Alumni Spotlight

Jain attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA), New York University, and the Le Coq School in Paris. He founded the Why Not Theatre company in 2007, which launched with a production of Hamlet at Toronto’s Winchester Street Theatre. It demonstrated a venturesomeness and willingness to challenge orthodoxy which has become a hallmark of subsequent Why Not shows. 

UCC News spoke to Jain about the prize, an ambitious recent project, and what’s on the horizon.

It’s exciting to be recognized alongside such brilliant artists, and special to be recognized by my peers in this way. I mentioned to someone that this comes at a milestone in my life: I’m now 45, have two kids, and just completed a project that was once-in-a-lifetime. I’m overwhelmed by the acknowledgement of work undertaken over a period of almost 20 years.

I’ve always considered the notion of “director” to be constricting; the word conjures up, for me, an image of a traffic cop. I consider myself a creator, involved in each aspect of the theatre process. I work with groups of people who help to build a story.

The heart of Why Not Theatre’s ethos has been to challenge the status quo: which stories are told and who gets to tell them. The Mahabharata is an Indian epic, perhaps made famous in the West by Peter Brook, a British director, who staged a version in France. It was a seminal piece at the time, and represented what international theatre could be. And while there might have been questions about “appropriation,” the size, scale and scope of the project were extraordinary. The project we undertook posed numerous questions, including how a group might tackle that story now. We devoted eight years to the research, creation, writing and development. It was one of the largest theatre projects to come out of Canada in a while, and it toured internationally: to the Barbican in London, The Lincoln Centre in New York, and as far as Perth, Australia. The project represented a Canadian perspective, entirely cast with people of colour. My sense is that such a perspective is sought, perhaps these days in particular, as Canada’s perspective is valued on the international stage.

Things are always tough in the arts! But I keep returning to the purpose of theatre. We’ve been telling stories for thousands of years, because they’re how we make sense of our world. They help us understand who we are. There’s power in stories. Gathering to share them is a kind of democratic act. I think stories create and contribute to the building of civil society; we need each other’s imaginations. We share what we have in common, despite our differences. So, even when times are challenging, perhaps particularly when they are, the arts are integral to our survival — the opposite of frivolous. 

We’ll be touring What You Won’t Do For Love, with David Suzuki and his partner, Tara Cullis, a beautiful show about the planet and changing our relationship to it. The show will tour to 15 venues in Ontario. We’re also incubating ideas for 2027 and our 20^th anniversary. The future is tremendously exciting.