Tina Fey once said, “Always say yes and figure it out later.” It’s a mantra Fredericton-born playwright Erin Keating goes by, but it hasn’t always applied to her.
After graduating from St. Thomas University in 2009, Keating assumed she’d have packed her bags and hopped on the first plane to Toronto.
Networking goes a long way in Fredericton. Unbeknownst to the fresh graduate, Keating’s professor had submitted one of her plays to New Brunswick-based theatre company, Notable Acts. They ended up running the play that summer.
“It started as homework, but people responded really well so that’s how I got started in this whole thing,” Keating said.
The “whole thing” Keating is talking about would be her play, WarBrides, which ran last week in Saint John, N.B. but will be at the Fredericton Playhouse this Wednesday.
The play is a result of five years’ worth of fine-tuning and whittling down the initial 10-character play into a one-voice narrative by the play’s main character, Adele.
“She’s both her present-day self and her past self. There’s older Adele in her 80s who acts as the narrator of her story. The story is acted through vignettes of her memories between her younger self and these two canadian soldiers she meets in England during World War 2,” says Keating.
At the same time her play had been submitted to Notable Acts, Keating had entered a second, shorter play into a playwrighting competition.
She won, and soon after the Saint John Theatre company picked up the play and ran it that same summer. It was how Keating came to know Steven Tobias, the artistic director for the company.
Keating was working in Fredericton when Tobias approached her in 2010 and pitched the idea of doing a play about war brides.
Tobias had heard on CBC Radio that five actual war brides from the Second World War were gathering for their last dinner together, and knew it would make for a great play.
“It’s not your expected love story like “boy meets girl.” In a lot of ways it’s a friendship story – the two canadian soldiers [Adele] befriends are best friends but they form this triumvirate. There’s some twists and turns along the way you might not expect,” said Keating.
The journalism and communications major knew since her high school days as a stage manager she’d rather be behind the scenes than on stage. When writing, Keating says her own works were usually dialogue-heavy, and says even when she’s reading, she skims the more descriptive parts of books.
Keating credits her life in the professional theatre world to the networking in a smaller town like Fredericton.
“It was one of those things where one thing leads to another. People were getting familiar with my work, I was having more opportunities to present it but it was definitely an unplanned thing.”
Keating says it wouldn’t have been easy to go right from university to Toronto – where she now lives and works casting for TV shows – without first networking in little ol’ Fredericton.
As you can tell, Keating’s resume is full to the brim, one of those fillers being a casting job for Theatre New Brunswick in Fredericton, after graduating from STU.
“My random jobs that I fell into ended up leading to being the reasons I got the jobs I have here [Toronto]. You could be doing something tangentially related to what you want to do but that relationship will be helpful in the future,” she said.
Keating sticks to the Fey mantra and says it applies to everyone. She says to stay open to anything, because it could just be the conduit to a career.
“As a journalist, if you get a job writing about fertilizers and tractors in a John Deere magazine when you want to be a Rolling Stone writer, write for John Deere anyway until you get to that point. It’s not so much a ‘take what you can get‘ but rather be open to where opportunities will lead even if it’s not perfect immediately.”
