Becoming Lucretia: Bahia Watson conjures a feisty teen caregiver in audio drama METAMORPHOSIS

Toronto novelist André Alexis’ new audio drama Metamorphosis: a Viral Trilogy explores life during a global pandemic from three female points of view: 13-year-old Lucretia, 30-year-old Kelli, and 86-year old Nella. The series is a co-presentation of TO Live, SummerWorks, and Canadian Stage, and is directed by Volcano Theatre’s founding Artistic Director Ross Manson, with sound design by Debashis Sinha. Metamorphosis charts the progress of a fictional global pandemic in Canada’s largest city through the three women’s fictional diaries. The first episode, hosted by TO Live, is Lucretia in Quarantine, performed by Bahia Watson. This audio diary centres on 13-year-old Lucretia caring for her 7-year-old sister Emily, who decides to adopt a baby racoon. In the middle of a deadly pandemic, when food is scarce and the world treacherous, these two resilient girls try to maintain a normal life without their parents.  

Watson came to the project by invitation from Manson. Prior to Lucretia in Quarantine, the two had collaborated only on a workshop of a play, “so when this came along, I was excited to do it,” Watson enthuses. Although she has done lots of voice work for animation, she had never performed a radio-diary, a form that she loves. So with the theatres closing down, she was especially interested in exploring this artform. 

On reading the script, she found Alexis’ writing “really beautiful and honest,” and related to the character of Lucretia immediately. She and Lucretia are both writers, and Watson appreciates firsthand the insight that writing can yield: “I like that she’s kind of keeping a log of these really intimate, seemingly insignificant, little day-to-day moments that take her through her life and start to shape her evolution. That really interests me.” Watson also likes teenagers, and considers the teen years a state of uncertainty between childhood and adulthood. Lucretia’s teenage limbo parallels that of the sisters waiting for their mother to come back, which in turn mirrors the COVID-19 “limbo that we are in, wondering what our lives are, what world we’re in. I felt like that aligns to be a nice, relevant kind of entry point into the feelings that a lot of us might be having right now. [Lucretia] became a sincere and earnest portal into getting to think about certain things and feel a sort of fear.”

Audiences of The Handmaid’s Tale (MGM/Hulu); Star Trek: Discovery (CBS) and Saving Hope (CTV) are already familiar with Watson’s considerable  range. Her stage credits include diverse roles at The Stratford Festival, Soulpepper, Crow’s Theatre, Company Theatre, Canadian Stage, and Nightwood Theatre. As Lucretia, she conjures the tone and cadence of a teen whose scrappiness barely conceals her vulnerability. Through her voice and with Sinha’s evocative soundscape, Watson draws us into the life of this young girl thrust into the role of caregiver. Her diary entries describe mundanities such as her culinary skills, which are limited to a basic flatbread made more palatable with cinnamon. Through the seemingly small observations, we learn that the pandemic world the girls inhabit is desperate and dire. Here, every person is out for themselves, and it has matured far Lucretia beyond her 13 years. Socializing has been subordinated to survival. Lucretia learns to snap up the few basic provisions left at her door on Tuesdays before a neighbour can pinch them. Luring small animals to hunt for food and avoiding the dangers that lurk in areas of the city are part of Lucretia’s everyday existence. When sister Em adopts an orphaned raccoon, some primal instinct tells the girls to hide it to save it from ending up on a neighbour’s dinner plate. 

Watson connected “pretty easily” with the writing from the first time she did a cold read of the script: “It all just flowed because I found I understood her.” To tap further into Lucretia’s character, Watson followed a process she often uses of creating diary entries in her character’s perspective outside of the show text. In this case, she composed entries as Lucretia for some of the missing days, in order to “fill out her world and my understanding of her outside of just these moments, trying to get a broader sense of who she is.”

Watson herself has not formed any distinct impression of what Lucretia might look like. “My imaginings were more outward from inside of her”, she admits. And the “fun part” about this aural medium is that Lucretia will look completely different to every listener: “Yes, my voice will create a person. What is so exciting about this kind of storytelling is . . . that if everyone wants to draw a portrait of Lucretia, it would all be very different.” Nonetheless, portraying the character came with distinct challenges, starting with deciding on the kind of performance required. “It’s not the same as doing it on stage where my body is also telling the story with me. And it’s not the same as on screen where again my body’s telling you, people are zoomed in up close, and you can see all those nuances in my facial expressions how I feel.” 

Watson, who is also a singer, relied on vocal inflections, breathing and pacing to create the realism of a diary entry, as opposed to a direct address to the audience – “kind of breaking a fourth wall, which you would do like a monologue, on a stage.” This different approach was a learning process. “When talking to Ross, it was helpful when we discussed the time of day, the room that I would be in, those kinds of specifics, so that I could really imagine myself in that room, doing the recording and my own personal log of my life.” This approach could evoke Lucretia and Emily’s deep loneliness and isolation because “they don’t have anyone else to talk about this stuff.” 

The play also required Watson to take on certain engineering tasks, such as setting up the necessary equipment and recording on microphone and iPhone simultaneously, so that the sound could be blended for  a “room, iPhone kind of sound” as opposed to sounding like a more polished studio recording. Though she collaborated with Manson virtually, she regrets that the creative team could not “be in a room together and share energy, at least once before we went off to do our own thing”. Ultimately, shared trust overcame the physical distance: “I feel like people trusted me that I could be on my own, in a lot of ways, and Ross was always there to help with notes and direction. But just having to be separate from your creative team is a bit of a challenge to feel connected to them, to feel like you’re all in the same world, creating it. Normally you’re in a room, and then you get a vibe going, and then you move off, and you can take that with you.” In the end? It was the writing held them all together because it was “so beautifully written and drawn out”. 

Watson spent two months creating the audio play in a little cottage in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and her memories of this time are indelibly etched: “I listened to [the play] just this morning, kind of reprocessing, going back into that time. It was such a present moment.”  She chose a “very isolated” location for the recording, and it resonated deeply: “there were all the uprisings, and I was up late on the internet recording this, and feeling in a physical space very aligned with [Lucretia’s] world… as a human being alive at that time, and then working on this and privately recording and sending [the recordings] off and getting into her world. Now, I’m kind of reflecting on it because I was within a limbo, in a fog in a wild moment in time, like she was — a kind of day-to-day living. It felt like the world was going to change tomorrow.” 

Lucretia in Quarantine is available until August 23. It is followed by the second installment of Metamorphosis: a Viral Trilogy, Kerri Wonders, on August 24. This play follows Kerri, a 30-year-old woman who takes a pill in a moment of abandon after years in quarantine, and the pill transforms her life in a post-pandemic world. Kerri Wonders is performed by the Canadian Comedy Award-winning Becky Johnson and hosted by SummerWorks. The trilogy concludes with Nella at 86, which follows an octogenarian in a long-term care home at the start of a global pandemic. Her diary is a clear-sighted account by someone who is no stranger to loss. Hosted by Canadian Stage, Nella at 86 launches on August 31 and is performed by acclaimed theatre veteran Diana Leblanc. Each diary runs approximately 35 minutes, and transcriptions are  available to increase access. 

On listening to Lucretia in Quarantine in its entirety, Watson found herself moved by it. “It was all such an isolated process, in a lot of ways. I didn’t know exactly how everything was coming together on the other end as I was sending it off, so I don’t know if it was a huge surprise that it would come together so well, but it was a pleasant experience listening to it and rediscovering it as a listener, hearing it with all the elements put together as one. I really enjoyed it.”

Audiences will also enjoy – and relate to – this auditory gem, which captures the swirl of emotions and reserves of resilience born from unsettling times like ours.  

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2020