Jessica B. Hill in the Tom Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ont., on April 29. The Stratford regular will perform this season as Viola in Twelfth Night and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet at the Festival Theatre.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Though the lobby of the Stratford Festival’s still-fresh Tom Patterson Theatre is filled with natural light, when Jessica B. Hill arrives for an interview, she suggests moving to the venue’s windowless, soundproof auditorium to talk about her life and art.
“When you have the option to be in the theatre, why not be in the theatre?” Hill says, leading the way down to the seats where Stratford-goers watched her break in this new theatre in her breakout season two years ago, playing a heart-fluttering Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well and a defiant Lady Anne in Richard III.
“This feels like home here,” she says, settling in.
Not every actor feels at home where the audience sits, but Hill thinks about theatre from both sides of the stage. She has become a playwright in addition to a performer – as was William Shakespeare, the patron saint of Stratford.
While Hill has yet to have a play of hers programmed at Stratford, this season you can watch her perform Viola in Twelfth Night or Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet at the Festival Theatre – and then cross the parking lot to the gift shop to purchase her recently published collection of two plays that premiered last year in the Prairies: Pandora (a solo show that crosses quantum mechanics with Greek mythology) and The Dark Lady (about Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano, the woman who may have inspired his sonnets). She’s working on another play with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik – like him, she likes big ideas.
Seana McKenna, the Stratford acting legend who is directing Twelfth Night, sees Hill’s playwright practice as bridging her work as a classical actor. “Her love of language is palpable in her work as an actor.”
The B in Jessica B. Hill does not stand for “bridge,” but she considers the word a metaphor for what art can do. “Live theatre creates a bridge between ourselves and the other,” she writes in the preface to her published plays. “It helps us see each other in each other.”
Bridging is, in a way, a function of who she is. Her full name is Jessica-Laurence Bornais-Hill, those hyphens little bridges between her anglophone side, the family of her Black American father, and her francophone side, that of her white Québécois mother.
The 36-year-old self-identifies as bilingual, biracial and “very tall for a woman” – all elements that have made her stand out in her industry. “I spent a lot of time as a young actor apologizing for my presence in the room, or hoping that there was room for my presence in the room, rather than taking the space and trusting that I was enough,” she says.
In Shakespeare’s works, Hill sees a fellow bridge-builder who subverted stereotypes with Othello, with Shylock, with Cleopatra. “He did write for the people he wrote for,” she says. “But how fascinating that within that he not only held a mirror up to nature, but also confronted people with their thinking at the time.”
Hill was bit by both the Shakespeare and acting bugs at the same moment. As a child at a Montreal park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she was invited on stage to play the Moon in the play within the play.
Hill began writing her play The Dark Lady (about Shakespeare and Emilia Bassano, the woman who may have inspired his sonnets) when the Stratford theatres were closed during the pandemic. The Dark Lady and a second play written by Hill, Pandora, opened in the prairies last year.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The Stratford Festival became her goal after a high-school trip where she was blown away by a performance of The Taming of the Shrew starring McKenna and Graham Abbey, who is playing Hill’s husband in Romeo and Juliet this season.
Back home, Hill wrote “STRATFORD” on a piece of paper and stuck it to the ceiling above her bed. “I lost my mind that there could be four different theatres playing four different shows, that you could see the same actor in something in the afternoon and then something different at night.”
After studying theatre at an English-language CEGEP, then getting a BA in English and French literature at McGill University, she started her stage, screen and voice acting career in Montreal going back and forth between la langue de Molière and the language of Shakespeare. She was turned down the first few times she auditioned for Stratford.
In the fall of 2014, however, Hill was accepted into Stratford’s “life-changing” Birmingham Conservatory, a paid two-year training program for early-career actors. She relished being pushed and stretched by theatre veteran Martha Henry, who ran the program at the time, and met like-minded collaborators.
During a Conservatory trip to legendary vocal coach and acting teacher Kristin Linklater’s centre in Orkney, Scotland, Hill was paired for an intensive series of all-day exercises with Brazilian-Canadian actor Rodrigo Beilfuss – the start of a friendly and fruitful creative relationship. Beilfuss, now artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ruins in Winnipeg, helmed the professional premieres of Pandora at Prairie Theatre Exchange and The Dark Lady in Winnipeg and Saskatoon last year.
“Linklater saw in us the same struggle that we both have with the English language,” says Beilfuss, whose mother tongue is Portuguese. “We really want to make sure that we are understood and worked really, really hard when we performed Shakespeare – maybe too hard, particularly at the time.”
Working with Linklater encouraged Hill to bring her unadorned self to Shakespeare’s words, which you can see in her open and vulnerable yet slyly intelligent performances. “She cut to the quick of who and what you are and everything that’s preventing you from showing it,” Hill says. “There really is a before-Orkney and after-Orkney in the way that I approach the work.”
When it comes to Hill’s career as a playwright, the before and after is March, 2020, when she saw the meme about King Lear being written during a plague and was inspired rather than demoralized.
With Stratford’s indoor performances on pause, she began work on The Dark Lady. The play is about Elizabethan poet Emilia Bassano, believed by many to be the “dun”-coloured woman who is the subject of many of Shakespeare’s later sonnets, the unnamed inspiration of his line that “now is black beauty’s successive heir.”
Since theatre school, Hill has been fascinated by the sonnets that seem to be written about a Black woman in Elizabethan-era London, which, she notes, new research suggests was more diverse than previously thought. Her casting note suggests Bassano be played by an actor who can “visually convey the image of someone from a diaspora that has been othered, racialized and marginalized.” She took a season off from Stratford to originate the role at Shakespeare in the Ruins and Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan last summer.
Shakespeare is sometimes sucked into the culture wars – viewed as a symbol of how Western civilization is allegedly in peril, or a representation of the living legacy of British colonialism. Hill prefers to talk about the Bard as a working artist whose “verse encapsulates the prism of human emotion” but who had a learning curve as a playwright, becoming over the course of his career “better and better at writing women and at championing the other.”
In The Dark Lady, she imagines Bassano having an affair with Shakespeare that plays a role in broadening his mind and deepening his art. The play functions, on one level, as a fun work of literary criticism, revealing Hill’s views on various characters Shakespeare wrote.
Early on, after seeing The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Bassano gives this note to Shakespeare about his women. “They start off great!” she says, “but you always seem to silence them at the exact moment they should be at their loudest.” (Bullseye.)
Hill incorporates the writing of All’s Well That Ends Well into the plot of The Dark Lady – imagining the play she was to star in back in 2020, before pandemic shutdowns, almost as an apology for the way Shakespeare treats Bassano.
The tragicomedy has not always been popular for the extreme ways that its heroine Helen pursues her romantic interest Bertram, and his casual cruelty to her. But Hill sees its conclusion as an opportunity for the audience to exercise empathy, with two people who have made mistakes witnessing the pain they’ve caused each other, and the love that lies underneath. “It brought tears to my eyes every time that we would do it, because we’re at time in the world where I feel we need more of that,” says Hill.
Among those who admired Hill’s performance as Helen was New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, a self-described “Stratford addict,” and his father. Gopnik has travelled to the festival with his parents since 1964.
“She made Helen so intelligent that you recognize her as a woman who is intelligent about everything except for her love life, which is a very familiar syndrome,” Gopnik says.
Gopnik and Hill are working on a play about Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill, her second husband, who together wrote some of the landmark 19th-century texts on liberalism, freedom of speech and women’s rights.
Beilfuss read Gopnik’s 2019 non-fiction book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, and thought there might be a play within its pages. He suggested Hill to Gopnik as a collaborator.
The three of them met in Montreal. “We had a terrific brainstorming session – and then that’s when I realized that this woman was this extraordinary actress my father and I had so keenly admired the summer before,” Gopnik says.
This theme Hill often explores as playwright and performer, of how people can see more clearly by considering the opposite sex’s perspective, comes together in her Twelfth Night character Viola this season. Upon shipwrecking in Illyria, she dons male clothing and ends up in a gender-bending love triangle with local duke Orsino and the object of his affection, Olivia.
“It is asking questions about gender, about what it is that we fall in love with,” says Hill, “about how a female lens can add to a male perspective, or a male lens can add to a female perspective.” No battle of the sexes in Hill’s work as playwright or performer – only bridges to cross.
Twelfth Night opens May 27 at the Stratford Festival and runs to Oct. 26. On Sept. 28, Adam Gopnik and Jessica B. Hill will have an onstage conversation as part of the festival’s Meighen Forum.