Caity Quinn may be 28, but she’s starring as eight-year-old Joseph in Pleiades Theatre’s production of The Sound of Cracking Bones.
“It’s a very, very powerful play,” says director John Van Burek. The show, which starts Feb. 14 at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, follows Joseph and 13-year-old Elikia after they escape from a group of rebel forces who are using them as child soldiers.
Canadian playwright Suzanne Lebeau penned her 2009 Governor General Award-winning play in French and Van Burek translated it to English with Julia Duchesne. The cast will perform it in its original language in the final week of their run.
Though Quinn may seem like an unusual choice to play Joseph, Van Burek describes her as “an incredible find.” Since he couldn’t use child actors due to the show’s “harrowing” content, he needed to find adults who could convincingly play these roles.
Quinn relishes the complexity of her character and must strike a balance between Joseph’s innocence and his slow realization of the world’s cruelties – all while believably portraying an eight-year-old boy. “As an actress,” she says, “I can sink my teeth into that challenge both emotionally and physically.”
Though she was immersed in the arts since early childhood, Quinn ventured to the United Kingdom to audition for post-secondary theatre schools. She attended a Tom Stoppard play in London’s West End one night and happened to sit beside a film director. “I started talking with him and I told him, ‘I’ve been auditioning here, but I’m not sure if I want to go here, I don’t know what I want to do,’” she remembers saying.
The director gave her Jack Garfein’s contact information. Garfein – an Auschwitz survivor – has been associated with the likes of Lee Strasberg, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Quinn heard that he didn’t usually teach young actors, but he accepted her as a student at the tender age of 17. Luckily, she had enough credits to graduate early and spent her last semester of high school learning from Garfein in Paris.
Her career also brought her to New York City where she attended the American Music and Dramatic Academy (AMDA). She earned an undergraduate degree in French language and literature from Hunter College and also studied French while in Paris.
At 19, Quinn was a principal dancer in Disney’s Enchanted. In the same year, she appeared in the off-Broadway show The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which starred Cynthia Nixon in the title role. “It just was a fabulous experience being able to go to theatre every day to work for a long extended period of time,” she recalls.
Originally from Lee, N.H., Quinn moved to Canada and received her MFA in acting from York University in 2013.
Following graduation, she participated in the Paprika Festival – a Toronto-based, theatre training program for emerging artists. There, she worked on her original play titled Ties of Blood: The Brontes, about the ill-fated literary family. The show, which she also brought to the ARTS Project in London, Ont., combines elements of folk music and Japanese kabuki theatre.
Quinn was inspired by the mystery surrounding the Bronte sisters, but for her, the play also touched on issues of sexual and domestic violence – areas that she’s passionate about addressing. The Sound of Cracking Bones also carries with it a powerful message of social justice and this production is affiliated with The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative.
Throughout the run, Proof Media for Social Justice’s Child Soldiers: Forced to be Cruel photo exhibit – which illustrates the prevalence of child soldiers in different areas of the world – will be on display in the Theatre Passe Muraille lobby.
For director Van Burek, the play is about sparking discussion on this troubling global issue. And with her portrayal of eight-year-old Joseph, Quinn is part of that conversation.
Pleiades Theatre’s production of The Sound of Cracking Bones runs at Theatre Passe Muraille from Feb. 14-28 in English and from March 3-7 in French. Visit www.pleiadestheatre.org
