International Exchanges: A Conversation with Emily Mann and Annabel Soutar

On October 6, 2025, ground-breaking American playwright-director Emily Mann and celebrated Québécoise playwright Annabel Soutar were featured in a public conversation at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre. This event, produced by Soutar’s Porte Parole Productions as part of the company’s 25th anniversary season, in association the McGill University’s Department of English and Centaur Theatre, gave Montreal theatregoers a chance to meet two pioneers in documentary theatre: Mann, still based at Princeton (where she served for three decades as artistic director and resident playwright of the McCarter Theatre) and Soutar, who studied playwriting with Mann as an undergraduate at Princeton in 1994. This forum piece distills the main points of this exchange between mentor and former student, in their first face-to-face meeting in 30 years, in a wide-ranging conversation exploring: the model of “theatre of testimony” shaped by innovative American feminist theatre-makers such as Mann and Anna Deavere Smith; and how this model influenced Soutar in her mission to create a unique (and increasingly popular) form of documentary theatre) Québec. In a short commentary on this selected transcription, the author (a feminist scholar/practitioner who comes from Montreal and has worked with Mann for many years) shares her insights on the audience response to the exchange, and considers ways in which Soutar’s practice represents the ability of Canadian and Québécois theatre artists to re-fashion and reframe traditions from other nations into new forms of performance reflecting cultural and political realities at home.