actor/playwright Jameela McNeil, whose play Ms. Pat’s Kitchen premieres at Nextfest 2024. Photo supplied

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you saw Jameela McNeil’s blistering performance as the sister of an ambitious Black boxer in The Royale last season at the Citadel, you already known something about the intensity and focus of this young theatre artist onstage.

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And the Sterling Award-winning actor is poised to have the same sort of reverb in the adjacent backstage world of playwriting (and producing). In Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, premiering at  Nextfest 2024 in a Black Arts Hub production directed by Sue Goberdhan, the emerging playwright takes us into the heart of a Jamaican family here and now: a fractious relationship between an 18-year-old daughter and her mother with all the intergenerational miscommunication that implies. And it unlocks a conversation about the thorny, culturally nuanced issue of consent.

“I wanted to write an Edmonton story,” says McNeil, whose own family background includes Jamaican grandparents, and roots in both Alberta and Ontario. “I was very fortunate to grow up (here) with a lot of Jamaican connections in the Caribbean community that came to Alberta for work.” She calls Ms. Pat’s Kitchen “a little ode to my community. I wanted to celebrate my culture, the food, the people….”

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen by Jameela McNeil, Nextfest 2024. Graphic supplied.

The initial idea that took McNeil into Ms. Pat’s Kitchen was “writing about a mother-daughter relationship, miscommunication between the younger and older generations, and bridging the gap so they can see each other and understand each other….” The 18-year-old daughter is “at that stage of life that’s a real shift for people, and for their parents.”

“We all have a story…. Of the five characters, four of them are women. I want to create women that (emphasize) we’re not all the same. Our dreams, our aspirations are different. We are all our own person.”

Says McNeil, a conversation about the difficult thorny issue of consent comes up. “In previous generations, there was no real way to talk about it…. We deal in different ways” across the age gap.

Jameela McNeil, Kristen Alter, Jesse Lipscombe in John Ware Reimagined. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux Photography 2017

As an actor McNeil had caught the eye of directors across town and beyond, not long after graduating from MacEwan theatre arts in 2017. Audiences have seen her at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, the Mayfield, the Citadel (The Color Purple in 2019). It was at Workshop West in 2017 that a life-changer of a role came her way — one whose reverb would find its way into the playwriting and producing branches of her expanding theatre career. She played the wife of the real-life title character of Cheryl Foggo’s John Ware Reimagined, a fascinating 19th century Black Albertan cowboy hero whose outlines have blurred in the mists of our white-centric historical consciousness. It was the first time, McNeil has said, that she’d been part of a story that grappled with Black history.

As a kid she’d written short stories and poems. And she’d been attracted to screen-writing in high school (“I let that dream go when the pandemic happened”). For Orange Skies, “my first play,” which she worked on as part of Tarragon Theatre’s Young Playwright Unit, “I did a lot of digging into the history of the Black experience in the 50s and 60s, in Alberta and Ontario.” In the program’s cohort of three emerging playwrights, McNeil found an inspiring mentor in Makram Ayache (The Hooves Belonged To The Deer).

And while she was part of the Stratford Festival company last year, (Much Ado About Nothing, Les Belles Soeurs, The Wedding Band), McNeil was part of the RBC Emerging Artist Program, as a writer. On her days off, she met, on Zoom, with mentors like playwright Foggo. “I”m a big fan of her work,” says McNeil, who starred in Foggo’s Heaven at Lunchbox Theatre in Calgary in 2022.

Her growing interest in Black Albertan history and emigré cultures has led to Black Arts Hub. Its debut venture is Ms. Pat’s Kitchen, but there will be more, McNeil says. The collective is about “connecting Black artists in different disciplines who might not otherwise meet each other,” across diaspora cultures. “When people move to Edmonton, I hope to be the somebody they can connect with.”

Not only is Nextfest a showcase for her new play, “which has room to grow” into something bigger and longer, the festival’s program of workshops includes how-to training for new theatre producers. McNeil, now in her late 20s, is a keen student. “I didn’t know what it took to create a production. I’ve learned a lot!”

“I’m trying things out,” she says, which might be a Nextfest mantra in itself. “I have a lot of community in Edmonton, and that includes the theatre community as well….” No matter where a burgeoning career takes her, “I’ll always be connected to Edmonton.”

Check out 12thnight’s survey of theatre at Nextfest, a preview with festival director Ellen Chorley. And an interview with Nextfest playwright Tori Kibblewhite here. 

Ms. Pat’s Kitchen continues on the Nextfest 2024 mainstage Tuesday  at 8 p.m., Saturday at 7 p.m. More details and tickets: nextfest.ca.