Catherine Banks and I meet at the Trident Cafe, tucked a few blocks from the harbour and surrounded by espresso machines and tall shelves stuffed full with books. It seems the perfect place to chat with the Governor General award-winning playwright, whose play It Is Solved By Walking begins a short run through Neptune Theatre’s Open Spaces Program this week. Noted for her poetic voice and “Atlantic Gothic” subject matter, Banks is sweet, pensive, and candid, sharing her response to how her writing is categorized and the understanding that she came to theatre through poetry.
“I was a terrible poet!” she laughed. I implored her to elaborate. “I just don’t have the proper brain for poetry. I think poets really care a lot about details and the names of things – and I don’t have the mind for it…it’s broader.”
“I read a lot of poetry,” she continued. “I had a teacher in grade 8, and instead of saying to me ‘maybe you could switch this around, or use a different image,’ she would say ‘Oooh, Catherine! I love this poem, it reminds me of W.H. Auden…you must read him!’ and she’d bring me his book!”
Consequently, Banks’ 8th grade teacher functioned as her gateway to the world of great poets: “And then I knew my poetry was bad! But when someone says to me, ‘your work is poetic’ — to me that’s the biggest compliment.”
In an unapologetic tone, Banks informed me she’s never trained in or studied theatre, save for a class at Acadia U and a six-week writing course (see also, renegade); “I just write very much the story I’m trying to tell. And I never think ‘oh is this what my audience wants,’ ever. I never think, ‘how will a director do this,’ I just trust that the director will…they bring their own brilliance that I can’t hope to know.” Banks’ affection for poetry and her “text-based” approach to theatre is a mark of her loyalty to its history as an oratory art. “I’m a bit of a dinosaur — I love language in theatre. I consider theatre a literary art. And so when I go to theatre, I want layered work… I want to be called a playwright, not a theatre-maker. I like the idea of the writing craft.”
Banks’ play It Is Solved By Walking premiered in Calgary with feminist theatre company Urban Curvz — “a very tiny company” — that found the script through a Saskatchewan playwright’s exchange. Banks had two scripts sent through Playwright’s Atlantic Resource Centre, and It Is Solved… was chosen. Banks was not put off by the diminutive size of Urban Curvz, nor a then-inexperienced director: the “very lovely…Kat Waters.” Banks reflected, “Kat had never directed a show on her own, so she was extremely respectful of my process and my journey of the play, how I wanted to present it. There was something about her I really liked, and when I was coming up I had a lot of people support me when I wasn’t really ‘ready,’ so I thought it was time to give back.”
Waters told Banks she wanted to do It Is Solved in April, because she “wanted people to come out of the theatre into the spring air.” This was an offer Banks couldn’t refuse, and a choice she does not regret. It took a less poetical promise, however, to bring the maritime writer’s script home to Nova Scotia.
“I didn’t want to self-produce. Ever again. I produced Bonecage with ForeRunner Theatre and it practically killed me. Just the process of self-producing…I find it impossible.” Luckily for Halifax, acclaimed director Mary Vingoe of HomeFirst Theatre approached Banks about producing the play, assuring Banks she would not have to don a producer’s hat. “She and I have tried to work together throughout the years, and she was so supportive of my early work and has been a great supporter. And she didn’t come with all the answers to the script, she had all kinds of questions. But she’s a treasure. She’s a very strong director and she loved the script -it seemed like the right time.”
Banks has given this production space to become its own composition; she has only attended a couple of rehearsals. “I went in early on to see the first nine scenes, and a little bit later and saw the full run. There’s a point where you need to see it to see if there’s anything off-kilter, that you didn’t intend…but there’s a certain point where you can’t really make changes. There’s a point where you have to trust that the director is working with a set of factors too, and if they’re asking you to cut a monologue, or cut things back…you have to let go, and be a little bit flexible. You have to stay active.”
“I feel bad because when people say it’s gonna be great, I say ‘I hope so!’ It has nothing to do with (the company), it has to do with me wondering how the text is going to land here! It’s about 13 descriptions of sex, so I wonder how that’s going to land, and if people are going to get what we’re trying to do. The team is wonderful, but I do worry, of course. It’s part of the territory.”
In Banks’ words, It Is Solved by Walking “is about a 53 year old woman, Margaret, who’s recovering from the death of her former husband. His death has taken her back to the very beginning of their relationship. And she’s very disappointed in herself – she’s disappointed she’s not a poet, she’s disappointed she’s not a tenured professor…she has to go way back and figure out how she got to where she is today.”
Margaret’s way in is through the subject of her unfinished thesis, Wallace Steven’s poem ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ Banks’ play reveals the poem is about sensations, and Margaret “rediscovers her past relationship through sex.”
The poem became the “spine of the play” after Banks opened her Norton Anthology for a morning browse. Banks sleeps with poetry by her bed, and was led back to Stevens’ “enigmatic” poem: “I read the notes. And the note said it was a poem about sensations, and I found that incredible – to me it had always been a poem about images. So then, I don’t know, because I was in bed, I thought ‘oh! I wonder if I could link the sensations to sex!’ So I did the first one, ‘the eye of the blackbird,’ thinking about when you’re making love with someone you really care about, especially early in the relationship, and it just seemed to fit so beautifully. I thought, ‘oh I’m going to have to do this. I’m going to have to see if I can relate every stanza to some sensation to do with sex.’ So I just did that, all the way through (the poem) every morning for the next two weeks: wake up, read the next stanza, and write a monologue.”
When I asked Banks about her connection to Stevens, American poet/brainiac, her response is humble: “I don’t pretend to understand his work. I enjoy it. I’ve read him, a lot. He’s so lush and beautiful and the images are so strong…” She added cheekily, “but I don’t pretend to understand them.” Like Banks, the audience need not brush up on Stevens before attending the show: “the poem is present in every scene, repeated sometimes more than once. It starts with Margaret reading the poem for the first time. She’s 17 and she’s trying to figure it out (and all throughout the play she) figures her way through it.”
It seems that Stevens invited himself onto the page in the first place. When Banks was sitting down to write It Is Solved, “Margaret has a line ‘is there anybody there?’…and Wallace Stevens was the person who appeared! He was just there, and it was very right that he was there.” At one point Stevens — “a very powerful personality to have in the play,” portrayed by Hugh Thompson — calls Margaret out for using him as a distraction from her own journey. Banks quoted her character as if he’s a dear funny friend and not her own artistic product; “He says ‘there you go again, trying to make this about me!’ I kept that (idea) all the way through…I didn’t want to do a bunch of research that would end up in the play and have it start to be about him.”
After admitting I was over-excited about Stevens-as-character, I asked Banks to tell me a bit more about the actual protagonist. The character Margaret is played by Newfoundland actress Ruth Lawrence, whose company White Rooster is co-producing the production. For Banks, Margaret’s internal exploration of how she failed to accomplish her dreams must go back to meeting her former partner John as PhD students. “She kind of made a deal with him – in the way that you do starting out in a relationship… for some reason you’re having a two-level conversation, you’re talking about one thing but you’re also talking about something much deeper. So in that deeper conversation she gives something over. And she never regains from that. It’s only when she reflects back that she understands what she gave over.
“So, that’s her struggle. To come to terms with why she didn’t become the poet she was going to be, or the mother that she was going to be, all these things she thought she would be, and yet — didn’t become.”
The play’s title reflects how both Margaret and Banks unpack and process any unkempt thoughts. “‘It is solved by walking’ is a Latin quote, from St. Augustine (Solvitur ambulando). I knew Margaret was a walker, she was walking at the beginning of the play. And I’m a walker, it’s how I process my work. And my life.”
One thing Banks doesn’t spend too much time ‘processing’ are the labels used to categorize her writing. When I mentioned that she’s been branded a writer of ‘Atlantic Gothic,’ I was told Banks doesn’t “really worry about the title. I go into the dark of maritime life, there’s no question — and I think I’ve put ‘Atlantic Gothic’ in my bio because of course it’s a hook.” She does acknowledge the darkness of her writing, though counters that “if you really go into rural Nova Scotia, or anywhere…the world is dark.”
More than just her content, Banks recognizes the challenges of creating work as a maritime artist; “It’s sort of a weird thing — I happen to think the more specific you are, the richer the work is. But a lot of people think the more general you are, the more relatable you are. It’s a weird time right now. A lot of people would put my work as ‘rural Nova Scotian stories.’ And it’s weird to me that there are southern writers who travel worldwide and no one says ‘oh they’re just from there.’”
“I don’t know why it happens in Canada, that we’ve decided we’ve ‘done’ the rural story, there’s no rural story -which is ridiculous because now there’s even more, and they’re even sadder. It’s even more difficult because of fisheries dying, and young men going out to Fort Mac. There’s so many important stories that are happening in rural Nova Scotia right now. And yet they seem to be being dismissed by the theatre community.”
I had the chance to see It Is Solved By Walking at last night’s pay-what-you-can preview, and my mind is still ringing with Banks’ beautiful language, strong theatrical images, and the many sensations her play brings the audience through. Banks had told me if she leaves a play “thinking about the next thing I have to do… I know something’s wrong. I like to leave thinking about the characters, and have discussions about the play’s ideas.” Between Banks, Vingoe, and Margaret’s labyrinthine mind, you are certain to leave the theatre with plenty to walk, talk and dream about.
It Is Solved by Walking plays nightly until October 5th at 8 pm,
Matinees Saturday October 4th at 4pm and Sunday October 5th at 2 pm.
All performances take place at Neptune’s Scotiabank Studio Theatre.
$25 general
$20 student/senior/arts worker
$15 each for groups of ten or more
Tickets are available online, in person at the Neptune Theatre Box Office at 1593 Argyle Street, or by phone at (902) 429-7070.
