To many, a night out at the theatre is simple entertainment. To Lise Ann Johnson, the artistic director at the Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC), it’s an important forum for community discussion.

“I’ve always thought the theatre is a little like going to church,” she said.  “I’m not a churchgoer myself, but that experience of coming together as a community to talk about something and to witness something that matters, I think it’s a bit of a religious, spiritual, civic experience.”

Johnson said she first became interested in theatre when completing an undergraduate degree in English and French literature at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.  It was there that one of her French literature professors got her involved in the dramatic arts, as he saw performance as a good way to learn other languages.

She went on to do a master's degree in drama at the University of Alberta, received a directing degree at the National Theatre School, and worked with the National Arts Centre on their play development program.

Her current job at the GCTC is a busy one. Johnson chooses which plays are performed and works with playwrights to develop their work. She said she usually directs one or two plays a season, and she takes on more of an “artistic support role” for  the others.

“The [shows] that I don’t direct, I kind of get to set up,” she said.  “I get to choose the play, I get to choose the director, and then I get to work with the director on how they want to develop that production.”

Last September, Johnson directed The Syringa Tree, written by Pamela Gien, a play about a white girl growing up in apartheid-era South Africa.

 Currently she is set to direct Heroes, which deals with three ex-soldiers living in a French veteran's home, who are facing the end of their lives.

 Johnson said the play’s strong characters and ability to be both humorous and meaningful attracted her to the piece.

 She said “The characters have all the time in the world because they don’t have much to fill up their days, and they have no time because they’re at the end of their life," she said. “I just find it so funny and moving, their desperate desire to make the most of the time they have left.”

She adds that the play should appeal to a wide variety of people, since it deals with universal subject matter.

“It’s a piece about friendship, it’s a piece about wanting to escape. . . . I think it’s a piece that a lot of people can relate to, regardless of what stage of their life they’re at.”