Choosing her path
May 02, 2024
Theatre grad Medina Hahn’s latest success is the interactive multi-platform reconciliation story Inheritance: A Pick-the-Path-Experience.
Any professional actor will tell you that success in the industry demands a combination of talent, determination and plain old hard work. But Vancouver-based actor, singer and writer Medina Hahn, BFA ’97, would add another essential element to that equation: synchronicity. “Whether it’s synchronicity, pure chance or more of a calling, I do feel very lucky,” she says.
Certainly, there seemed to be an element of luck at work around her latest success, the reconciliation-based suspense play Inheritance: A Pick-the-Path Experience, co-written and co-performed with Daniel Arnold and Darrell Dennis, an Indigenous performer from the Secwepemc Nation, and produced by Touchstone Theatre and Alley Theatre. Following a COVID shutdown of its only live production at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre Annex in 2020, Inheritance went on to be published by Talonbooks, recorded as an interactive audio book with Penguin Publishing, filmed as a choose-your-own-adventure-style movie and shortlisted for the 2022 Governor General’s Award for English-language drama.
“We really have explored four different, interactive storytelling vehicles with this project,” says Hahn, who is Lebanese. “Not because we are crazy, but because of how important Inheritance has been—and how important the discussions are—for all of us.”
Each audience member at the Annex’s Inheritance production had a personal handheld controller to cast a vote at critical times. The action begins with an immigrant/settler urban couple (Hahn and Arnold) on a getaway to visit her father at his rural estate. But when they arrive, they find him missing and a local Indigenous man (Dennis) staying there instead. The couple asks the man to leave… and, with an anonymous click, the audience chooses what happens next. The audience is very much in control as this story of colonial land rights unfolds with humour, suspense and a race against time. There are over 50 possible variations in the journey
Hahn worked hard during her time in UVic’s Theatre department.
“It was all about giving us a well-rounded view of what it meant to be part of a theatre company, so you had a lot of respect for everyone’s different jobs when you did get cast in a professional show. UVic allowed us to see all the angles—in a funny way, it made us all jack-of-all-trades.”
Those skills turned out to be essential when she followed up her UVic degree by attending the University of Alberta, where she first met her longtime creative partner, Daniel Arnold.
The two established their own production company, DualMinds, and had immediate success co-writing and touring a string of notable plays, such as the award-winning Tuesdays and Sundays (2000)—which had radio adaptations on both CBC (starring Hahn and Arnold) and BBC (featuring future Doctor Who’s David Tennant)—and Any Night (2008), which eventually earned an Off-Broadway run. Together, they were also chosen by acclaimed Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor to receive the Siminovitch Prize Protégé Award in 2008.
But Inheritance owes its origins to another stroke of luck, when they were both cast in a 2011 Kamloops production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal alongside future co-writer Darrell Dennis. “Daniel loves structure and had wanted to do a choose-your-own-adventure play for years, and he brought it up again when we were all in Betrayal. He was throwing around the idea of people squatting in a house or cabin and talked to Darrell about the idea of an inheritance—what we’re given, what we inherit and how we deal with that.”
The story continued to develop over the next few years as BC began implementing land acknowledgements, Arnold became more interested in learning about Canada’s true history and Hahn’s personal life changed. She married a Vancouver restaurateur, who astoundingly, owned an establishment called Medina. They started a family. But Arnold kept hitting walls and couldn’t move forward with it, so he approached Dennis and Hahn about coming on board as co-writers in 2017. That’s when they started looking at Indigenous versus settler points of view, and adding in an immigrant female perspective to help find the heart of the story.
“Daniel is always heady and analytical while I’m more like the heartbeat of our work, but this was my first time writing a new play since having children,” she says. “I had so much to learn about Canada’s true history, all the things we were never taught in school. It became a great example of how theatre can push essential conversations and put new concepts in front of audiences. If you make it interesting—like giving the audience controllers and having on-stage screens come down—then it’s like a video-game experience in which the audience votes for the outcome.”
Choosing her own adventure
Regardless of format, Hahn says it’s essential that Inheritance remains a character-driven, not concept-driven, story. “We really didn’t want any of the 50 variations to be cop-outs, where you choose a path but then the story just loops back to where we wanted people to go anyway,” she says.
While shooting on the film adaption wrapped in 2023, she doesn’t expect it out until 2025 (a North American book tour is being planned in the meantime). “The theatrical release will have a linear path, but I’m sure there’ll be some festival screenings where people will have controllers,” she explains. “The goal is when you’re at home, you can just tell Alexa which path you want to take. Both Netflix and Amazon have interactive platforms for watching it online.”
Ultimately, Hahn feels Inheritance has a much-needed message for our troubled times.
“The anonymity of the online experience allows people to say the most hateful things that they would never say publicly—it’s just shocking, and it’s not allowing for conversation to happen anymore. Which is why Inheritance is so refreshing and was such a gift to be a part of: the conversations we all had to have to create it were very difficult. But the goal was to create an understanding of all points of view, and for no side of the conversation to be the ‘right’ one.”
Hahn clearly recalls being in a cabin together with Dennis and Arnold as part of the Playwrights Lab at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, discussing questions like, “What does reconciliation mean?” and “What would it entail?”
“We were in a safe environment, and we knew we cared about each other, so we were able to have these tough conversations,” she says. “That’s an essential part of creating art, yet it’s just so hard to do in the world now: everyone’s on their devices and fighting for their own point of view. I wish we could all have those conversations in our own lives—but if we can’t do it in life, at least we can still do it in art.”
—John Threlfall, BA '96
This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.
For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.