Welcome to the digital show program: Never the Last
Never the Last
by Molly MacKinnon and Christine Quintana | A Theatre Passe Muraille Presentation of a Delinquent Theatre Production
Christine Quintana (playing Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté) and Molly MacKinnon | Photo by Bold Rezolution Studio
Created by
Molly MacKinnon
Christine Quintana
Director
Laura McLean
Choreographer
Kayla Dunbar
Lighting Designer
Jill White
Set Designer
Jenn Stewart
Projection Designer
Joel Grinke
Costume Designer
Carmen Alatorre
Costume Design Assistant
Alaia Hamer
Sound Designer
Nancy Tam
Sound Designer Assistant
Charlie Cooper
Production Manager /
Technical Director
Jamie Sweeney
Stage Manager
Geoff Jones
Performers
Molly MacKinnon | The Violinist
Christine Quintana | Sonia
Amitai Marmorstein | Walter
TPM PRODUCTION CREW
House Technician: David Fisher
Sound Operator: Elio Legault
Crew: Elio Legault, Leighton Smith, Ian Kelly, Sean Baker, Katherine Teed-Arthur, Lindsay McDonald, Sarah Yeoman, Vanden Ward, Nathan Gregory, John Cabanela
DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT
Never The Last was part of the 2016 rEvolver Theatre Festival, produced by Upintheair Theatre. We acknowledge the assistance of the 2016 Banff Playwrights Lab – a partnership between The Banff Centre and the Canada Council for the Arts. Special thanks to the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation, the Electric Company Theatre, the Anvil Centre, the Annex Theatre, and Tarragon Theatre.
THANK YOU TO DELINQUENT THEATRE’S FUNDERS
The Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.
Audio Description
Closed Audio Description for those who are Blind or Low Vision is available on Saturday April 15 and Sunday April 16 at 2pm. The Closed Audio Description will be transmitted to receivers which can be picked up at the box office. Only the person listening to the audio description over the receiver can hear it. TPM does provide headphones, but you are also welcome to bring your own.
Audio Description provided by Janis Mayers of Superior Description Services.
Janis Mayers is a Toronto born mixed race artist. A graduate of Seneca College’s corporate media production program she has worked behind the scenes in live event production transitioning to theatre in 2018 performing in “Derives” – Naomie LaFrance at the Bentway and co-creating/ performing in “The Solitudes” produced by Aluna Theatre. Janis produced a short documentary “A Pile of Dirt” that premiered at the Regent Park Film Festival. She began training with Superior Description in 2022, most recent projects have been audio describing for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective short film festival, Thompson Highways’s The Cave and Yolanda Bonnell’s My Sister’s Rage.
Visual Story
To access the visual story, please click the button below. A Visual Story is a package that aims to support people with communication difficulties, learning disabilities, English as a second language and Autistic People. It can be used to help anyone access and understand the play. The package may include spoilers.
Note from our Artistic Director
We’re thrilled to welcome Never the Last and Delinquent Theatre to Theatre Passe Muraille!
I was lucky enough to experience the play in Vancouver and was blown away by this interdisciplinary work providing insight into Sophie Eckhardt-Grammaté, a heralded musician and composer, that I, embarrassingly had yet to encounter. Sitting in a venue, mostly known for new music, I was captivated by Christine’s playful text, punctuated by the composer’s violin caprices, as interpreted by Molly McKinnon’s virtuosic playing. But after the show I did wonder, why had I not heard of this composer before?
As I later learned, Sophie was a prolific composer, composing a wide range of works that include symphonies, concertos for violin, piano, bassoon, trumpet, strings, various chamber works as well as numerous solos for both piano and violin, including the ones you will experience at today’s performance.
Born in Moscow in 1899, Sophie (also known as Sonia) was a child prodigy, playing and composing for piano by the time she was 5 years old. Encouraged and supported, she continued to perform and compose throughout her childhood and throughout Europe, adding violin to her repertoire in the meantime.
In Never the Last, we meet Sophie in her twenties when she first encounters the expressionist painter Walter Grammaté. The play then chronicles her ten-year affair with him, evolving theatrically to first reflect the couple’s initial loving bond and shifting as their connection changes.
Sophie ultimately gives up performance to focus on composition. She eventually settles in Canada, becoming a citizen in 1958, and becomes celebrated in her adoptive country. If this is your introduction to her, I hope that you will continue to explore her extraordinary life and especially her music.
Thank you to Christine and Molly for shedding light on an incredible artist and woman!
Enjoy.
Marjorie Chan | Artistic Director, TPM
Note from the Creators
Never The Last began in a room with two people – Molly MacKinnon, then a music student at UBC, and composer Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté. That is, if you believe that an artwork can summon its creator to be present in some ephemeral way. Molly was so struck by Eckhardt-Gramatte’s 10 solo violin caprices that she kept playing them after her graduation, learning more about the composer’s fascinating life, and dreaming of bringing all ten caprices together in an evening of music and storytelling. What started with two people has grown to a large and beautiful circle of collaborators, new and old, all working together to tell this story of love, of profound regret, and of life.
The title, ‘Never The Last’ comes from Eckhardt-Gramatté’s biography. It’s a phrase she and her second husband Ferdinand Eckhardt would share with one another – later in life, after suffering significant hardships, she would sometimes feel fear, anxiety, hesitation to be present in life’s most beautiful moments, expecting them to vanish immediately. Even now, in these difficult times where the spectres of poverty and scarcity haunt us, where massive loss has gone ungrieved, this is no easy task. But Never The Last is a reminder – that there will be more joy, more love, more life.
In this piece, we invoke spirits, we grieve them and we let them go. These spirits are in the way Molly plays these violin caprices, after nearly ten years of time spent with them – they’re in the words, the movements, the images you see. We want to be present with you, for a moment, in the grand scope of your life. While we are together, it is never the last.
We dedicate this run to Jocelyn Morlock, a gifted composer and beloved member of the music community, who left this world on March 27, 2023.
Delinquent Theatre is a Vancouver-based company that creates, develops, and produces new Canadian plays and performance works. Our work explores the figure of the Delinquent as the resilient other – telling narratives of survival, ingenuity, and subversive action in the face of a hostile status quo. We strive to create working spaces that challenge and re-examine traditional hierarchies in order to allow artists to grow and thrive. We ask ourselves and our collaborators to imagine new ways of working instead of re-creating the systems we know, in order to respond to the needs of each production’s ensemble, and to push our work forward into new and uncharted territory.
This January we premiered The Seventh Fire by Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen, an immersive audio experience inspired by Anishinaabe ceremony, at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. The Seventh Fire and Never The Last have been developed side-by-side and in conversation with one another for the last 7 years, and it’s an honour to share these stories of resilience, survival, and healing with our communities.
Delinquent Theatre’s activities take place on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. We have had many incredible adventures on these territories; we have met our collaborators here, and our work often draws inspiration from this land. We are deeply grateful to live there, and acknowledge the importance of Indigenous sovereignty on the stolen, unceded territory known as ‘Vancouver’, and the cost of our lives on that land. We will continue to find new ways for all of our work to reflect the protocol of the land we live and work on (and those that we visit), and to tangibly address the intersections of colonial power and privilege that our work resides at – not just in what we produce on stage, but how we work in everything we do.
Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, Neworld Theatre, Young People’s Theatre, Laura Fukumoto, Nadeem Phillip, Danielle Bourgon, Adam Paolozza, Anton Lipovetsky, Ingrid Turk, Jasper Wood, Kyle Sutherland – Head Scenic Carp, Katherine Witts – Assistant Carp (installation), Amira Routledge – Head Scenic Sculptor and Head painter, Che Campbell – Head Scenic Fabricator, Angela Carlson – GNW Scene Shop Project Manager, Amy McDougall, Wayne and Diana Stewart, Progress Lab, Brian Quirt, Sebastian Finch, Sam MacKinnon, Mark Haney.
About Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté
Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté (Sonia) lived a life marked by poverty, migration, and ambition. She was born in Moscow where her mother, a piano teacher, was abandoned by her father. In desperation, her mother left Sonia at an artist colony in the UK at age 2, and came back to get her at age 4 when she had become more financially stable. They moved to Paris, where she was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eight, where she majored in piano and violin – exceptional for a girl of her age. By age eleven she had given her first concerts in Paris, Geneva, and Berlin, playing both instruments on the same program. The family’s subsequent move to Berlin left them homeless, until she managed to support the family by playing violin in a beer garden while working on her music career.
After meeting expressionist painter Walter Gramatté in 1919, she was surprised to find herself in love. Her misgivings for men gave way to a passionate love affair, and their marriage in 1920 brought the freedom to devote herself full-time to composing and to giving recitals. Their turbulent 10 year marriage saw them move from Berlin to the suburbs, to Barcelona, and back to Berlin with long periods of separation all through. Following Walter’s untimely death in 1929, Sonia premiered her first piano and violin concertos in an American debut under the batons of Leopold Stokowski and Frederick Stock. Upon her return to Berlin, the young widow abandoned her performing career and devoted herself completely to composition.
In 1939, five years after her marriage to Ferdinand Eckhardt, the couple moved to Vienna where Sonia continued to compose, receiving prestigious commissions and recognition for her work. The last twenty-one years of Sonia’s life were spent in Winnipeg, breaking new ground as a composer and pedagogue on the Canadian prairies. Her work catalogue of over 175 compositions (symphonic, chamber, violin, and piano) attests to the fiery, dynamic spirit of an artist, steeped in the romantic tradition, carving a path for herself in the remarkable musical terrain of the twentieth century. Now, she is remembered in Canada through the work of the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation, and the national contest in her name that celebrates talented young musicians.
Delinquent Theatre has always been a strongly woman-driven theatre company, founded with the intention of creating material that challenges and fulfills us, where other professional opportunities may not. As women in leadership positions, as performers subject to the limitations of representations of women on stage, and as musicians in the still heavily patriarchal classical music field, Eckhardt-Gramatté’s ferocious rejection of the status quo is profound and inspiring to us. Her music is visceral, daring, and unapologetically innovative, and in telling her story we feel called to honour her by pushing our work to embody those same qualities.
Performers
Molly MacKinnon is an award-winning violinist and collaborative artist based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Recent projects include The Quarantettes; a seasonal roving show formed during the pandemic, Good Things To Do; a digital creation centred on technological intimacy and gentleness; and Double Happiness: Detour This Way, a multimedia song cycle presented as part of Music on Main’s 2022 Modulus Festival. Molly’s extensive orchestral experience includes the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Plastic Acid Orchestra, the Vancouver Film Orchestra, and the Allegra Chamber Orchestra. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Concerts On Tap, a series that brings together Vancouver craft breweries and classical music, as well as the Co-Artistic Director of Seagrass Music Society. Molly performs regularly with the Black Dog String Quartet, whose first full-length album A Thousand Times Brighter is due to be released in the spring of 2023.
Amitai Marmorstein is an actor with an extensive list of credits on both stage and screen. Some of his theatre credits include Legoland (Atomic Vaudeville), Bad Jews (Famous Artists) Nothing But Sky (The Only Animal), Stop/Heart (Factory Theatre), and Mr. Marmalade (Latchkey). His film and television credits include Schmigadoon!, Batwoman, Family Law, and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Amitai hasn’t performed on stage in some time and is so damn excited to do so again on this beautiful piece with this beautiful team of people.
Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican-American father and a Dutch-British-Canadian mother, Christine is now a grateful visitor to the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Christine is an actor, playwright, and co-Artistic Producer of Delinquent Theatre. Winner of a Dora Mavor Moore Award, Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, Tom Hendry Award, a Governor General’s Award nomination, and the Siminovitch Protegé Prize for Playwriting, Christine’s works have been translated and performed in Spanish, French, German, and ASL. As a performer, she’s acted on stages big and small, in a camper van, in neighbourhoods across East Vancouver, and on a farm. She is currently working on a commission for the Manhattan Theatre Club, and will premiere 4 new works next year. She is a graduate of UBC’s BFA Acting Program. christinequintana.ca
Creative Team
Originally from Mexico, Carmen Alatorre has a Licenciatura (BFA) degree in Art History from Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm in Mexico City and earned her MFA degree in Theatre Design at the University of British Columbia (2010). She is currently based in lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ Territories (Victoria, BC). With over 87 design credits, some of her recent costume designs were seen in companies such as: Arts Club Theatre Company, Bard on the Beach, Globe Theatre Regina, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Citadel Theatre, Electric Company, Milwaukee Rep Theater and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Carmen is an Assistant Professor in Performance Design at the University of Victoria. She is also a recipient of four Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. For more information visit: carmenalatorre.com
Charlie Cooper is a composer and performer whose work incorporates visual and text-based concerns. He collaborates frequently, working with dance, theatre, sound and digital media artists to create live performances and site-based projects. Collaborations include A Wake of Vultures, Projeto Arcomusical, Cities and Memory, Mivos Quartet and D.J. Sparr, C3 Collective, Media Sandbox, Strike Percussion Ensemble, and Electronic Music Workshop. Exhibitions of installation and video work include Science Gallery Lab Detroit, ArtPrize 10, Small File Media Festival, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Charlie is currently living and working on the the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. He holds an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University.
Kayla Dunbar is a 1st generation Scottish Settler located on the stolen lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. A graduate of Langley Fine Arts Secondary and Studio 58, they now work as a director, choreographer, educator, and sometimes actor. Companies she’s worked for include: Savage Society, Urban Ink, CTYP, ArtsClub, Bard on the Beach, Chemainus Theatre, Vancouver Playhouse, City Opera, The Elbow, Itsazoo, ZeeZee Theatre, Axis Theatre, Gateway, etc. Kayla is committed to using their privilege to be of great service to their community. They believe storytelling can change the world. Thanks to their family, friends, mentors, and partner. www.kayladunbar.com
Joel Grinke is an experience designer for museums, attractions, and theatre. He creates work that uses automation, audio-visual design, and stagecraft to make the world around us feel more magical. He has recently written and produced The Immersive Christmas Carol and Hands Up! The Legend of Billy Miner, two automated immersive walkthrough experiences for historical sites. As a designer for theatre, Joel has worked for companies such as Presentation House Theatre, The Arts Club, and The Electric Company. Joel has won a Jessie Richardson award for design. Joel has a Bachelors of Performing Arts and is a graduate of Studio 58. Joel is a member of the Themed Entertainment Association, the Canadian Institute for Theatrical Technology and IATSE Local 118.
Alaia Hamer is a Vancouver Theatre Designer. Recent projects she has worked on include Costume Design for The East Van Panto: The Little Mermaid (Theatre Replacement), HMS Pinafore, Carmen Up Close and Personal, Associate for Amahl and the Night Visitors (Vancouver Opera); The Cull, Beneath Springhill, The Birds and the Bees (Artsclub), Costume Design for Beautiful Man (PI Theatre), Assistant Costume Design Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanaus, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth (Bard on the Beach), Set Design for Seventeen (Western Gold), She Kills Monsters (UBC), Production Design for The Drawer Boy (ETC). She has worked on a variety of smaller shows through Vancouver and has a passion for costuming dance. Alaia is a graduate of the UBC Theatre Design program in 2017 and holds an English literature degree from 2012.
Laura McLean is a Jessie Award-winning director and producer. She’s directed with Pacific Theatre, Rumble Theatre, Arts Club Theatre, Bard on the Beach, United Players, Birmingham Repertory, and the Bristol Old Vic. Laura is the Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Producer of Delinquent Theatre.
Previous credits with Delinquent Theatre include: Never the Last, STATIONARY: a recession era musical, and Our Time. She has her BFA in Theatre from UBC and her Masters in Directing from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Jenn Stewart is a multi-disciplinary theatre artist based in the unceded lands of The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. She is very pleased to continue to collaborate with the incredible artists at Delinquent Theatre on Never the Last. Selected other credits include: Hamlet (Honest Fishmongers, set), Selfie (Seizieme, set and costumes), Wet (Itsazoo, set), Kuroko (VACT, props), Redpatch (Hardline, masks) and Blond Eckbert (Vancouver Opera YAP, set and costumes). She has been part of the team backstage at Bard on the Beach since 2013. She studied at Studio 58 and UBC and is a member of CAEA and the Associated Designers of Canada. jenniferannstewart.com
Jamie Sweeney is a Canadian, Vancouver-based, theatre collaborator. She is a technical director, a lighting designer, a performer, a deviser, a creator, and an artist. She has a BFA in theatre production and design from Simon Fraser University. Some companies she has worked with include Ballet BC, Bard on the Beach, Vancouver Opera, Arts Club, Rice & Beans Theatre, and vAct, and Neworld Theatre. Further credits can be found on her website: jamiesweeney.ca
Sound Artist Nancy Tam works and lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice is collaborative, often models after devised theatrical processes. Nancy works transdisciplinarily fusing sound and performance as primary media with a specialization in spatialized multi-channel sound performance for live and fixed media. Her current research triangulates between sound, space, and body to investigate notions of horizontality and peripherality in the context of immersive spatial and sonic designs. Nancy has a penchant toward listening to quiet sounds and observing quotidian performances. Her work is form-bending and dramaturgically rigorous. Nancy is a founding member of the Vancouver-based interdisciplinary performance collective A Wake of Vultures as well as the Toronto-based Toy Piano Composers collective. She is an award-winning composer. Her compositions, audio walks, performances, and collaborations have toured in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Norway, Hong Kong, the U.S. and throughout Canada.
Jill White (she/her) is a three time Jessie Richardson Award nominated designer and member of IATSE Local ADC659. She is the Lighting Designer in residence at Caravan Farm Theatre, designing throughout Canada when not on farm. Favourite credits include: Hey Viola! (Musical TheatreWorks), Bright Blue Future (Hardline), RUINED (Dark Glass), Gross Misconduct (SpeakEasy), Blackhorse (Caravan), Certified (Touchstone), Inheritance (Touchstone), To Perfection (Shameless Hussy), and She, Mami Wata & the Pussy WitchHunt (Frank). jillianwhite.com
Available Now! Digital Audio Experience: Year of the Cello
The Cultch’s RE/PLAY: Digital Playground and Theatre Passe Muraille Presentation
Adapted from the Theatre Passe Muraille and Music Picnic world premiere co-production, co-created by TPM Artistic Director Marjorie Chan and Njo Kong Kie, this audio work has been created with binaural sound to give a surround listening experience of the play.
Tickets are pay-what-you-can-afford between $0 ~ $20.
Season Sponsor:
Thank you!
You make it possible! Thank you so much for coming out to watch T: the world premiere of Never the Last as part of our 22.23 season.
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