All for Show

Jani Lauzon has maintained she is Métis and her play 1939—now touring Canada—is based on her father’s experience at a residential school. What if none of it is true?

- MICHELLE CYCA

WORLD WAR II is looming in Europe, but in Canada, a group of Indigenous children at a Northern Ontario residential school is putting on a performance of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well for the royal tour of King George VI. Such is the set-up of the play 1939, directed by multidisciplinary performer Jani Lauzon, who also co-wrote it with Kaitlyn Riordan. According to the playwrights, the story is partly inspired by Lauzon's own family history. "My father went to a very specific convent residential school, and they studied Shakespeare as well as Latin and Greek, and the idea there was that all the students that were there would become nuns or priests," explained Lauzon in a 2022 interview for a University of Waterloo speaker series, adding that she learned that her father had attended a residential school only when she was in her thirties, because he had never spoken about it. "I thought, wow, that's interesting― because you don't hear about Shakespeare being taught at residential schools."

1939 is not a straight tragedy, as one might expect given the setting, but something like a comedy; the allusions to beatings are punctuated by mentions of a rival school called Titsworth and a farting priest. According to one review, it received a standing ovation on opening night at the 2022 Stratford Festival in Ontario. This September, it debuted at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre. The Toronto Star called it an "especially poignant piece of theatre," while Intermission magazine declared it an "overdue addition to the Canadian dramatic canon." In October 2024, it premiered at the storied Belfry Theatre in Victoria.