thinking, well, maybe I should consider what she has to say. I don't think I should just move on because I've already made up my mind. And there was part of me was just like, intellectually assessing the situation. And then being emotionally still kind of annoyed by by the moment.

Ariana deVries

Yeah.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

And I just had to really stop myself. I remember thinking, Okay, this is like such a trap. Like, of course, I'm going to want to move on and I don't necessarily want to hear her rant about the Liberals. But why not? So anyway, it's just a small moment, but I think we will we all encounter these moments so frequently, especially in a city like Toronto, in a country like Canada, and are faced with otherness on all kinds of levels. And to just stop for a moment and consider what it means to be in their shoes or just like, see the situation that the discussing from the opposite perspective, if you don't end up agreeing with them, is harder than we think. But I also think it's a decisive step.

Ariana deVries

Yeah. So in closing, I have a quote and this quote’s actually by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, and I was listening to this in a podcast this morning, and I thought it was brilliant. And he said, “Love the stranger because to him, you're a stranger. The sense that we are enlarged by the people who are different from us. We are not threatened by them that needs cultivating can be cultivated and lead us to see the 21st century is full of blessing and not fear.”

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Thank you. That’s great.

Ariana deVries

I thought it would be very fitting considering the play that you did and how you are helping people to view the world like that. So thank you very much, and I very much appreciated the play that you directed.

Birgit Schreyer Duarte

Thank you so much for having me and for making this a subject for your listeners.