Winning Formula

Playwright and mathematician John Mighton. (Chris Chapman/Canadian Press)

A prize-winning playwright with a PhD in mathematics and an educator who believes math is the easiest subject for kids to learn, John Mighton has spent a career challenging stereotypes. But now here he is, inadvertently living up to a classic one: the absent-minded professor.

It’s a holiday Monday and I’ve just met Mighton, author of the hit play Half Life, at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences on the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. We’re about to head out for a lunch interview when he realizes he’s accidentally locked his money and keys inside his office. When he calls campus security, the rule-bound guard who arrives says she can’t let him in without seeing his ID, which, unfortunately, he’s also neglected to bring with him.

However, fame has its advantages. Mighton leads her downstairs to a bulletin board on the main floor and points to one of the many posted clippings about him – an article in Maclean’s, complete with a big colour photo. “OK, I guess that’s you,” she says grudgingly and proceeds to unlock the door.

Later, when we’ve settled into our seats at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant, Mighton apologizes for playing the distracted academic. Put it down to lack of sleep – he’s been working 15-hour days to prepare new workbooks for JUMP, his acclaimed program for teaching children math. It’s JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) that’s landed Mighton so much publicity in recent years and made him the poster boy of the Fields Institute. But now, thanks to Half Life, which won him his second Governor General’s Award last year, he’s back in the theatre spotlight, too.

A beautifully crafted drama about love and memory, Half Life was Mighton’s first new play in almost a decade, and its success has sparked fresh interest in his back catalogue. Not surprisingly, the early work that’s been getting the most attention is The Little Years, a play that expresses the impetus behind JUMP in poignant dramatic terms. Originally presented on a shoestring in 1995 for a Toronto theatre conference, it’s being revived this fall as a major co-production between Halifax’s Neptune Theatre and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

“People are especially interested in this play right now,” says Mighton, a soft-spoken 49-year-old whose dark hair is threaded with silver. “It had a revival in Vancouver recently that got extremely good reviews, but this is its first big mainstage production.” The Neptune-NAC staging is directed by Leah Cherniak and features a cast led by seasoned Toronto actor Tanja Jacobs and Julie Stewart, late of TV’s Cold Squad.

The Little Years tells the story of Kate, a brilliant but socially awkward child growing up in the 1950s, whose original scientific thinking is misunderstood and discouraged by her teachers and her widowed mother. The principal of Kate’s school trots out the old cliché that girls don’t have the mental capabilities for science and recommends she be taught a vocation.

Over the decades, Mighton traces Kate’s devolution into a bitter, unfulfilled woman trapped in a series of secretarial jobs, while her popular brother William soars to success as a celebrated poet.

She's a brainiac: Krystin Pellerin plays a young math prodigy in the Neptune Theatre and National Arts Centre co-production of John Mighton's The Little Years. (Courtesy Neptune Theatre)

Mighton says the tale of Kate’s wasted potential was partly inspired by his own experiences as a private math tutor, when he discovered that children who were supposedly “unteachable” could understand and even excel at the subject if they were given plenty of practice and positive reinforcement.

“I’d seen some amazing changes in my students. In fact, one of my first students, who was struggling then, has just finished his doctorate in math,” he says. “I recognized how effective the school system is at closing doors on people and making them feel that there are barriers, and that’s what Kate expresses.”

Mighton also faced those barriers himself. As a boy growing up in Hamilton, he loved math as much as writing, but after almost flunking a calculus course in his first year at the University of Toronto, he became convinced he didn’t have a mind for numbers. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s, a successful dramatist with a master’s degree in philosophy, that he returned to the U of T and, by dint of persistence, earned his own math doctorate.

“What really changed me profoundly [at that time] was recognizing that the stuff I’d originally found impossible on tests had become really easy once I’d had a chance to practise the material and absorb it properly,” he says. “Students rarely have that opportunity once they fail. They shut themselves off because of their own fears and insecurities, while adults judge them as being incapable.”

That realization sowed the seeds for JUMP, which Mighton founded in 1998. What began as a teaching experiment, with Mighton and a bunch of his theatre pals (including Half Life director Daniel Brooks) working one-on-one with mathematically challenged kids in the playwright’s spacious apartment, has since grown into an international movement.

Today, there are about 400 volunteer JUMP tutors and the program has been adopted by school boards in Alberta, British Columbia and Manitoba, as well as by individual schools in Ontario, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. The accompanying JUMP workbooks sold 30,000 copies last year.

In addition to heading the not-for-profit organization, Mighton continues to tutor several students. Add to that his mathematical research into graph theory at the Fields, and it’s no wonder it takes him a while to write a new play. But it’s clear he sees JUMP as an important contribution to current education that outweighs his desire for personal artistic success. His attitude is reflected in The Little Years, where the overarching theme is the pliant and deceptive qualities of time.

Kate’s poet brother William and his friend Roger – a painter who can’t live down an embarrassing 1970s comparison to Barry Manilow – are motivated by the quest for artistic immortality, only to see their reputations wane over time. But Kate, despite living a life of dull obscurity, discovers that her scientific diaries have inadvertently inspired her precocious teenage niece.

“There’s a suggestion in the play that Kate passes on something to a single person that’s more vital than William’s widely known work,” says Mighton. “I think we’ve lost this sense of biological or immediate immortality that comes from affecting your generation, your society or even your small circle of friends. We don’t value those things enough, especially as artists, because we’re obsessed with this abstract notion of immortality.”

Mighton’s own artistic reputation has grown slowly since he first garnered attention with the play Scientific Americans in 1988. Until Half Life, his best-known play was the metaphysical whodunit Possible Worlds, which won him his first Governor General’s Award in 1992 and was turned into a film by Robert Lepage. Last year, Mighton’s small but impressive body of work was recognized with the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize, Canada’s richest theatre award.

The Little Years isn’t the only Mighton play on tap this season. Brooks’s Necessary Angel Theatre Company continues to tour its superb production of Half Life, with engagements in Vancouver and Winnipeg and a reprise in Toronto at CanStage. Meanwhile, the playwright will be workshopping a new play with Brooks and resuming his collaboration with Lepage on a stage adaptation of physicist-author Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which promises to explain string theory using a string quartet.

Mighton, whose playwriting feeds his math studies and vice versa, believes the typical separation of art and science is another barrier that needs to be knocked down. “That’s another instance of our cultural stupidity,” he says. “It shouldn’t be strange that people like me are doing both things. [The idea that the two are mutually exclusive] is simply another product of our education system. It’s an illusion.”

The Little Years runs until Nov. 4 at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax and Nov. 8 to 25 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.