We recently connected with Warren Sulatycky and have shared our conversation below.
Warren, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Over the many decades that I’ve been creating work for theatre and film, I always ask deep questions of myself about life, love, family, mortality, society and one’s place in the universe. These questions invariably take me to stories from my own experience, or family experience, and the people involved. There are two projects that I’ve created, both for the theatre, separated by 30 odd years, that have had the most meaningful impact in my life. And it’s terribly difficult to choose between either. The first, ”Babas“, was early in my playwriting career in the early nineties when I was playwright-in-residence at Toronto’s Factory Theatre. “Babas” was based on my Ukrainian grandmother who lived in a small town in Saskatchewan. The play was really my second or third play that I’d written, but the first to get real traction in the Canadian theatre community. I had been writing earlier variations of ”Babas” as a collection of short stories while I was living in New York in the eighties (not that long really, eight or nine months around 1986). Just long enough for New York to kick a young Canadian writer in the teeth and send him packing back to Canada. I returned straight to my Baba’s house in Saskatchewan and rewrote the short stories into a very early draft of the play. As soon as I got to Toronto in 1990 I sent the rewritten draft to then Artistic Director Urjo Kareda at Tarragon Theatre. Urjo sent me a very kind encouraging rejection letter telling me not to give up, to keep working at the play. And I did and it was eventually produced in Toronto at the Factory Theatre and then Western Canada. “Babas” was a love letter to my grandma whom I spent many summers and weeks with on many writing “retreats” at her small wonderful prairie house. I’d hone the play about her while writing in my dad’s old childhood bedroom while Baba cooked her sumptuous Ukrainian meals for us; she created the warmest environment a writer could wish for. When “Babas” was eventually produced at the Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon, an hour’s drive from Hafford, her hometown, the whole town of Hafford got in their cars, trucks, buses to come see the play. It was the happiest night of my life for her to see what I had been madly writing for so many years in her front room. Babas is about love, family, memory . . . My first love letter to family. The second project was a play I did recently, a workshop last year at Toronto’s Theatre Centre. “Walking Home” is a solo performance piece I had devised for myself about my beloved mom and caregiving to her during her challenges with Alzheimer’s. It had been almost 35 years since Babas and I had six or seven other plays produced in those intervening years and had made four internationally award winning feature films (and scads of directing and writing/producing television). But I had come to a point in life where looking after mom was my most pressing concern in life. Creating art was a distant second. However, I felt I needed to capture this time with mom, before her mind slipped completely. I envisioned using home movies and video clips of mom’s life in the multidisciplinary piece. The workshop of “Walking Home” touched on these elements, but I focussed really on the writing and finding as deep a story possible to honour mom’s journey. It was an immensely difficult journey and each day I felt I wasn’t up to the challenge, emotionally, psychically. But I also knew that in sharing my story about mom that there are many many others who are in similar situations of caregiving (to a parent, spouse, sibling, child); we are all, many of us, looking after one another in some manner. I have come to a place in my art creation where my work should be in service to others, a sharing, a gift that can bring a shard of empathy and compassion to others. I don’t want to create art that is in a vacuum or is merely for my own purposes. “Walking Home” is a love letter to my mother. I had intended to craft it into a full production. Mom passed away on Remembrance Day 2024, months after I did the workshop. She never saw it, (she was in Calgary and I was flying back and forth between Calgary and Toronto.) After each of the five nights we did the workshop, the mostly sold-out audience didn’t want to leave the theatre. They wanted to stay and share their own stories of looking after loved ones, (I had invited the audience to stay and share – I feel theatre should have that essence of communion with one another). Theatre for me is sacred place, “Babas” and “Walking Home” were religious creations forged in the furnace of love, family, compassion, memory. I am so grateful and thankful that I had the chance to bring my mother and grandmother to life onstage and share their stories, their essence, their lives. Oh yes, the day after the entire town of Hafford attended ”Babas” in Saskatoon, my grandmother’s phone was deluged with calls, Half the town was ecstatic with congratulations, the other half had turned against her because of the wrong colour of yellow that was used on the linoleum style kitchen table and chairs, “we’d never have that kind of colour in our kitchens”. Baba was pleased and proud nonetheless. Mom told me after that opening night where she sat beside Baba, that her arm was sore from Baba’s enthusiastic nudging.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Well, I think I may have touched upon answers to these questions in my previous response. Briefly, I started as a professional child actor in Edmonton where by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I was acting in local theatre at the Citadel and films. Theatre was and still is my first love. As mentioned it is a sacred place for me, where I can commune with other artists in deep collaboration and with audiences. The live shared theatre experience of life, heart, mind and soul goes beyond all ego, but is rather a life-giving source of energy. Over the follwing years I trained in and expanded my art practice into writing for theatre, film and television, then directing and producing. Since 1990, I have always had my own production companies (non-profit and for profit) and mostly controlled the direction of my creative output (very important for financial longevity and stability for any artist – own and control one’s work). Over twenty years ago, while living in New York, I pivoted somewhat and studied visual arts at the School for Visual Arts and the Arts Student League of New York and ground down heavily into visual art work, partly as a reaction to the complexity of film, television and to a lesser extent theatre production. Visual art requires just you and your materials (and ideas and inspiration, some spark). It was really very liberating to just . . . paint. Eventually I found my way back to film production and since 2017 have done four award winning feature films (produced and/or directed ”April In Autumn“, “Jasmine Road”, “A Polite Fiction” and “Wild Goat Surf”), which I’m very proud of, in addition to my theatre work.
As I continue my creative journey, I am always looking for ways now of combining my various arts practises into multidisciplinary works; for example I’ve adapted and expanded my “Walking Home” theatre experience last year into a feature film project that is now awaiting funding notice for production. It will be an homage to my mother. I always try to have several projects at various stages of development so that in case one (or two or three) don’t go, there is hopefully always something deeply resonant from my chest (literally from the heart) that will enrich and deepen my life’s journey and those around me.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My mission as an artist has always been to connect on a profoundly compassionate human level with others, artists/collaborators and audiences. It comes down to asking oneself: what is there in one’s life that is most human, that makes you most vulnerable; and in most cases, the answer is love. I believe all art, art that truly touches people, is made from a deep place of love. Everything I’ve done that has made its’ way into the world has come from a place of love (sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, or both). My mission in life in art and otherwise is to live in love. Be in love, with life, despite all its’ hardships, calamities, and momentary highs. Be in love with one’s own breath and existence and share, share, share, rejoice in this with others. That is all we have really. The daily grind of news and politics is meaningless when placed beside our own existential and very quick time on earth. We must celebrate all we can through art, of who we are, as loving, compassionate, empathetic human beings. That is the ultimate best we can do in art: pass on our own life’s energy to those who follow us. I try to do this in all my work and in life each day.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
There was a time in the late 90’s and in 2000’s that I thought it was important to build up my film and television company, thinking this would give me more freedom to do the creative work I wanted to do (in theatre mostly). I brought in employees and took on television projects (reality television in the early days of reality tv) that paid the bills and helped financially. I moved to Los Angeles, leaving behind a good theatre community and career in Canada, and focussed on television development there, But it was taking me further and further away from my source, my life’s purpose and work, my true art. By 2005, I saw the light and left Los Angeles and resettled in New York where as mentioned I reoriented towards a new visual art practise and jumped into New York theatre (starring in and producing the New York Time’s critically acclaimed off-Broadway American premiere of Canadian Claudia Dey’s “Trout Stanley”). I learnt, or rather re learnt that the bigger risk you take in life, the greater the potential rewards. I found my artistic soul again in that New York transfer from LA. And then brought it all back to Canada a decade later.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.WarrenSulatycky.com
- Instagram: @warrensulatycky
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warren.sulatycky/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/warren-sulatycky
- Twitter: https://x.com/WarrenSulatycky
- Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCZkeyvuNCRkjficrAdGYVGA
- Other: Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/ragingriverpictures
Image Credits
“Walking Home” production photos, Dahlia Katz