Director Daniel Brooks died on May 22 in Toronto at the age of 64, after what he’d playfully described as a five-year 'dance' with terminal cancer.Brett Gundlock/The Globe and Mail
It all started with a showdown: Daniel vs. Daniel, face to face outside the Poor Alex Theatre on a summer night in 1989 at the first Toronto Fringe Festival.
On one side were sensitive young playwright Daniel MacIvor and his sidekick, actor Caroline Gillis. On the other, iconoclastic director Daniel Brooks with his super-cool Augusta Company posse – Tracy Wright and Don McKellar.
“It was like High Noon at 10 p.m.,” Mr. MacIvor recalled. He and Ms. Gillis had just seen Indulgence, the avant-garde Augusta troupe’s cheeky takedown of the sort of sentimental, self-reflecting work then being nurtured at the Tarragon Theatre, the bastion of new Canadian playwriting. The piece included a veiled jab at Mr. MacIvor’s own recent Tarragon play, Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, in which Ms. Gillis had performed.
As the parodists encountered the parodied postshow, there was a moment of breathless tension. “Caroline and I stood facing Daniel and Don and Tracy and saying, ‘Are we going to be friendly, or what?’” Finally, Mr. MacIvor remembers, somebody spoke and that broke the ice. The next thing they knew, they were all sitting on the patio of the Future Bistro, talking and laughing for hours.
“We all became great friends,” Mr. MacIvor said.
More than that, the two Daniels became longtime collaborators. Mr. Brooks would delve into Mr. MacIvor’s dark side to create a string of disturbing monologues – directed by the former, written and acted by the latter – which toured internationally and would have a huge influence on a generation of Canadian theatre artists.
The magic that Mr. Brooks worked on their shows would be repeated with many other collaborators on many other era-defining works, from the Chalmers Award-winning two-hander The Noam Chomsky Lectures to the Tony Award-winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone.
When Mr. Brooks died on May 22 in Toronto at the age of 64, after what he’d playfully described as a five-year “dance” with terminal cancer, he was among the most admired, revered and influential directors in Canadian theatre. A teacher and mentor as well, he left his mark on many younger theatre practitioners, including the current artistic directors of Toronto’s major not-for-profit companies.
“His legacy is not just the work he did onstage,” said Chris Abraham of Crow’s Theatre. “It’s also his impact on the industry, on the aesthetic of our stages, and all the individuals whose lives he touched as artists.” When Mr. Brooks won the inaugural $100,000 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre in 2001, he chose the young Mr. Abraham as his protégé – and recipient of a quarter of the prize money – even though the two had never met. Mr. Abraham would work closely with him for several years, an experience that “changed everything for me,” he said. Mr. Abraham would win the Siminovitch himself in 2013.
Weyni Mengesha at Soulpepper Theatre has often credited a revival of Insomnia, the play Mr. Brooks originally created with Guillermo Verdecchia in 1997, as inspiring her to become a director. At the time, she was a frustrated acting student in York University’s drama program. “I wasn’t seeing a lot of work that represented me as a Black woman,” she said. “Watching how he’d created and staged Insomnia, how it seemed to set its own rules, just empowered me to recognize that I could direct and be a creator, too.”
Ms. Mengesha went on to pursue Mr. Brooks’s mentorship, eventually studying under him at the Soulpepper Academy in 2006. More than a decade later, when she was hired to run the company, the first thing she did was ask him to direct a show. The result was his powerful production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which survived a pandemic postponement and Mr. Brooks’s own precarious health to make a triumphant debut this season.
A year before that, Mr. Brooks performed a one-man show he’d written called Other People. A disarmingly buoyant reflection on his own mortality, set at an annoying meditation retreat, it was directed by another of his many mentees, Canadian Stage’s Brendan Healy.
Working with him on the show was “glorious,” Mr. Healy said. “Daniel was a teacher for me until the end. He approached his death with the same kind of curiosity, questioning and engagement that he approached everything else in his life.”
Mr. Brooks was able to make a slow, graceful exit. After he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in 2018, targeted therapies allowed him to extend his terminal prognosis and continue to work until this spring. The Seagull, which opened at Soulpepper in April, turned out to be his thrilling finale, a bold, irreverent take on the Chekhov classic that proved he hadn’t lost his rebellious spirit.
That would seem to belie Mr. Brooks’s reputation as an intellectual who did intense research to prepare for a play and favoured a Beckettian discipline and austerity. When colleagues describe his process, the word “rigorous” often crops up. All that was true, but he also delighted in chaos and pure theatricality.
“He always wanted sensation, danger, provocation in the theatre,” said Mr. McKellar, his longtime friend. “Daniel very much believed in entertainment and engaging the audience in every way.”
Mr. Brooks was teacher and mentor, and he left his mark on many younger theatre practitioners, including the current artistic directors of Toronto’s major not-for-profit companies.Brett Gundlock/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Brooks was born on June 23, 1958, into a family that valued culture. “Our home was full of books and art,” said his older brother, filmmaker Adam Brooks. “Our parents took us to museums.” Their father, Herb, came from Brooklyn and served with the U.S. Army in the Second World War before moving to Toronto, where he started a successful advertising agency and met their mother, Naomi (née Budd). Naomi was an amateur director and playwright who would stage holiday shows at their synagogue and had one of her plays performed at the public library.
The two brothers grew up in North Toronto and attended tony Upper Canada College, but never felt at home there. Adam Brooks said their summers at Camp Wabikon on Ontario’s Lake Temagami were far more formative. “It was the early 1970s and it was this free-thinking camp,” he said. “It introduced us to a wider culture of reading and art and imagination.”
Adam went to film school after UCC, while Daniel enrolled at the University of Toronto, where his studies under drama professor Stephen (now Francis) Martineau at University College ignited his passion for theatre. He graduated in 1981 and had already become a charismatic actor and writer on the indie scene when Mr. McKellar, another U of T student, first encountered him.
“He was this legendary figure,” recalled Mr. McKellar, who caught one of his performances and then later met him through mutual friends. Mr. Brooks, in turn, introduced him to filmmaker Bruce McDonald and got him to write the screenplay for Mr. McDonald’s Roadkill, launching Mr. McKellar’s screen career. He also brought him together with actor Tracy Wright, Mr. McKellar’s future wife, to found the Augusta Company and help kick off the Toronto Fringe.
Fuelled by anger and a taste for the postmodern, the trio used deconstructed texts and other experimental methods to mock the theatre establishment. Their targets included not just the Tarragon but also The Phantom of the Opera and the mega-musical trend of that time. “We wanted to do more probing, challenging, political theatre,” Mr. McKellar said.
Although the company dissolved in the mid-1990s, its aim and aesthetic continued to inform Mr. Brooks’s theatre work and Mr. McKellar’s films. Ironically, the two were reunited creatively in 2001 when Mr. Brooks directed the first full-scale Toronto production of The Drowsy Chaperone, the Fringe-born musical co-written by Mr. McKellar that would later go on to Broadway. “People may think that was a weird combination,” Mr. McKellar said, “but Daniel had a profound influence on the shape of that show – the way it makes fun of theatrical conventions and expectations. He gave it the kind of lift that made it take off.”
It was a rare venture into commercial theatre for Mr. Brooks, who spent the 1990s making waves outside the mainstream. For serious theatregoers, his shows were must-sees. They included 1992′s The Noam Chomsky Lectures, an inspired gloss on Chomsky’s then-au courant mass-media theories. It was co-written, co-directed and performed with Mr. Verdecchia. The two would later create the even more compelling Insomnia, about a man losing his grip on reality.
Mr. MacIvor, though, was his closest collaborator. Their chemistry exploded with their very first show, 1991′s brilliant, startling House – it opened with Mr. MacIvor’s angry misfit hurling a chair across the stage – and continued over the years with Here Lies Henry (1996), Monster (1998), Cul-de-sac (2003), This is What Happens Next (2010) and Let’s Run Away (2019).
Despite coming from different backgrounds – Mr. MacIvor from working-class roots in Sydney, N.S. – the two bonded over a sense of “otherness.”
“Daniel as an olive-skinned Jewish boy at Upper Canada College had an outsider experience, just as I did as a queer kid growing up in a small Christian town,” Mr. MacIvor said. Consequently, the troubled characters in their shows were often outliers, too.
Creating theatre with Mr. Brooks was an intimate experience, involving intense discussions and lots of trial and error. Actor Rick Miller discovered this when Mr. Brooks helped him build his breakthrough 2004 multimedia show Bigger Than Jesus, a serio-comic critique of Christianity.
“I remember my times with Daniel where it was just the two of us in a room,” Mr. Miller said, “riffing and improvising for hours on end.”
Bigger Than Jesus was co-produced by Necessary Angel, the adventurous Toronto company founded by Richard Rose, whom Mr. Brooks succeeded as artistic director in 2003. During his nine-year tenure, he gave it one of its biggest successes, his 2004 production of John Mighton’s Half Life, a moving play about age and memory.
Alongside the new work, he became known as an exciting interpreter of the classics. In 1999, he staged an audacious five-actor version of Goethe’s mammoth Faust for the Tarragon. That same year, he tapped into the bleak comedy of another impossible work, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, which proved the highlight of a fledgling Soulpepper’s second season. It began his continuing association with the company, which included productions of Ibsen, Pinter and Racine, as well as another Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in 2017.
He also continued to put his distinctive imprint on important new work, such as Christopher Morris’s The Runner, a solo drama about the Israeli-Palestinian divide for which Mr. Brooks devised a frighteningly frenetic staging. Presented in 2018 at Theatre Passe Muraille, it won him his third Dora Mavor Moore Award for directing.
In the summer of that year, Mr. Brooks learned he had cancer while in Nova Scotia, working with Mr. MacIvor on Let’s Run Away. He was able to see the play through to its premiere at Canadian Stage in the fall of 2019, after which he moved on to direct The Seagull at Soulpepper. It was in rehearsals in March, 2020, when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly the whole world, like Mr. Brooks, was being forced to pause and take stock.
That was something he did extremely well. He approached his illness with his customary rigour and discipline. He practised meditation and tai chi. He wrote his one-man play and, when Soulpepper pivoted to online, directed an audio version of The Seagull. Once the lockdowns ended, he went travelling with his two daughters, Emma, 30, and Kate, 26 – his children with former partner Jennifer Ross.
He summed up his situation with a dry wit. “We all have this mortal disease called life,” he told The Globe and Mail’s J. Kelly Nestruck in a 2020 interview. “Mine’s a little more pressing.”
In addition to his daughters and brother, Mr. Brooks leaves his sister-in-law, Kerri Kwinter; his nephew, Theo Brooks; and niece, Taia Kwinter.