Winners and Losers is a play by Marcus Youssef and James Long based on a game of the same name the two theatre artists sometimes play. They pick a person, place, or thing, and debate whether it’s a “winner” or a “loser.” But it probably wouldn’t be fair to pick their director (and Crow’s Theatre artistic director) Chris Abraham as a topic, particularly since he was recently declared the winner of the Siminovitch Prize, Canadian theatre’s most prestigious (not to mention lucrative) honour.

We caught up with Abraham for a chat about his new play, the importance of mentorship in the arts, and bad Russian accents.

Torontoist: So, how long have you guys been playing Winners and Losers?

Chris Abraham: We started doing the show two years ago. It premiered in Richmond this time last year, and since then we’ve been able to get pretty steady bookings.

And how did it all get started?

So, Marcus and Jamie, they run New World Theatre and Theatre Replacement. They really wanted to work on something together and were interested in investigating this terrain of “winners and losers.” I met Marcus in Montreal the year before it premiered and he invited me to come out to Vancouver to hang out at an early stage of developing the piece. And what they tried to do was write a play together as a scripted text, and as a warm-up, they played a game: this winner-or-loser game where they adopted Russian accents and improvised a kind of debate on whether something was a winner or a loser—person, place or thing—and recorded those. Kind of for fun, maybe with some idea that it might be useful raw material for the the play they were writing. And then they looked at the script at some point, and they looked at the improvisations…and they realized they really liked the raw material, and weren’t so much liking the script.

How scripted is the final show?

The show is a partly-scripted and partly-improvised 90 minutes of playing this game where they talk about places and things and compete for this crown of “Who’s the best this?” “Who’s the best that?” And it’s different every night.

But some parts are the same?

It has a core arc to it and the piece becomes riskier as it goes on. And they choose different things.

In Russian accents?

No, they’ve dropped the Russian accents.

Shame.

I think where that came from is that when they were writing it, they were renting a studio in Vancouver where they found these old canisters of Soviet-era propaganda films. And so, I think that the kinda alignment of the subject of winners and losers and the Cold War-era competition between the USSR and the US was one of the ideas.

Why do you think we’re so keen to declare things “winners” or “losers” anyway?

In a world where we’re inundated with so much information coming at us all the time, there’s a pervasive cultural tendency to categorize everything as good/bad, winner/loser, awesome/terrible, and I would say that our take on that is not just that it’s a bad thing, but that it’s actually a survival technique. It’s a way of processing and breaking down the chaos into pieces or things that then we can have relationships to. On the other hand, it is problematic to play the winner and loser game because we know that things are more complex than that.

Speaking of winners: you were recently awarded the Siminovitch Prize for your work as a director, and you chose to honour Mitchell Cushman (artistic director of Outside the March Theatre Company and now associate artistic director of Crow’s) with the Siminovitch Protégé Award—something you yourself won 12 years ago. How does winning the Siminovitch change things for you?

It’s a completely transformative prize. As for right now, I’ll have to see what that means in 10 years, but as a former protégé, it was huge. Both getting $25,000 when I was 26 years old, and getting to know Daniel Brooks and getting to develop a friendship and relationship with him over 10 years had a huge impact on my development as a director. And I think it’s had similar results for others, because it honours and celebrates and recognizes that mentorship and apprenticeship are at the core of the most important parts of how we pass on what we do. We go to school, but another important part of our education as artists happens through our relationships with our mentors.

And those relationships can be so hard to find.

It’s so significant in director-training, both in terms of the transmission of knowledge, but also in terms of how important it is as a young director in Canada that you have older artists shepherding your career. Growing your work, but also creating opportunities for you. I really don’t think that you get to where I am—or you get to getting paid—if you don’t have that experience. It just doesn’t happen.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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