For her latest onstage role, Toronto-based actor Aviva Armour-Ostroff might wear a corset for a play set in 1885. But the themes she helps bring to life in this piece of theatre resonate loudly today.
In Age of Arousal, which opened on Oct. 25 at the Factory Theatre, Armour-Ostroff is Virginia Madden, one of three sisters.
The play, by late renowned Canadian playwright, Linda Griffiths, and directed by the award-winning Jennifer Brewin, is set in Victorian London and explores feminism and sexuality against the backdrop of the suffragist movement.
Yet, Armour-Ostroff knows that these ideas are just as relevant now. “There’s still a fight for equality,” she says. Though she recognizes that we have made progress.
“We’re definitely allowed to wear pants in public,” she says. “We’re allowed to cross our legs and we’re allowed to smoke and we’re allowed to be single and we’re allowed to own our own money and be businesswomen.”
Yet, on many television shows, for instance, she sees women pigeonholed to certain roles. She also knows that many of us still make assumptions about women and the positions we’re supposed to hold in society.
As for Armour-Ostroff, she jumps in and out of numerous roles in the arts world. This year alone, she received a Dora Award nomination for her work in Moment with the Actors Repertory Company. She also won the Patrick Conner Award, given to an individual dedicated to theatre and sustainability.
For eight years, Armour-Ostroff ran the Lab Cab Festival along with her producing partner, André du Toit. Lab Cab started out as a cabaret fundraiser for the Factory Theatre and grew into a weekend-long arts celebration.
Eventually, she and du Toit held it in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood where it ran until 2014. Lab Cab was a free, family-friendly event that made the arts accessible while also allowing artists to showcase their work. “People were seeing music and theatre and dance and film and visual art that they would never on their own volition go and seek out,” says Armour-Ostroff.
While she’s proud of the festival, she decided to retire it last year in order to focus on other facets of her career.
She’s currently writing a play called Lune about a mother and daughter who must navigate the Canadian mental health-care system after the mother is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The mother, a Jewish journalist, has a manic episode while reporting from South Africa in 1994.
Armour-Ostroff says it’s based on her father and his experience as a South African Jewish man who was politically active around the same time.
“Writing comes out of necessity,” she says. Lune will be her first play. “I was lying in bed one night going, ‘I want to play this kind of character. I want her to be fierce, yet vulnerable. I want to be able to scream and cry. Oh, I want to play my dad.’ That role is not going to get handed to you,” she continues.
She notes that Lune explores themes of identity, and in a similar vein, so too does her character in Age of Arousal. In the play, she wrestles with alcoholism and strives to reconcile her outward personality with her inner self. “That’s something that I think everyone struggles with and relates to.”
Age of Arousal runs until Nov. 8 at the Factory Theatre in Toronto.
