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One of Ours.

Out of order. In Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s One of Ours, written and directed by the company’s artistic director, Michael Nathanson, an outsider disrupts the family dynamic.
   
Set in West Hawk Lake, Man., the edgy comedy explores what happens when Simon (Dov Mickelson) brings girlfriend Lily (Gwendolyn Collins), a New York actress, to the family cottage to meet younger brother Mark (Adrian Marchuk) and his wife Janice (Aviva Hoffman).
   
"It’s about how the openness and youth of this actress shakes the foundations of the established family," says Nathanson, 44. "The play explores the roles we all play within families, the patterns we fall into when we’re around family and the things maybe only an outsider can help illuminate for us."
   
Initially, Nathanson considered writing a Jewish adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie for the Master Playwright Festival but elected not to when he heard that Manitoba Theatre Centre was producing Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie.
   
"Still, I took the themes that I wanted to work with on Miss Julie," Nathanson says. "I was very interested in family and the roles of privilege and entitlement, and the generational divide between people of my age, mid-40s, and the younger generation, early 20s, who are much more open about living their lives. They have less sense of protecting things and privacy. I started to track in my head how I could create characters and dramatic action that would convey that, and slowly, One of Ours emerged."
   
One of Ours is Nathanson’s second world premiere play for WJT. In 2007, the theatre company presented Talk, which has since been produced by Toronto’s Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, received staged readings in New York City and Los Angeles, and is set to represent Manitoba at the National Arts Centre’s Prairie Scene 2011 this April in Ottawa. Throw in the fact that Talk was a finalist for the 2009 Governor General’s Award in drama and the pressure is on the playwright with One of Ours.
   
"The task was not to write a better play, I just knew there were a few things from the perspective of craft that I wanted to work on," Nathanson says. "I wanted to have a larger cast. Talk is a two-hander and there are only so many permutations and combinations you can play with there. With One of Ours, I wanted to really focus on the plot of the play and make sure that it was as well-crafted as possible. Also, I knew I wanted to have an intermission, which sounds like a weird goal, but it definitely feels like there is something a bit more mature about this play."
   
One of Ours marks WJT’s fourth premiere in a row, following the top-notch theatre that was Alix Sobler’s Some Things You Keep, Vern Thiessen’s Lenin’s Embalmers and Julie Tepperman’s re-imagination of Strindberg’s The Father.
   
"I definitely don’t want to be the one to drop the ball," Nathanson says. "I don’t want to be the weak link of the group, but this is the pressure we put on ourselves with every show. I say this to anybody that works with us and I say it generally, our goal is not to be the best Jewish theatre in Winnipeg, but to be the best theatre in Canada."
 

ONE OF OURS
Winnipeg Jewish Theatre
Until April 10, Berney Theatre (123 Doncaster St.)