Love is the first step: in conversation with A Wrinkle in Time’s Thomas Morgan Jones
Not every playwright has the opportunity or resources to work with a live-in assistant dramaturg. But while adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for the Stratford Festival, Thomas Morgan Jones found his surprisingly close to home: his six-year-old son.
“He’s an amazing barometer for things,” Jones said in an interview. “I’d read him parts of the story, or I’d show him a costume and ask, ‘scary’? And he’d say, ‘eh, not so scary,’ so I’d show him another and he’d say, ‘oh, that’s pretty scary.’ So we’d go with that one.”
Jones has been working not only in theatre for young audiences (TYA), but also with the Stratford Festival since long before his son was born. He was part of the inaugural Langham Directors Workshop in 2010, and spent eight seasons as an instructor with the Birmingham Conservatory. So when artistic director Antoni Cimolino called him with a proposal in summer 2022, Jones was immediately interested.
“[Cimolino] said, ‘this is the play that we’d like to do, and there are adaptations we’re looking at. But what do you think about writing one?’ I’ve spent a huge portion of my career in theatre for young audiences — I love making plays for young people — and this is a story that’s both exciting and profoundly important to me, so it was intriguing to get the invitation as not only a director, but as a writer as well.”
L’Engle’s beloved novel tells the story of Meg Murry, a thirteen-year-old girl tasked with the seemingly insurmountable task of rescuing her father from a terrifying monster at the edge of the universe. Aided by her kid brother Charles Wallace, their neighbour Calvin, and an array of whimsical supernatural beings with linguistically-inspired names (Mrs. Who, Which, and Whatsit) who live next door, Meg must not only push herself beyond her limits to rescue her father and protect her companions, but learn to embrace her own strength along the way.
It’s no wonder the story was curated in a season exploring themes of duty versus desire. But Jones found a further area of focus in another major theme in the text.
“In an old video interview with Madeleine L’Engle, she said, ‘We don’t plan the terrible things, we just try to love through them,’” he recounted. “That’s what this entire story is about: the power and magic of love. And that led to a lot of reading and researching and thinking about love, and then Meg as a character, and this whole story.
“[Love has been] the very first step of every part of this process. Every decision has been framed on a foundation of conversations about love.”
Those conversations extended beyond the rehearsal hall and into the audience. The Stratford Festival offers a variety of educational opportunities to school groups, and with A Wrinkle in Time being the season’s Schulich Children’s Play, the students’ reactions during the May preview shows reaffirmed Jones’ focus.
“We’ve had some school groups,” he said, “and after one show, Lois [Adamson], who’s the director of education at the festival, asked them, ‘what does love mean to you?’ And I sat in this room of hundreds of children, some waiting with their hands up, some screaming their answers because they wanted to be able to get them in. ‘Love conquers all,’ ‘love means that I can trust the people around me,’ and ‘love means home,’ all of these things. A huge group of young people having an open and honest conversation about what love means. And I thought, ‘maybe it’s going to be okay. For just this one moment, despite everything. Maybe we’ll be okay.’”
While A Wrinkle in Time is set in a sci-fi universe involving ethereal neighbours, terrifying creatures, and adventures through the space-time continuum, Jones considers the story to be a perfect offering for the world we live in.
“We’re in this amazing time, across the planet, where what young people are inheriting and how they’re going to navigate the world they’ve been born into is a really important consideration for us all,” he said. “This is one of those stories that is centred on empowering young people’s voices, and helping them to see there isn’t anything that they can’t do, not only for themselves, but for their community, society.”
Before A Wrinkle in Time closes, Jones will be bringing his directorial expertise to the world premiere of Guillermo Verdecchia’s Feast this October at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange, where he is artistic director. But it probably won’t be long before Jones finds another TYA project to work on, as he firmly believes in the importance of children’s theatre and its impact on the industry as a whole.
“Sometimes when people talk about making theatre for young people, there’s this addition or caveat that it’s because they’ll be the audiences of the future, which is true. But they’re their own audience now. There’s lots of reasons why parents might want to bring young people to the theatre, and they’re all very important. What they’ll see [in A Wrinkle in Time] is really exciting and spectacular and lush. The design is jaw-dropping — music, costumes, all of it — and the performances are amazing. But it’s the story we’re telling that is so important for people to receive right now.
“There’s an article in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that says children have the right to arts and culture. In each stage of their development, children deserve something sophisticated, beautiful, and wonderful that’s been made specifically with them in mind… And with love.”
