Audrey Amar is not a full-time actor or director – yet. But she has been creating opportunities for new theatre school grads for the past four years through her company Seventh Method Productions.
“I like to treat my company as a semi-professional stepping stone from the academic world to the professional theatre world,” she says.
And this summer, she’s giving her actors a challenge by mounting Canadian playwright Morris Panych’s Seven Stories. It’s a meaty and surreal play that follows a man (Chai Valladares) who’s contemplating jumping off a building.
As he stands on the ledge, he meets and interacts with the building’s tenants – Amar calls these characters hyperbolic, or exaggerated versions of the people we encounter every day.
Back in 2006, when Amar was 17, she was in this play at Thornhill Secondary School. Her late drama teacher, James Graham, chose it for his students. Now, more than 10 years later, Seven Stories sprang to her mind when she was deciding what to direct this summer.
She notes it was an odd choice for a high school production, but it gave her and her classmates a chance to explore a breadth of substantial characters within Panych’s material.
And now she’s passing that opportunity along to the five actors – Aba Amuquandoh, Geet Arora, Emma Burns, Duncan Derry and Valladares – she’s currently working with. They started rehearsals back in March and they’re finally getting ready to open at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse in Toronto on Aug. 18.
Outside of Seventh Method Productions, Amar, who trained as an actor at the University of Toronto’s Drama Centre, assists with team relations and communications at Ryerson University’s Fashion Zone, which is part of the school’s Digital Media Zone, or DMZ.
Yet, she always keeps one foot firmly planted in the arts world, both as an actor and director. Although before starting her production company, she admits she never had any directing experience – she just had a desire to create opportunities for herself and for others.
“It’s a little tricky for me, because I’m very dedicated to theatre, but I have a few obstacles,” she says. “I’m visually impaired, for example. So it’s difficult sometimes, no pun intended, to get casting directors to look past that.”
But when she was nearing graduation, Steven Bush, one of her professors at U of T, gave her class a speech about the importance of making their own work in the theatre industry.
Amar took his words to heart.
“If I can’t find a place for actors, and set designers and stage management and production crew with disabilities to work, then maybe I should make that place myself,” she says. And that’s exactly what she’s been doing for the past four years.
In 2012, she directed her first show, Cyrano de Bergerac and afterward, she staged Canadian-American-Israeli Oren Safdie’s Private Jokes, Public Places.
She’s still excited to put new grads in front of local audiences and will do so when the curtain rises on Seven Stories this week.
Seventh Method Production’s Seven Stories runs Aug. 18 to 21 at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, 79 St. George St. For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com.
