Hart House Theatre has appointed Jeremy Hutton as its first Artistic Director in thirty years.
“Obviously, I am very excited” said Hutton who applied for the advertised position. Having served Hart House as Director, Actor, Sound Designer, Music Composer, and Fight Director over the years, he seemed to be the ideal choice from the applicant pool.
The two year position was created by staff to shape and direct the artistic plan of Hart House Theatre. Hutton’s main duties will be to select the season’s shows and develop festivals and workshops that serve the Hart House mandate.
“Well, there are the basics of just choosing the shows,” he says of his duties as AD, “and hiring the artistic staff. It’s really quite broad in terms of description. I have a hand in the marketing side of it too. Being in a university, a lot of focus will be to provide student involvement at Hart House Theatre and to enforce and improve that involvement.”
Hutton stresses that there is an educational element to working at Hart House. As Artistic Director, Hutton will give much attention to deepening this potential within the university.
“By the end of my two year term, it would be great to have a core group of students working here and starting to produce their own stuff,” he said.
The current window of opportunity for student involvement isn’t that extensive. Though there is a regular audition process, most students have to contend with professionals for parts.
“You end up getting a first year student competing with a graduate of the Windsor Acting program which is not terribly fair for them. So we are thinking of smaller projects and doing stuff that can be more inclusive to U of T students probably not starting off at Hart House theatre itself but smaller venues.”
Hutton also sees more potential to become culturally aware in the future because “Hart House Theatre, sadly, tends to be a bunch of white guys doing theatre.” With smarter programming choices and more efforts to reach out to other cultural communities at the University Hutton feels he can “make theatre more relevant to what the makeup of the university actually is.”
Though he was appointed Artistic Director after the plays for the 2010-2011 season were picked, Hutton says he likes all the selected plays for different reasons. He is also set to direct two of next season’s plays: Shakespeare’s brutal Richard III and the more light-hearted musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Peter Shaffer’s infamous 1973 play Equus, about the treatment of a young man who has a sexual fascination with horses, is also featured next season. It was most recently revived in 2007 at a London theatre with a much talked about nude scene with Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe.
“The nudity is going to cause some problems I imagine, so I won’t be directing that one, we will be hiring a director for that.”
The season will close with David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face which was written in response to the controversial casting of actor Jonathan Pryce in an Asian role in Miss Saigon. “It’s a play about, really, the problem that most theatre communities have, including Toronto.”
Hutton’s other notable credits as Director for Hart House productions include a number of Shakespeare favorites Othello, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia this past year. Outside of the University, Hutton was the Founder and Artistic Director of the Toronto Youth Theatre.
Hart House is considered the cradle of Canadian Theatre. It opened in 1919 and became a leader in Canada’s “little theatre” movement during the 1920s. After World War II it became a student focused theatre under the direction of Robert Gill. The result was a generation of stage actors including William Hutt, Kate Reid, Donald Sutherland, Norman Jewison, and Lorne Michaels.
