In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia tells her king that ‘Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be …’, the subtext being that we may know or believe we know who we are at present but the future is unknowable.
In a nutshell, that could be a good way of looking at Jessica Hill - both right now and in the future.
The Montreal-born actress is in her eighth season with Stratford’s world-famous acting company, playing Viola in Twelfth Night and Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet. Her resume also includes being a published author, as her plays The Dark Lady and Pandora, are available at the Festival’s shop. Penning those plays began as a COVID project for Hill, putting her active mind to use when she was unable to perform.
“It’s terrible to say, but I was lucky to have COVID - it saved me,” she said. “We were in the middle of the 2020 rehearsal season and it was going to be huge. We were opening the Tom Patterson Theatre when COVID hit. We were ready and in the crux of gelling together when it all came to a halt. It was pretty certain to me that it wasn’t just going to be a few weeks - we were going to be down for a while.”
It wasn’t too different from what Shakespeare himself went through, having to deal with the bubonic plague in his day. But a call from Fiona Mangelo at Here For Now Theatre tasked her with coming up with … something. So she wrote.
“I wrote stories when I was a kid and in high school we had oral exams that I would always write a script for,” she said. “I would cast my friends and direct it.”
Ideas had been percolating from Hill’s time rehearsing for All’s Well That Ends Well for the role of Helen, and her sonnets connected with Hill - something about the unrequited love moved her to put thoughts in motion.
“The sonnets were fresh in my mind and there are these final sonnets called ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ that kind of read like revenge porn - they’re not very nice,” she half-joked. “He’s very hurt and has so much vitriol and revenge towards this woman that broke his heart and it goes straight to sexualizing her in a really heavy, evil way. I hadn’t remembered them that way, and I just went, ‘Oh my God, who hurt you? Are you okay?’. So when Fiona asked me what I wanted to write about, I knew there was something about this dark lady.”
By diving into the topic and researching Emilia Bassano, Hill let her inner nerd go to town. That led to a reading with Rylan Wilkie outside The Bruce Hotel, which Hill had the foresight to record. That was sent to a friend, who gave her the encouragement to follow it through. It became the first unofficial performance at the TPT, and then the premier performance at Shakespeare In The Ruins. A company in Calgary also presented it, and Hill’s journey as a playwright officially was on the upswing.
In a way, The Dark Lady and Pandora were Hill’s way of showing the people around her and the world in general who she really is. The massive amount of work that she poured into it has only served to stoke a creative blaze inside her.
“It has woken a whole other creative side to my creative practice, and I’m already writing three other things,” she said. “I know this is something I’m going to keep doing. In doing this, it’s also made me a better actor.”
The role of Viola is one she’s cherished for a long time, as Hill said her relationship with the character and with Twelfth Night is a long one: it was the first play she read in high school and helped to open her up to the concepts of love and gender and about being present to what is.
“I was a shy teenager so there was something about Viola and that kind of unrequited love, that kind of having to hide and not being able to express how she feels that just resonated so strongly with me,” she said. “Viola’s words have spoken to me for some time, and I’m just so excited I get the chance to actually step into her shoes and I actually get to say her words.”
She remembers seeing Taming of the Shrew with stars Seana McKenna and Graham Abbey on stage, coming away wowed enough to write out ‘STRATFORD’ on a piece of paper and stick it on her bedroom ceiling.
Perhaps Ophelia was right. Hill found her purpose then, but now she’s looking at her future in a slightly more pragmatic way.
“I don’t think there’s one specific goal; I think there’s a path and a journey that feels so right - I want to see what comes,” she said. “My acting and my writing, I want to see how they meet and keep influencing each other. There are so many parts I’d love to play, but the nature of what we do for a living is that we never know, right? But there was something in writing that puts you in control of the narrative … they dovetail nicely with each other.”
Hill will be at the Festival Theatre Store on Sunday, June 30 for a book signing following the matinee performance of Twelfth Night. The book is also available at Fanfare Books and via her website.
