What Does It Take to Be A Producer? Grace Delamere Talks ‘Sharing Is Caring’
In the week leading up to the winter solstice, I sat down with a handful of local theatre-makers to reflect on the year, learn about people’s upcoming projects, and find out what was keeping them warm through the short, dark days of December. This interview with Grace Delamere is the third in a series which will appear on the Kingston Theatre Alliance’s Performance Blog in the early months of 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How well do you know your loved ones? In Sharing Is Caring, a group of close friends finds themselves opening up in unexpected ways over the course of a night spent in an old, abandoned church. Written and produced by Grace Delamere, Sharing Is Caring is the fourth new work to be presented by Of The Sea Productions, an independent theatre production company founded in 2023.
The aptly-named company is helmed by Delamere (en Français: « de la mer »), who launched their first project, Violets Bloom in April and Marigolds in Autumn, last spring. “It was a show that I wrote, and it was put on by a fantastic team of students. It’s kind of abstract, and doesn’t follow a very specific plotline—it’s five characters struggling through existence.”
After Violets received a warm reception, Delamere was inspired to continue producing plays—“I realized how much I love giving platforms to artists.” That summer, Of The Sea produced Kathleen Greening’s The Cape As Red As Blood for TK Fringe, followed by Elsa McKnight’s EXPERIMENT 1a in the fall.
For Delamere, the best part of producing is bringing the right people together to make a project shine. “You get to hand pick this really beautiful group of humans, and that is going to make the show what it is. I’ve never once felt like I made a mistake with the people I’ve put together, because they’re all just so fantastic. As a producer, you are this leader, but you’re also putting trust in a big group of people that is creating it with you.”
Being a producer means being ready for anything. “The biggest thing is that it’s never the same. You’re essentially doing whatever is needed behind the scenes to make the show happen. If the director or creator, or really anyone comes to you and asks, ‘Can we make this happen?’, you either figure out how to, or you work with them on how to make it something that can happen. It’s so singular to each individual show.”
It also comes with tons of administrative work. “I manage all the finances for all the shows, and usually I handle the majority of the marketing. I’m lucky with Sharing is Caring—I have an assistant producer, Alina [Siwy], who’s lovely. So she’s been helping me, which is such a blessing.”
While Of The Sea Productions isn’t affiliated with Queen’s University, most of the artists who work with the company are fellow students that Delamere met through the DAN School of Drama and Music. “It’s been really special, and it’s a really talented group of students in each show.”
Sharing Is Caring is a product of that environment, too—the script began as a project for DRAM 350, a playwriting class which is now no longer offered at the university due to budget cuts in the Faculty of Arts & Science. “It was taught by Colleen Murphy. There were six of us in it, and it was one of the best things I’ve been able to do at Queen’s. Every week for three hours, we’d come and sit together and read bits of each other’s work and give each other feedback.”
The pace of the class, where students wrote a full-length play over the course of a year, was perfect for Delamere’s writing process, as was the small group size. “It was so special because Colleen Murphy is an award-winning playwright, and it’s crazy to be able to say that that was who guided me through writing it.”
Sharing Is Caring, which follows a queer friend group on Hallowe’en, examines the limits of closeness in relationships. “What’s the difference between thinking you know everything about someone because you spend all your time with them, and actually knowing that person? Is there such a thing as saying too much when it comes to your closest friends, and sometimes partners or lovers?”
The choice to write a story about gender-diverse characters was a natural one. “It’s really special to me because it’s something that I’ve lived—having an almost fully queer friend group—and it’s beautiful and awesome, and also sometimes hard, because life is hard. And I’ve never seen that experience reflected onstage. And I’m not saying my experience is everyone’s, but it’s at least a little taste of what it’s like.”
It also came from a desire to create roles that will feel good for queer actors. “Genderqueer actors don’t always get to feel like they are being represented in what they’re playing a lot of times.” Often, actors are put into male or female roles, whether or not it suits their identity. “That’s sometimes just how it works. But it’s a beautiful thing to be able to go beyond that.”
When asked what’s keeping her warm this winter, Delamere answered in true people-person fashion: “I just think that people are what keep me going. Even when it gets dark at 4pm and I’m like, ‘Well, time to go to sleep,’ the thing that keeps me out of that kind of winter funk is the people around me.
“I’ve learned to take time to appreciate more, because there are so many great people in my life, and I am so lucky to have them and to have the support system that I have. So I would say that that’s keeping me warm, and keeping me going.”
Grace Delamere (she/they) is a queer artist in their fourth year of studying drama and music at Queen’s University and she is the founder and artistic director of Of The Sea Productions, which is a new live performance production company currently based in Kingston, Ontario. Grace loves autumn, cats, and creating art with the people she loves.
‘Sharing Is Caring’ opens today and runs until February 2, 2025 in The Spire’s Performance Hall. Tickets and more information can be found here.
