Renowned Stratford Festival commissions new Anne of Green Gables play
Playwright Kat Sandler has been tapped to adapt 1908 bestseller for a 2025 audience
Toronto-based playwright Kat Sandler has been tapped to adapt Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 bestseller about an orphan who blossoms on Prince Edward Island for a 2025 audience.
That means whimsical Anne Shirley will be taking a trip from Avonlea to the Avon Theatre at the revered Stratford Festival in southwest Ontario, in a new non-musical theatrical production that will run from April to October.
"I'm obsessed with it. I love it," Sandler said of Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables during an interview this week.
"I grew up with the audio cassettes … and the miniseries, so it's just such an honour to get to touch this piece of Canadiana that so many people have such beautiful, beautiful memories and experiences with."
She wants to share that love with a new generation not familiar with the story, some of whom lurk within her own family.
"My little sister was like, 'Oh, that's the girl from Newfoundland with the potatoes.' And I said, 'No, no, no, no, no, wrong on all counts.'"
Back in 2016, Sandler received the Dora Mavor Moore Award for an outstanding new play for her work Mustard, about a troubled teen's strangely persistent imaginary friend. She is now the artistic director at Toronto's Theatre Brouhaha, and the latest of her 17 plays include BANG BANG and the double bill The Party and The Candidate.
So when Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino's team started talking about commissioning a new play based on Anne of Green Gables, "Kat Sandler was one of the first people that was mentioned," said Keith Barker.
Barker's the director of the Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program at Stratford, carrying out the mission of negotiating and nurturing original theatre projects for the festival. So he got in touch with Sandler.
"The first moment I spoke to her, she was like a superfan and started talking about [how] she read all the books and how much she loved it," he said of Sandler's reaction to hearing the words "Anne of Green Gables" come out of his mouth.
"It was just a perfect marriage."
The Canadian copyright for Montgomery's most famous work of fiction ended in 1992, leaving the book in the public domain in terms of adaptations. But the lack of copyright fees to be paid was a small part of the decision to take another look at Anne, Barker said.
"We're also really excited around the idea of bringing families into theatres," he said, and the ability "to have a new take on it while still honouring its East Coast roots."
Sandler's written a full draft of her version, and it's been workshopped during the process of ironing out kinks.
"We're moving towards being fully cast and we're getting design pieces," she said. "It moves very fast at Stratford."
The work will be presented at the festival's Avon Theatre, which Barker calls a beautiful old vaudevillian theatre that seats around 1,100 people.
"So there's absolutely a side of vaudevillian flair with our production that I'm hoping for," Sandler said.
Love, belonging, chosen family, community, loss, class — like, these are really big, big themes with high stakes.— Kat Sandler
"What I don't have is sweeping shots of stunning P.E.I. What I do have is an army of some of the best actors and craftspeople in the world to ... tell the emotional core of this story."
That core is made up of excellent ingredients, she added.
"Love, belonging, chosen family, community, loss, class — like, these are really big, big themes with high stakes. And what Lucy Maud Montgomery does in the book, which is so hilarious and poignant, is create this story that is actually, I think, much more timeless than people give it credit for. And I'm hoping that my adaptation can reflect that."
P.E.I. musicals 'a treat'
Sandler is fresh from a trip to Charlottetown to take in Anne of Green Gables: The Musical at the Confederation Centre of the Arts and Anne & Gilbert at the Florence Simmons Performance Hall. She said getting to see both of those musicals "was just such a treat."
The playwright can reel off a number of versions of Anne that have been staged, filmed or taped over the years.
Those include the 1980s Kevin Sullivan TV miniseries for CBC starring Megan Follows as Anne, as well as an audiobook project that Follows recently directed for Audible.
"I listened to the Rachel McAdams-read audio book when I was prepping for this, but like, there's nine books and now there's all these graphic novels. There's like Anne of Green Gables with Zombies, Anne of West Philly … the CBC show that Moira Walley-Beckett did [Anne with an E]."
Sandler was still able to find fresh "scope for imagination," as young Ms. Shirley herself would say, in the original book.
"The base story of someone coming from away and fundamentally changing a community with their optimism and intelligence and passion for the better — that all still makes a lot of sense," she said.
"But there's quite a lot of hard stuff that happens in this book," Sandler said, including deaths, illness, and a teacher taking a romantic interest in a teenaged student.
"And I think people tend to gloss over it.… Lucy Maud Montgomery isn't shying away from the hard stuff."
As Anne once said: "It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?"
Definitely not 'a garbage fire'
Sandler is intrigued about why so many still gravitate toward Anne Shirley 120 years after she was birthed in Montgomery's brain.
"I'm really obsessed with storytelling and how we tell and retell stories and why certain stories get told again and again and again," she said.
"You know, the world can be such a garbage fire. And it's really nice to return to a place like Avonlea and a character like Anne and revisit the idea that the world can be so beautiful," Sandler said.
"My very favourite quote in the whole book is: 'Dear old world. You are very lovely and I am lucky to be alive in you.' And that sentiment, I think, is something that's just so nice to have existing in our world today."
Members of the general public can buy tickets for 2025 Stratford Festival season productions as of Dec. 16; festival members can book starting Nov. 10.
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With files from Jackie Sharkey