The award-winning debut by a Vancouver-based playwright will come to life this weekend in 2025’s first public play reading of the Off the Page series.
Jordan Hall’s play Kayak won the Samuel French Canadian Playwrights Competition in 2010. The plot presents a suburban mother who spends most of the show in the titular watercraft, thrown off-balance by the environmental radicalism of her son’s girlfriend. “She was the sort of girl who floated around the world spraying Japanese whaling boats with fire hoses, planting trees, and making perfectly nice people uncomfortable at parties,” worries Annie, the doting matriarch.
The Gibsons reading will feature actors Sophia Ballantyne, Gabriel Ditmars and Wanda Nowicki. Kayak follows a local rendition of another of Hall’s works — How to Survive an Apocalypse — which was performed last year to one of the largest audiences in Off the Page history. The play-reading series was founded by Jessie Award-winning writer and musician David King, who died at his Granthams Landing home in 2021.
Hall’s early draft for Kayak was shared as a monologue with women playwrights at a conference in Mumbai, India in 2008, and later as part of a lineup of new Canadian works in Montreal. The story stems from her own involvement in environmental advocacy.
“I was at a place and time when we felt really disillusioned with the choices that people were making around politics,” said Hall, “and how they were approaching their responsibilities in the age of — what seemed to me — an urgent environmental crisis.” She was inspired by the example of 23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie (“not an unproblematic figure,” Hall conceded) who died in 2003 while protesting in the Gaza Strip. “How are some of us so happy to just live our lives and how are some of us so utterly moved by these things that they go out and act?” mused Hall.
In the 14 years since the play’s Toronto debut, Hall has re-examined her own role as an activist while lamenting the lack of global progress on effective climate change policy. She balances her reformer’s zeal with comparatively domestic priorities: raising a child, teaching writing at Capilano University, and becoming a sought-after screenwriter (her web series Carmilla garnered over 70 million views on YouTube; a host of new projects are in the production pipeline).
“I think Kayak was the beginning of me trying to navigate those two extremes,” she explained, “the person who lives their life and feels comfortable, and the person who is not. It’s like what happens when Joan of Arc meets a Real Housewife.”
Although the reading by Ballantyne, Ditmars and Nowicki will not include props or sets, a full staging of Kayak traditionally requires the actress playing Annie to remain in the watercraft for the show’s entire 90-minute duration. Strong-armed actors playing her son have had to physically extract her from the cockpit after the curtain call.
Some of the play’s themes — especially state-sponsored violence abhorred by Julie, the radical activist — seem clairvoyant, given that it was penned almost 17 years ago. Hall downplays her own prescience. “I think anything that has an accurate observation of power is going to turn up those uncanny infelicities,” she observed.
Hall will travel to attend the Gibsons reading for a question-and-answer session following the performance.
Off the Page’s presentation of Kayak takes place at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 12 at the Heritage Playhouse. Admission is by a cash donation at the door ($10-20 suggested).
