Aline Bouwman, Marketing and Communications

Elaine Ávila is reclaiming space for stories missing from the stage, one play at a time. 

As an undergraduate student, the playwright and Creative Writing instructor questioned why her theatre classes did not feature plays about women and other disenfranchised people. When she was told there was no time to cover those stories, she decided to start telling them herself. 

Ávila’s award-winning plays have premiered around the world in multiple languages, and always center voices from the margins. She was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Award to write and research at the University of the Azores, and she has taken up teaching appointments from Portugal to Panamá. Her recent play To Please the Audience, based on a true story about France’s first openly gay king, was presented at Douglas College in November. 

Theatre and storytelling, to Ávila, bear a central role in creating a more equitable, just and creative society. She founded the Vancouver Arts Club LEAP Playwriting Intensive to remove barriers for young writers and co-founded the International Climate Change Theatre Action, a bi-annual worldwide festival of short plays about the climate crisis with over 45,000 participants. 

Her latest passion? Making the Douglas College classroom more inclusive for all students. 

We spoke with Ávila about her work as a playwright, her passion for unheard stories and how she plans to create a more representative curriculum. 

What inspires your work as a playwright? 

When I was an undergraduate student, my theatre and theatre history courses almost exclusively featured stories with male protagonists by male authors. When I asked if we could cover women playwrights, I was told that there was no space for that on the curriculum. That was – and continues to be – a common response to anyone who calls for equitable representation in theatre education and on the stage.  

Since then, my work as a playwright has been to investigate why there are so many other voices missing from the theatre. I want to shine a light on stories that people don’t seem to be paying attention to, because they are often the stories most worth hearing. 

Why is it important to tell previously untold – or unheard – stories? 

It is important to create space for people who have historically been excluded from the theatre. I realized there were so many stories missing from the curriculum and from our stages because of this persistent claim that there is no space or time for them. That’s just a made-up argument for exclusion. The stories and plays I assign in my own classes about women, LGBTQ2S+ and IBPOC folk are strong, beautiful and worth studying. 

Read more: How the pandemic helped this theatre grad rediscover the power of story 

How does your own cultural background inform how you tell these stories? 

My mother was part of the Baby Scoop Era, which attempted to erase all trace of her birth parents. My father was Portuguese-Azorean, but due to the enormous pressure to assimilate into American culture at that time, I grew up outside the community without access to my ancestral language, history and traditions. 

After I immigrated to Canada, I became aware of the Indigenous movement to retrace connections to ancestral lands and recover generational stories after colonial attempts to sever connections to Indigenous heritage. I worked with Inuk storyteller and children’s writer Arvaaluk (Michael) Kusugak, whose books strongly encourage everyone to interrogate their own past and uncover their family’s generational stories – whether they are Indigenous or not. Ask yourself: “How did I get here? What are the stories of my ancestors?” because we all have stories that powerfully inform who we are. 

Those questions set me on a journey to learn more about my ancestry, which culminated in my travels to the University of the Azores as its first Fulbright Scholar in 2019. Speaking with scholars in Lisbon, I learned that my ancestors were among the first people killed in the Portuguese Inquisition. Now I know that’s where my family’s history of displacement began, and that informs my interest in stories of diaspora. 

Read more: Stagecraft grad creates high-end custom carpentry 

Why is it important that students see themselves represented on the syllabus and on the stage, particularly in theatre? 

Both academia and theatre have historically marginalized many people. Even if they were allowed in the doors, they often didn’t see a place for themselves. My goal is to welcome everyone and to begin transforming traditions from the inside so that they become something that everyone feels welcome to participate in.  

I’ve always felt that Vancouver stages should look like Vancouver’s population. Wherever I teach, I research who the students are, what their demographics look like, and then I assign plays that constitute a welcome sign to those students. 

How are students responding to this type of learning? 

Students are always so excited when they see themselves represented in the course material.  

Last semester a student approached me to say that they loved the range of readings on the syllabus. Then they said something quite funny, “It’s awesome, you’re doing the bare minimum!” Students understand why representation matters. They are excited when instructors “get it,” but that enthusiasm also illustrates how rare it is that students feel included in the classroom. 

One of my favorite books, How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, mentions many issues related to exclusion as well as the burdens of representation and exceptionalism. I have an ongoing practice of re-educating myself and balancing this on my syllabi. For example, wherever possible, I now assign at least two to three trans authors per course, so no one author is meant to represent all trans people. I do the same for Indigenous, neurodiverse, LGBTQ2+ and IBPOC authors. 

Tell us more about your recent and upcoming projects. 

There are so many! Two of my plays, The Ballad of Ginger Goodwin & Kitimat, were just published by Talonbooks. Both of those plays are about labour and environmental issues in B.C. municipalities that garnered international attention and turned small towns into sites of global politics. 

Talonbooks is also about to publish my newest play, Hummingbird, based on a true story of how one of the smallest birds on earth stopped a pipeline near the Brunette River, not far from Douglas College’s New Westminster Campus. It premiered on Granville Island last summer. 

Now I’m working on two other plays about some powerful women in history. One of them is Hypatia of Alexandria, the first acknowledged woman mathematician and astronomer, who was brutally murdered in the fifth century. I’m writing it for an all-women jazz ensemble in Vancouver, the Hypatia Creative Women’s Jazz Orchestra. The other play is called A Woman of the Cape and is based on Azorean women – my ancestors – who wore a traditional Portuguese form of head covering akin to a burqa. I’m excited to see where the creative process will take me.

Learn more about Douglas College’s Creative Writing program on our website.