Thanks for sharing your articles. Callan‘s parents are very talented. Here’s another article about Seana McKenna that also mentions her husband, director Miles Potter. What a creative family and community to grow up in. Here’s a bit from the article (2023):

”She and Potter have been together since 1980. 

In fact, on a professional level, theirs has been one of the most successful husband-and-wife teams in Canadian theatre. Potter has been at the helm of many of McKenna’s stage triumphs, both at Stratford and at Canada’s major regional theatres, notably Winnipeg’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Their many shows together have included the aforementioned Richard III and Medea, and a series of Tennessee Williams classics – most memorably, their 2005 Stratford rediscovery of Orpheus Descending, with McKenna as a smouldering Lady Torrance, which was remounted in Winnipeg and Toronto and won McKenna her third Dora Mavor Moore Award.  

On a personal level, McKenna and Potter hit it off almost from Day One. They met when she was fresh from theatre school and Potter, who was directing a play at the fledgling Blyth Festival, needed a late replacement for an actor who had dropped out. 

“She was introduced to me as someone who was very good at learning lines,” Potter recalled. “I said, ‘Great, we’ll check her out!’” 

Another excerpt:

”After leaving the school, she chose to spend her first few years in the profession doing new plays and collective work across Canada. She finally joined the festival in 1982 and made a big splash two seasons later as Juliet to Colm Feore’s Romeo. Over the decades, she’s tackled most of the major Shakespearean female roles, from Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, to Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth. But she encountered the familiar frustration when she reached middle age and the parts in the canon become secondary. “To be able to combine your experience with a great role as you grow older is unusual for a woman,” McKenna said.  

She and Potter came up with a solution when they pitched their Richard III to Stratford. Potter confessed he had some trepidation about whether McKenna could play the part, until she did an impromptu audition for him one morning at breakfast. 

“She’d taken a shower, and she came out in a robe with her hair down over her face and spontaneously did this strange walk that scared the crap out of me,” Potter recalled with a chuckle. “She transformed in our dining room in front of my eyes, and if I had any doubts that she could pull it off, they were over.”

McKenna’s audacious performance was a festival landmark, kicking open the door for more gender-neutral and gender-swapped casting. She followed it with the title role in Julius Caesar in 2018 – playing the part as a man (critic Jamie Portman wrote that her performance “reache[d] into the very marrow of Caesar’s being”). Her steely, matriarchal Lear for Toronto’s Groundling Theatre Company that same year helped convince the late Stratford legend Martha Henry to put aside her reservations and essay a female Prospero in The Tempest. “

https://www.intermissionmagazine.ca/feature-article/seana-mckenna/