Canadian Stage hopes to leave #CanstageSoWhite behind in 2017

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The past year was a challenging one for many people – and Matthew Jocelyn was no exception: 2016 was bookended by difficulties, professional and personal, for the artistic and managing director of Canadian Stage, one of Toronto's biggest not-for-profit companies.

It began in January with the hashtag #CanstageSoWhite – made to trend on social media by local diverse artists and producers after the season Jocelyn announced for 2016-17, themed to the country's sesquicentennial, featured no Canadians of colour in the role of director, playwright or choreographer. After initially inflaming the situation in the press, Jocelyn later apologized via a Facebook statement and promised to be more inclusive going forward.

And it came to a close in November with the death of Jocelyn's father, Gordon, at the age of 96. It was to be with him in his later years that motivated the younger Jocelyn to return to his hometown from France to take over Canadian Stage in 2009 after spending almost 35 years living and working abroad.

"It was so good to have seven years of being a son," says Jocelyn, whose sister, Marthe, also recently returned to Toronto after three decades abroad to be close to their father. "My mother died in her mid-50s and I have a brother and sister who both died, so we really got filtered down to a family of three from a family of six."

As 2017 begins, Jocelyn, sitting down for his first interview with The Globe and Mail since the #CanstageSoWhite controversy, seems ready to move forward and is happy to be back in a rehearsal room.

At Canadian Stage, he's about to direct the English-language premiere of Liv Stein, a play by a young Georgian playwright named Nino Haratischwili, who lives in Hamburg and writes in German.

One of the joys of Jocelyn's tenure at the head of Canadian Stage over the past seven seasons has been his introduction of artists such as Haratischwili to Toronto audiences. Unlike previous regimes, he's been a leader in producing international work first, rather than waiting for a script to first be given the stamp of approval in New York or London.

In this case, Liv Stein came to Jocelyn's attention not during his own European travels, but via local actor Alon Nashman – who, he says, had seen the play on holiday, not understood a word and yet felt it would be right up Canadian Stage's alley.

As it turns out, Jocelyn connected strongly and personally with a script he calls a "good old-fashioned play" – for which he has commissioned a translation by local German-speaking playwright and director Birgit Schreyer Duarte. It's easy to see why the play he describes as about "mourning and artistic creativity" might resonate with him, especially at this moment in time.

Liv Stein concerns a world-class pianist of that name who neglected her son for her jet-setting career – until he became terminally ill and she abandoned it to care for him in his dying days.

Fourteen months after his death, a young female piano student – the ex-girlfriend of her son – appears at the now-reclusive pianist's house and offers her a deal: In exchange for piano lessons, she will tell Liv stories about her son.

For his leading lady, Jocelyn has chosen Leslie Hope. She – like Jocelyn – left Canada as a teenager to pursue the arts in a foreign country, in her case to work with John Cassavetes in L.A. As of late, she's best known for her steady work on television shows such as Suits, NCIS and 24.

Jocelyn has a history of orchestrating the stage returns of Canadian TV and film actresses – notably, Molly Parker, in his 2015 production for Canadian Stage of Simon Stephen's Harper Reagan. "What I like is Canadians who have left the country – and offering them an opportunity to come back and do work here of a different nature," he says.

If Jocelyn champions outsiders, it's in part because he has long seen himself as one – not just when he was running the Atelier du Rhin in Alsace, France, but even now, seven years after his return to the city of his birth. "I lived in France, which is the most xenophobic country on the planet, for 30 years and became director of one of their national theatres – but it's a country which will remind you until your dying day that you're a foreigner," he says.

"Then, I came back to Canada at age 52, not having lived in the country for 30 years and came back as a foreigner," he says. "Sure, a foreigner with a white face, but an immigrant. I am an immigrant."

It's this type of talk that got Jocelyn into trouble during the #CanstageSoWhite controversy – he doesn't always seem to fully appreciate that he's not really an outsider, but actually a very powerful man in the context of Toronto arts; and he's not always precisely politically correct in his language.

A year ago, after #CanstageSoWhite began to spread, Jocelyn initially swatted away the criticism as "parasitic" in a Toronto Star interview.

The director has left that comment in public to linger for the past 12 months – but he disavows it now, and says, if he said it, it was taken out of context.

"I did not record what I said and the Toronto Star did not record what I said, so there is no actual material evidence of what was said in the context in which things were said," Jocelyn says. "What I, probably inappropriately, was trying to express was that it's not by finger-pointing and number-counting that we address profound questions about the society that we live in and the representation of that society in our artistic enterprises and institutions."

Not long afterward in our interview, Jocelyn is taking back something else: the word "finger-pointing." He still doesn't think counting Canadian artists of colour in a specific season is the best measure of diversity. To him, bringing in the Australian aboriginal performer Jack Charles or first-generation Australian performance artist William Yang, as he will in April for a spotlight on Down Under, is important so that local artists can see diverse work from other countries. "The mandate of the theatres in Toronto, hopefully, is to complement each other's work and to dialogue with each other," he says.

One could argue with that, of course – but at least it's a more positive place to start a discussion at the start of a new year.