Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre hires Nightwood’s Kelly Thornton as its artistic director

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In an appointment that will reverberate well beyond Winnipeg, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre has selected Nightwood Theatre’s Kelly Thornton as its first new artistic director since the 1980s.

It’s a big leap for Thornton, who will go from running a Toronto-based women’s theatre that operates on less than a million dollars a year to helming the oldest regional theatre in the country on an annual budget over $10-million.

At a time when many search committees have appeared to prioritize international credentials and credits in candidates and insisted on experience managing multimillion-dollar companies, the hiring of Thornton – who has headed Nightwood, an indie outfit that punches well above its weight in artistic impact, since 2001 – is an encouraging sign that extensive experience in the Canadian theatre trenches can still matter.

“At the end of the day, I think it came down to character – that they wanted someone that fit the work culture, the city,” Thornton says, in an interview in Toronto ahead of Wednesday’s announcement of her appointment in Winnipeg.

“[Outgoing artistic director] Steven [Schipper] is a person who leads from the centre – and so am I.”

While many theatres of a similar size in bigger cities have struggled financially or in terms of audiences over the past decade, MTC has found success on both fronts at the geographical centre of Canada with that philosophy.

Indeed, Thornton takes over one of the most stable theatrical institutions in the country, with an enviable subscriber base of around 14,000 and an endowment of about $19-million.

“I’m inheriting a great theatre,” Thornton says, who wants to maintain its close relationship with its audience. “There’s a real strong cultural identity that’s come out of Manitoba and I think it’s because the institutions are so strong there: Cercle Molière, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the new Human Rights museum… ”

At the same time, MTC has not had much of a national reputation for the creation of new work in recent years under Schipper, who was promoted from associate artistic director to artistic director in 1989 and will program one final season before stepping down at the end of May.

Nightwood has, comparatively, premiered or co-premiered a larger number of impactful and popular new plays on its modest budget – in the past couple of years alone, Diane Flacks’s debate drama Unholy, Ellie Moon’s documentary play Asking for It, and Quote Unquote Collective’s Mouthpiece (recently turned into a film).

Thornton wants to beef up MTC on that front – and says she’s on the search not just for new dramas in the Nightwood mould for the theatre’s second stage, but for mainstage musicals that could be, as she puts it, “Manitoba’s Come From Away.”

“I really want to dig in and invest a lot more in new play development,” she says. “The really fantastic thing is there’s some really interesting young writers coming out of Winnipeg… like [2018 Toronto Fringe New Play Contest winner] Frances Koncan.”

Another area where MTC has come under criticism for not leading the way is in serving or representing the Indigenous audience in Winnipeg – which, after all, has the largest Indigenous population of any major city in Canada.

Thornton, who has demonstrated a commitment to inclusion and, naturally, gender equality at Nightwood, has some ideas – from starting an Indigenous artist council to reaching out to National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre artistic director Kevin Loring on collaborations – but the first thing she wants to do is get her boots on the ground. “I say this again and again about everything, the first year is about talking to people, reflecting my ideas to them and getting feedback,” she says.

That will begin when Thornton moves to Winnipeg in June with her family – her husband, Josep Seras, her 11-year-old daughter, Chloe, as well as her ex-husband and Chloe’s father, actor Alex Poch-Goldin, who will be relocating west from Toronto as well.

“I always say we’re like the modern family – happily divorced,” Thornton says. “Before applying I had to talk to everyone and say, ‘Are we all in?’ I couldn’t take Chloe away from Alex.”

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, another artistic director position opens up: Nightwood Theatre will launch a search for a new leader later this fall.