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Murrell, John

CTE photo
John Murrell

Playwright John Murrell was born in 1945 in Lubbock, Texas, and completed a BFA degree at Southwestern University in Texas. He came to Canada in 1968, and graduated from the University of Calgary with an education degree. He began writing plays while teaching in Alberta’s public schools. His second play, Power in the Blood (1975), about a female evangelist experiencing a life crisis, won the University of Alberta’s Clifford E. Lee playwriting award, encouraging Murrell to write full-time.

In 1975, he became playwright-in-residence for Alberta Theatre Projects, where several of his plays premiered, including Waiting for the Parade in 1977 at the Canmore Opera House in Heritage Park, Calgary. Focusing on the lives of five women in Calgary during World War II, Waiting for the Parade has been produced many times at theatres in Canada and abroad, including the Tarragon Theatre , Toronto in 1979, where it won the Chalmer’s Awards; the Grand Theatre, London in 1983, directed by Robin Phillips ; and at the Shaw Festival in 2004, directed by Linda Moore .

Memoir (a two-hander about the final days of legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt) premiered at the Guelph Spring Festival in 1977, and then toured internationally. It has been produced throughout Canada, the USA, in South America, and Japan, and ran for more than three years in Paris in the 1980s. It enjoyed a successful revival in Paris at the Théâtre Edouard VII in the fall of 2003.

Subsequent plays also focus on famous cultural figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including October (1988) featuring Eleonora Duse and Isadora Duncan; Democracy (1992), about a meeting between poet Walt Whitman and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson during the American Civil War; and The Faraway Nearby, about painter and feminist icon Georgia O’Keeffe.

Other plays reflect his continuing interest in the history of western Canada, including Farther West ( Theatre Calgary 1982, dir. Robin Phillips , with Martha Henry as May Buchanan), which dramatizes a prairie prostitute’s catastrophic search for absolute freedom. New World(1984), is set on Vancouver Island, with allusions to The Tempest. Its premiere at the National Arts Centre , Ottawa was also directed by Robin Phillips. It was remounted at the Tarragon in 1997.

Farther West and Waiting for the Parade were filmed for Canadian television (Murrell wrote both screenplays). Both Farther West, and the The Faraway Nearby were honoured with Chalmers Best Canadian Play Awards; and Democracy received the Canadian Authors Association’s and the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Best Play Awards in 1992. In winter 1998-1999, The Faraway Nearby was produced at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage.

Murrell’s knowledge of Italian and French, and his love for opera, has resulted in several translations of plays, including Machiavelli’s Mandragola (Theatre Calgary 1978), Racine’s Bajazet (Tarragon Theatre 1979), Sardou’s Divorcons (Theatre Calgary 1983); and Carole Frechette ’s The Four Lives of Marie (Tarragon 1996). His love for Chekhov’s plays is reflected in his translations of Uncle Vanya (1978), The Seagull (1980), and The Cherry Orchard (1998), all produced at the Stratford Festival . He has also translated Ibsen’s The Master Builder (Tarragon 1983), and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Stratford 1988).

Murrell’s play Death in New Orleans, was premiered by Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during the 1998 International Festival Of The Arts, and won a Fringe First Award for Outstanding New Writing. His dramatic adaptation of The Odyssey was first performed as part of the Banff Arts Festival 2001, and was recently remounted by Manitoba Theatre for Young People in Winnipeg, where it garnered both critical and popular acclaim.

Murrell has also written the libretto for the opera, Filumena, about a young Italian woman embroiled in rumrunning in the Crowsnest Pass during Prohibition, and hanged for murder. Filumena was a co-production between Calgary Opera and The Banff Centre, with music by John Estacio, with a world premiere in January 2003 in Calgary to sold-out houses. It was re-mounted in August 2003 as part of the Banff Summer Arts Festival, and garnered four Betty Mitchell Awards including Outstanding New Play. It was remounted in Ottawa in June 2005, and in Edmonton in the fall of 2005.

His second opera, Frobisher (also with John Estacio)is based on the life of the English explorer, and given a contemporary context. It was co-produced by The Banff Centre and the Calgary Opera in the 2006-2007 season. His third opera with John Estacio, Lillian Alling, commissioned by Vancouver Opera, premieres in October 2010.

He is also working on a comedy about Friederich Nietzsche for the Shaw Festival (the first ever such commission of a Canadian author). In summer of 2004, Murrell was the first Canadian playwright to be included in the seasons of both the Shaw Festival (Waiting For The Parade) and the Stratford Festival (a new translation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice).

Murrell’s plays have been translated into fifteen different languages and performed in more than thirty countries around the world. He has worked as Playwright-in-Residence at both Theatre Calgary and Alberta Theatre Projects, as Associate Director of the Stratford Festival of Canada, as head of the Banff Playwrights Colony (1986-1989), as Head of the Theatre Section of the Canada Council for The Arts (1988-1992), and 1999 to 2007 as Artistic Director/Executive Producer of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre.

Murrell is a highly respected arts advocate, mentor, and consultant. In 1998, the National Theatre School of Canada presented him with the Gascon-Thomas award in recognition of an outstanding lifetime of service to arts education in Canada. In 2002 Murrell received the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellency in the Performing Arts, and the Alberta Order of Excellence. In 2003 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2008, he was awarded the Governor General's Lifetime Artistic Achievement award.

Anne Nothof, Athabasca University

Last updated 2010-02-03