Behind the Curtain: Arthur Milner on “Tommy and Père”
Since moving to Regina almost five years ago, Arthur has written Tommy and Père, for Curtain Razors, and Weyburn 1959, which is now in development with Architect Theatre. Getting to Room Temperature (“a hard-hitting, sentimental and funny one-person play about dying”) was produced by Curtain Razors in February 2022, and Souffler la veilleuse, its French translation, was produced by Saskatoon’s La Troupe du Jour in February. He has also worked with On Cue Performance Hub and the Playwrights Reading Series, and he taught theatre history at the University of Regina.
Arthur has a long association with Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC), where he was a resident playwright and then artistic director. His produced and published scripts include Zero Hour, Learning to Live with Personal Growth, 1997, Masada, and Cheap Thrill (all premiered by GCTC), Sisters in the Great Day Care War (Local 2204 CUPE), Crusaders of the World (Green Thumb), and The City (Workshop West). He was part of the GCTC collective that created Sandinista!, which was presented at Sheldon Williams Collegiate in 1982 as part of a Canadian tour. Facts, a murder mystery set in the Palestinian West Bank, premiered at GCTC in 2010, toured Palestine and Israel in Arabic, and was produced in Istanbul (in Turkish) and London, U.K.
The following interview is with playwright, Arthur Milner, and Johanna Bundon, the Artistic Associate of Curtain Razors.
Can you tell me about your background?
So, my background, the problem is I’m 74, so there’s a lot of background. It’s a lot easier when you're 27 to describe your background. Anyway, leaving out many exciting details, I grew up in the 60s and became a teenager in the 60s, which explains a lot about me. I found my way into theatre by mistake. I was trying to get into medical school, but some friends of mine had started a theatre company, and I got involved with them. First as an actor, then very quickly I joined the board and this was the very early days of Canadian theatre. We wanted to do political theatre. There were a handful of plays around, decent plays on political subjects, but we ran out of them pretty soon. It became up to us to write them. We started by writing collective creations, but eventually, people left, and I learned to write by writing collective creations. I had to write the plays on my own because people left. That company was called The Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, and I was very involved with them for many years. That’s how I became a playwright, and eventually, I became the artistic director for 4 years. Somewhere along the way, I met Jennifer Brewin, who is now my wife. 6 ½ years ago, she decided she wanted to do a master's Degree, so I followed her to Calgary, and then she got the job here at the Globe Theatre, so I followed her here.
What inspired you to imagine a meeting between Tommy Douglas and Père Murray during the 1962 Doctors' Strike?
Arthur: Jennifer got here at the beginning of COVID, and the Globe Theatre had just shut down for renovations. We had no friends, but Jennifer started meeting the theatre artists, and she met Johanna [Bundon], and eventually, we all had dinner. I had told Johanna about this play [“Getting to Room Temperature”], which is my experience of when my mother was 94 and wanted us to help her die. This was before euthanasia was legalized in Canada, so it’s a play I wrote about that. Right around the same time, there was this festival of death going on in Regina, and that connection worked well, so Johanna and Curtain Razors decided that they would produce this. So we did that. Through more conversations, Johanna ended up telling me about this guy named Pere Athol Murray. Can she tell the reason why she told me about him?
Johanna: My folks grew up in Wilcox and they went to Notre Dame College, and my grandpa and grandma both taught there. I knew a little bit about Pere Athol Murray, because he was a friend of my grandma’s mostly. I told Arthur about how my grandmother was dying, and I was reading her some stories about the old days out at Notre Dame. I told him that Wilcox would be an interesting place to go to.
Arthur: You talked a bit about him to me, and you said you should go out and look at the tower of god at the school. It happened that my wife’s mother was visiting, and it was a beautiful spring day and we were looking for something to do. We drove out and walked around and he just struck me as this fascinating guy. I grew up Jewish, so I’m not inclined to admire priests. He built this 60-foot high tower that one side was dedicated to Islam, one side to Judaism, another side to science, and another side to Christianity. You ask yourself, what priest does that kind of thing?
I started reading about him, and in one of these books, I read that he was a vicious opponent of Medicare, and that struck me as very odd because here’s a guy who seems so progressive. If he thought kids were eager and bright enough, he would let them in [to the college] even if they couldn’t pay. He died in 1975, so this is all quite a long time ago, but he’s quite a legend in Saskatchewan, and lots has been written about him, and obviously a ton [has been written] about Tommy Douglas. I met Tommy Douglas twice when I was young. There was a vote on the CBC, and he was declared Canada’s Greatest Canadian, but Father Murray was as Legendary in Saskatchewan as Tommy Douglas was. I thought these are two people to put up against each other, and decided to do it in the middle of the strike when they announced Medicare in Saskatchewan. When the Doctors went on strike, Pere was a huge supporter of the Doctors and he went around making speeches against Medicare. There’s no definitive version, but in one of the speeches, he said something like, “If the government goes through with this, there will be violence, and god help us if there isn’t”. That’s how it got reported in the media, and everybody immediately thought that maybe he meant to say
“God help us if it does become violent,” but he wouldn’t retract it. He was a stubborn guy. Anyway, that’s how I started writing and researching the play. I read a lot, and there are interviews, videos, and a feature film made, “The Hands of Notre Dame”. Just today, I got an email from a student at the University of Alberta, who is a student of the guy who played Pere in that movie. I can’t remember his name, he was a well-known Canadian actor at the time, and then he went to teach at the U of A. There are lots of ways to do research, it continues to fascinate me.
Johanna: And people came forward with a lot of information and stories.
Arthur: Especially people from the college, two guys in particular, one had been the head hockey coach and had gone on to be the coach for team Canada at the Olympics, and another guy taught there and he went on to be the Archibishop of Winnipeg. Both of these guys met with me several times. They were determined for me to get him right. I never found them defensive about him; it wasn’t like they were trying to protect him or his reputation, but they wanted me to get him right. It was a real treat! At some point, Curtain Razors decided they were going to do it.
Johanna: We saw a reading. On Cue Performance Hub has a play reading series and we saw a workshop of the piece there, and then we had a conversation about that. I got really curious about how this play could be a springboard to explore beyond Medicare, Tommy Douglas, and Pere. To explore ideas about broadcast and media, and how we participate in it communally in the sharing of information in the early 60’s. In this amazing province, with its idiosyncrasies. It's rural and urban divide, and all about that. I asked Arthur whether or not Curtain Razors could present the work and whether a collective of artists, could create an installation that could support the work.
Arthur: I agreed eventually; we signed a contract, and here we are today!
The play explores fairness, faith, and societal collapse—why do you think these themes resonate so strongly with this historical moment?
Well, it was a very hostile time. There were big demonstrations, there were threats, and there was hate mail between the socialists like the NDP/CCF at the time on the one side and the doctors and their supporters on the other. We always think, well, this wouldn’t happen in Canada, but there was no surprise that there was disagreement, but the level of anger was. In England, when they adopted Medicare ten years earlier, there was a lot of anger, but there were no threats of violence.
The doctors were very angry, but they were behaving better, and it was Murray who brought their anger out. When you think about it nowadays, the arguments between the left and the right are much more polarized. Back then, it also became a very polarized argument—people talk about it as if families fell apart over this issue in '62. I think this kind of behavior was surprising when people saw Père Murray act that way. People don’t know that side of the story, yet it happened.
The anti-vac demonstrations that went on in Ottawa, that was a time when there was that kind of anger, where there could have been laws broken and people have gone to trial about it. There was real hatred, and around this doctors strike, there was real hatred. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, and I think I did adequately explain where Pere was coming from. I just hope it makes people think about the anger that exists about our politics these days. The word for what we're living through right now is polarization. It's very hard to expect Poilievre and Carney to have a polite conversation, just as it's hard to imagine Trump having a polite conversation with me.
How does the play explore the intersection of faith and politics?
It’s on the edge of faith, partly because I heard Tommy Douglas speak twice, and I have read many books about him. There’s a whole book length interview with him that was done in 1957, which is handy because it was very much in this period, but they don’t talk that much about Medicare. He was a Baptist Minister in Weyburn, but in all the things I’ve read about him, he doesn’t sound like a preacher. There’s this whole thing in the left in Canada called the Social Gospel, which was a take on the church and christianity that was quite progressive. It was about helping the poor, looking after people, right from the beginning, that’s what Tommy Douglas was about. There were 3 or 4 other top NDP/CCF Leaders at the time who were also Ministers, so it was not unusual. You could listen to 27 speeches by Tommy Douglas, and the word “god” would never be uttered. If you look back at his speeches from the time he was Premier of Saskatchewan, I don’t even know if you could tell he was a church minister. It was not part of his presentation. The reason you should do good things in society is because you care about people, not because god told you to.
Pere Murray was fairly progressive for his time, which you can see from the way he treated women and female students, his expectation of female students- not to say he believed in full equality, I’m sure he didn’t, but were talking about the 1940’s here. He put importance in letting deserving, smart kids into the school without paying. I would say, in a way, he was more influenced by the Greek philosophers than by Catholic philosophy. There is a branch of Catholic philosophy that is influenced by Greek philosophy, and in this play, Murray talks about Plato and Aristotle. He had a classical education and learned about the Greek philosophers. I think St. Augustine was a big influence on him, but St Augustine was largely influenced by the Greeks.
Religion doesn’t come into the play in that sense, they don’t argue religion. They use their beliefs, and they back them up in their own minds, understanding them in a religious context, but they don’t argue about religion with each other.
The characters represent opposing perspectives—do you see this as a reflection of current political debates on healthcare and social justice?
Arthur: Yes, but what went through my head when I was writing this is “What would Tommy say? What would Pere say?” I never thought, “what could I write that would be relevant?” It’s either relevant to today or it’s not. I have to make the characters live in their own terms, so I think that is an interesting question, looking at the play, rather than asking me what my intent was. I had faith that somehow this would reflect on today. The thing is, it might have reflected on today until the day before Trump was elected, and then the day after Trump was elected, the whole world changed. At the end of the play, they have a debate because Tommy says, “We can disagree forcefully, and have fierce arguments, but what you are doing is reckless. You are encouraging violence, and challenging the basics of democracy”. In that sense, it reflects very much on the debates that are going on now. We would have said that about Trump beforehand, when many people showed up and broke into Congress. Pere was pushing things in a very uncomfortable way, sort of like the truck drivers in Ottawa. It does reflect on those things.
Johanna: Curtain Razors has been working with Arthur and the team of artists for the development of this for the past two years. What we’ve found is that it is a play that brings out the desire to tell stories, the desire to converse, and the desire to start a debate. Some questions we have about Pere’s intentions may be answered.
This event combines an installation, the play, and a post-show conversation. What do you hope audiences take away from this multi-part experience?
Johanna: The gift of Arthur’s writing is that it prompts a lot of communal reflection, so for me the play is most potent when we have this installation that contextualizes that moment in 1962 for younger folks in their 20’s or 30’s that don’t have a living memory of the journey to Medicare. It gives them some context to ground it in, and then I hope the audience experiences a great play, a great discussion, and a great performance. The post-show discussion feels really important after everyone experiences the debate. It feels important to give space for people to bring their own knowledge and experiences forward, but also to collectively trouble and reckon and chat with one another and practice talking to one another. I think that’s been a big learning in this process, we can rarely have spaces to respectfully converse and share differences.
Arthur: These two plays (referencing Two Plays About Israel/Palestine), the first is set in the West Bank of Palestine, and the main characters are an Israeli cop and a Palestinian cop. When it premiered in Ottawa, we always had talk backs one day a week, and normally out of 200 people, 20 people in the audience would stay for the talk back, and ¾ stayed and usually you would ask if there are any questions, and in this case people were fierce and wanted to talk. It was never angry, but they were eager to talk about it, and started doing talk backs every night. We would bring guests in for talk backs for those conversations. It’s been so important for me since then.
Johanna: We are having talkbacks after every show with special guests. Through the curation of that we have Dr Ankit Kapur, who is one of the founders of The Nest Health Centre, and Greg Marchildon, author of “Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada”, and a series of partner organizations like the Museum Association of Saskatchewan, the REM, Heritage Regina, and Notre Dame. It is a great conversation starter and a great way to connect with people you don’t usually get to connect with. It’s such a gift to present a piece of art that instigated that. The other thing that makes this so important is that in Saskatchewan, we don’t always understand ourselves to be central to the country's history, or to have great stories, but this is a fantastic story.
If you could have one conversation with either Tommy Douglas or Père Murray, what would you ask them?
I would say to Pere, look around at what’s going on, take a few days, read a few speeches by Trump, and read a few speeches by the opposition. Listen to Ppilievre and Mark Carney, and who would you vote for? That’s what I would ask. I don’t know what his answer would be. He was a big admirer of Lester Pearson. One of the things that Pearson did was bring Medicare to the whole country. He was also an admirer of Diefenbaker, and these were very political animals that Trump or Pollieve, so what would he do now? I have a sense of where Tommy Douglas would be now, but it’s hard to imagine Pere.
Arthur Milner’s Plays.