King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties: A Collaboration Across Perceptions of Cognitive Difference

Description

King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties are two plays with music by co-writers Niall McNeil and Marcus Youssef, with songs by Veda Hille. McNeil is a professional actor whose life includes Down syndrome. Youssef is one of Canada's leading contemporary playwrights. In these plays, based on the iconic King Arthur and Peter Pan stories, entirely new worlds and languages are invented. McNeil's singular voice and imaginative landscape are at the centre of these works. Niall's genius as a writer is his ability to associate, and to create through dialogue and play, with a seemingly preternatural ability to riff and shift perspective, subverting expectations. The results of this are counterintuitive, absurd, disarming, confusing, hilarious, frightening and occasionally heart-stopping. In the worlds of King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties there is a permeable boundary, between the source material, pop culture and McNeil's own world. McNeil has a gift for imagining links between characters and situations that defy traditional categorizations like fictional and real. In this work, McNeil and Youssef challenge the classifications "neurotypicals" assume must be the only legitimate means available to perceive and name the world. They're not. There are worlds none of us can name or even imagine, within every one of us. That's why we have art: to offer ourselves a glimpse. Art-making, and theatre in particular, is a natural place for people to come together to define new, radically inclusive ways of working together across historical presumtpions about diifference that have shunned and isolated many of of our fellow human beings for millenia. An assumption at the heart of this collaboration: every single one of us is very good at some things and very bad at others. No exceptions. All of us. Every single one. King Arthur's Night and Peter Panties were commissioned and presented by Canada's most prestigious theatre festivals (Luminato, the National Arts Centre and PuSh). They are among the first plays by a writer with Down syndrome published in this country.

Niall McNeil has been involved with theatre from an early age through his long association with the Caravan Farm Theatre. As a youngster he performed in Romeo and Juliet, Bull by the Horns and Strange Medicine. In 2011 Leaky Heaven and Neworld Theatre co-produced Peter Panties a play written by Niall and Marcus Youssef which was performed in the Vancouver Push Festival. Peter Panties won a Jesse Richardson Critics Choice Award for Innovation in theatre. Niall loves researching new ideas, writing music and writing plays. Niall also enjoys teaching acting with his friends at the Down Syndrome Research Foundation. Marcus Youssef's plays include Winners and Losers, Jabber, Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Adrift, Peter Panties, and A Line in the Sand. They have been performed across North America, Australia and Europe. He has won numerous awards, most recently the 2017 Siminovich Prize. Marcus is Artistic Director of Vancouver's Neworld Theatre, editorial advisor to Canadian Theatre Review, an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Canadian Fellow to the International Society of Performing Arts.