Tawiah M’Carthy’s career takes another leap as he directs Pulitzer-winning play ‘Fairview’

Tawiah M’Carthy is prepared.

The Ghana-born theatre artist is constantly adding to his portfolio. Trained as an actor at York University, he started creating his own productions after graduation because opportunities were not otherwise available.

“Most of what I was getting back then was, there weren’t characters I could play. Being a Black person, having an accent, people not being able to tell if I was queer or straight: apparently all those were factors when it came to casting,” he said.

His solo piece “The Kente Cloth” played at the SummerWorks Festival in 2008. He co-created and performed in several well-received pieces at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, including “Obaaberima,” which won the 2013 Dora Award for best production, and “Black Boys,” in which M’Carthy, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff and Thomas Olajide shared their experiences as gay Black men.

His career took a big step forward last summer when he directed Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horseman” for the Stratford Festival, which I called “a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical event” in my four-star review.

“It was a huge leap,” said M’Carthy of that project. “I had the skill set, but I’ll honestly say that it was a steep learning curve for me because, prior to that, the shows that I directed were two characters or one-person shows. And here I was directing a show that had about 28 people onstage.”

But he was ready. “I believe in preparation, meeting opportunity. And I’ve spent a majority of my career preparing for the moment where I’ll have the opportunity to do something on such a stage at such a scale.”

His latest directorial project is Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” playing in a Canadian Stage/Obsidian Theatre co-production. The play starts out as a family comedy set in a middle-class African-American home, but what lies ahead are provocative shifts and revelations that open up questions of race and power.

The experience of directing at Stratford helped M’Carthy prepare to take on “Fairview.”

“It got messy before it got unmessy with ‘Death and the King’s Horseman,’” he said. That play is set in a Second World War-era colonial Nigeria and dramatizes the catastrophic effects of a British officer intervening in a Yoruban death ritual.

“This happened post-COVID, post what I call the BLM (Black Lives Matter) revolution that happened universally. So there were difficult conversations that had to be had … The discomfort, the tears, the anger, all of it happened for us to be able to get the show where we got it to,” M’Carthy said.

In a different but related way, “Fairview” has also been challenging. “Let’s be real about it … Canadian Stage has its history, just like Stratford has its history. And Black and white actors are coming together to tell these stories. And the characters are extremely challenging. They say challenging things to each other.”

From the Stratford experience, McCarthy said he learned “certain things that I needed to do to keep the conversion in the container it needs to stay in.”

These things include creating the position of “active listener” in the rehearsal room, held by Jamie Robinson, a Toronto theatre artist and assistant professor at York University.

“I needed someone else in the room who could help me carry the conversation,” said M’Carthy. “For the work to get where it needs to, I cannot avoid the difficult conversations. But how do I make space for those and stay on the task of directing the play? The active listener becomes a support system for me” and for the other artists in the room.

Among the play’s challenging themes is surveillance: its first line, said by one Black character to another, is “What are you looking at?”

It’s something that M’Carthy is particularly interested in highlighting in this production: “As Black bodies, we’re always aware of the fact that we’re watched. Whenever you step out of your home, you’re watched … part of what the play does is speak to that.”

At the same time he’s aware that the audience will be mixed and spectators will have different experiences depending on how they identify.

“After every preview, the show has finished and people just sit in their chairs and are not able to get up,” M’Carthy said, speaking a few days after the show started performances. “My hope is they are considering what they’ve just experienced.”

While welcoming the opportunity to direct a much talked about American play, M’Carthy continues to pursue opportunities to “expand the Black narrative in Canada” by staging African stories.

He’s moving on to the second half of a doubleheader at Canadian Stage with “Maanomaa, My Brother,” an original hour-long production he’s creating with Brad Cook for their company Blue Bird Theatre Collective.

The story, told through movement and words, is about two boys — one Black, one white — who grew up together in Ghana and come back together there 25 years later. The show comes out of conversations with Cook about “whether friendship actually extends past race,” said M’Carthy.

His next job overlaps with that one and it’s another African story: while performing “Maanomaa, My Brother” he’ll be rehearsing Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s Soulpepper production of “Sizwe Banzi is Dead.” M’Carthy will perform alongside Amaka Umeh, who played the Praise Singer in “Death and the King’s Horseman” as well as a groundbreaking Hamlet at Stratford last season.

While telling Black stories is a central goal, M’Carthy also doesn’t want this to contain his career. One of his mentors congratulated M’Carthy on “Death and the King’s Horseman” and offered this advice: “Just make sure they don’t only call you for Black works.”

“My hope is that as my career continues to go, I’ll be seen as more than the director who directs African or Black plays. I’m hoping to produce a repertoire of work and experience that can attest to that,” said M’Carthy.

After several years as part of the artistic leadership team at Canadian Stage, M’Carthy is enjoying focusing on his creative work: “I’m at this place where I just want to go into practice for a bit. I feel I lead better when I’ve been in practice,” he said.

So he has aspirations to Canadian theatre leadership? “I do. I will. I can confidently say that,” he said. “Not right now at this moment in my career, but in the future I do.”

He’ll be ready. “What I’m going to do in the next few years, it’s all in preparation for what the next step is.”

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