On introducing young
people to the theatre

Up-and-coming local actor/playwright Darragh Mondoux talks about her latest play Bud

By Irwin Rapoport

November 14, 2024

Montreal is home to a vibrant and flourishing English theatre scene that attracts talent from the rest of the country and has led to many promising local actors and theatre professionals having an opportunity to train and perform in our city and be ready to flourish across Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world.

Our city has produced actors such as Christopher Plummer, William Shatner, and others who cut their teeth in local productions before reaching greater fame in Toronto, Stratford and Hollywood, where they excelled in movie productions and television series.

Darrah Mondoux NDG’s own Darragh Mondoux has worked in theatre in Montreal for the past ten years. Many avid theatre aficionados have seen her perform on various stages such as the Centaur Theatre and the Segal Centre. Not only has she acted, but she also teaches theatre to people of all ages and has been involved in theatre management at several levels. Mondoux is currently on stage in a production of The Wolves at the Segal Centre, performing the role of “#7.”

An alumnus of the Dome Theatre Program at Dawson College, Mondoux began performing professionally with Repercussion Theatre, Shakespeare Canada, Talking Dog Productions, and Persephone Productions. She has also written and produced plays of her own with the support of Playwright’s Workshop Montreal, the Mainline Gala for Student Drama, and of course, the Montreal Fringe with her artistic collective Heart of Gold Productions.

Currently, she is writing a piece of theatre for young audiences for the 2025 Centaur Theatre Winterworks Festival… which promotes experimental performance projects each year.

I first met Mondoux a few years ago when she was working at Repercussion Theatre, helping me with an article for that summer’s presentation of Shakespeare-in-the-Park. We have remained friends ever since which I am very grateful for. Our conversations ranged from screenwriting to acting.

Currently, she is writing a piece of theatre for young audiences for the 2025 Centaur Theatre Winterworks Festival, previously known as the Wildside Festival, which promotes experimental performance projects each year. This was perfect as I wanted to query her on the importance of exposing young people to the world of theatre and sparking their imaginations.

Here is the Q&A of that conversation:

WM: Why should young people be exposed to theatre?

Mondoux: Theatre is an art medium that requests the collaboration of the audience’s imagination, and an audience of children is one with boundless imagination. It offers children the duality of experiencing a story personally and sharing that experience collectively. It is directly inspirational to them as growing creative creatures to see storytelling in action before them rather than mediated through screens. Maybe it inspires a joke, or a song, or a Halloween costume, or a career, but none of them leave a performance of live theatre without something new in their minds.

‘Theatre is an art medium that requests the collaboration of the audience’s imagination, and an audience of children is one with boundless imagination.’

WM: Was theatre for young audiences an impactful exposure to the performing arts for you?

Mondoux: I vividly remember the theatre troupes who came to my schools when I was a child, and the magic they could weave within the same walls I ate lunch and played dodgeball. I remember the songs and call-and-response games a certain magician would employ in classrooms and birthday parties, and the delight that elicited to experience person to person, grown-up magic maker to little magic seeker. It showed me that the society I was growing up in valued artists, that wanted to share performing arts with its youngest members, and that there were roles to be played by those of us with a child-like generosity of spirit who might grow into performers ourselves.

WM: What is Bud, your original play for young audiences being staged at the 2025 Centaur Theatre WinterWorks Festival about?

Mondoux: The idea for Bud came from my experience in lockdown in 2020 and 2021 when I lived with my sister, and I watched her use her time at home to bring an orchid plant back to blooming life. It had been among the many flowers we were sent when our mother passed away in the summer of 2019. Living through lockdown together gave us time and space to grieve together near our mother’s memory, which we held in each other, and take care of each other, and this plant. Bud will dramatize a tale of two sisters living together through their pandemic blues while caring for a singing, thirsting, growing orchid plant, played by loop-pedal musician and actor Lucas DiTecco. I think an audience of kids of all ages is going to absolutely love his performance.

‘It’s been such a privilege to perform in The Wolves this past month, and so rewarding to perform live theatre for teenagers. They are such a lively and reactive kind of audience…’

WM: You’ve been a teacher with Geordie Theatre School for a few years now so how has it been performing with such a large cast of young women in The Wolves for the Geordie Theatre mainstage production?

Mondoux: It’s been such a privilege to perform in The Wolves this past month, and so rewarding to perform live theatre for teenagers. They are such a lively and reactive kind of audience, they don’t miss a single joke or reveal without vocalizing how it makes them feel, even during 10 am shows. We opened this play all about teenage girls navigating their frustrations, their identities and the American exceptionalism they are growing up in on the day Trump got re-elected. It supercharged so many lines we speak as these teenage girls. My character speaks a few swears and slurs that offend her teammates, and by the end of the show she’s still swearing but she knows better and speaks more thoughtfully. She has been softened by grief and the growth grief gives, and that’s a feeling I hope to imbue in my play Bud.

WM: What larger life skills does theatre teach children and young adults?

Mondoux: As a theatre teacher, I see how kids come into their classes a little shy, a little unwilling to look silly. I have to hold myself back from being heartbroken that protective egos are already prohibiting little humans from letting loose, and that kids under ten are at all preoccupied with looking cool or appearing in control. I have to lead by example, as the magicians and travelling actors of my childhood did. I get to be a carefree kid among kids and balance instruction and creation. Kids leave their seasons at Geordie Theatre School more expressive, more empowered to ask for what they need and more ready to share the talents they have to give. At its essence, it’s communication training, in the most playful and creative capacity.

‘Kids leave their seasons at Geordie Theatre School more expressive, more empowered to ask for what they need and more ready to share the talents they have to give. At its essence, it’s communication training, in the most playful and creative capacity.’

WM: How do you balance working with children and in performing arts education with your other variety of artistic disciplines?

Mondoux: I do dabble in decidedly adult art practices. I take in the performing arts that grace the stages of The Wiggle Room and Café Cleopatra and take to those stages myself. I am, through it all, a former child. I am deeply in touch with the dreams and values of the child within me. She keeps me safe, she keeps me healthy curious and daring. The time I spend in nightclubs a little more than underdressed speaks to the safety and community I feel in those spaces and with those (for the most part) women. It probably looks bafflingly incongruent from the outside, but I’m at peace with the contradictions of the artist’s life I’m leading.

WM: What effects on children have you seen theatre classes and exposure to theatre have?

Mondoux: We are creating in an age where kids are exposed to so much garbage – I know that’s not new, the only thing new is the size of the screen of the garbage they’re getting. But I do believe that one good play for young audiences is more powerful than a dozen hours of YouTube – it’s challenging, it’s all-encompassing and engrossing, and it’s the immersive experience everyone is craving in a post-lockdown age.

The most valuable feeling I retain from my secondary and post-secondary education is the feeling of having my mind changed. That is to say, being gently corrected, being shown the error of my ways and greeting that new perspective with joy and gratitude. This means approaching theatre with a philosophy of showing good behaviour as good, heroic, noble, and virtuous, and bad behaviour as recognizable, familiar, easily done and easily turned away from with practice. I love it when kids confess, with smiles on their faces, that they feel so different about something after seeing a good play.

‘… I do believe that one good play for young audiences is more powerful than a dozen hours of YouTube – it’s challenging, it’s all-encompassing and engrossing, and it’s the immersive experience everyone is craving in a post-lockdown age.’

WM: What artistic values are you bringing to Bud with kids and their experience?

Mondoux: This artistic value of modelling weakness and strength and showing the ways we get through trials together rather than alone. Showing how care for others is easily transferred into care for ourselves, demonstrating that feelings of isolation, depression, fear and grief are not lonely permanent states but rather feelings that are known and understood by the grown-ups in your life who love you.

Bud will be an experiment in staging sad and scary feelings shared between sisters who fight for each other and with each other, an experiment in seeing if kids will recognize themselves in a play set in the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 and see how they feel understood by characters cooped up and lonely and attending school online, and trying to make the interior world of their family home more magical and more stimulating.

Bud
Coming Sunday, March 2 at 2 pm at the Centaur Theatre
centaurtheatre.com

Images: Brooklyn Melnyk