If you had visited the Young People’s Theatre website on February 4, 2019, you’d have found nine different shows on offer. YPT suggests an appropriate age or grade range for each show: The Code, for example, is recommended for “Grades 8–12 | Ages 13 & up”; The 26 Letter Dance is appropriate for “JK–Grade 5 | Ages 4–8”; and One Thing Leads to Another is “for ages 3–12 months.” Months.

And this isn’t a one-time thing. One Thing Leads to Another premiered at YPT in 2016 and this year, after a YPT remount, toured four Ontario cities, Montreal and Vancouver.

One Thing Leads to Another is credited as “A Collective Collaboration by Maja Ardal, Audrey Dwyer, Mary Francis Moore and Julia Tribe.” Maja is a friend and colleague, and a very talented theatre artist with a long history of significant contribution to theatre. Also, I should admit that I haven’t seen One Thing Leads to Another. But I’ve read a bunch of reviews, all very positive. According to Toronto’s Now magazine,

The room’s floor is covered with carpet, blankets, cushions and toys; the actors first greet the parents, grandparents and infants with hellos, smiles and peek-a-boo games. The show itself, about 20 minutes long, starts in black and white, with sounds and visual cues passed between actors and audience. Dancing, hand-holding and some simple three-note, wordless melodies are also part of the production, which moves into colour with the appearance of silk flags and ribbons, bubbles, bells, hoops and different sized balls. Pattern and play are key to the staging. A large piece of long blue silk envelops the audience and later becomes water, flowers grow and kitchen implements become a mini orchestra.¹

Theatre for babies is not unique to Canada. An article in the April 20, 2016, issue of the New Yorker described a Northern Irish production, “billed as an ‘immersive theatre experience for babies,’” presented by New Victory Theatre in New York City:

Eight infants attended the 10 a.m. performance of “Babble,” which was staged within a blue geodesic dome … The audience, young and old, entered the dome, which was lit inside in a soothing twilight blue … Then four young women in white lace dresses – they looked like maidens from an Irish meadow – stood up: “‘Babble’ is an adventure that’s been made especially for your babies, and so however they want to experience it is absolutely fine.” The show lasted twenty minutes. For the finale, the dome was lit up like a twinkling galaxy of stars. “Fly, fly, fish, fly, fly, high!” the performers sang. The babies lay on their backs, blissing out. The adults seemed just as placid.²

According to Rob Weinert-Kendt in a 2010 American Theatre article, shows for babies “have been a staple of European and Australian theatre for two decades.”³ Linda Hartzell, artistic director of Seattle Children’s Theatre, says she saw “a stunning piece in Denmark in 1990. It was for 35 toddlers who came in in their little snowsuits; it was magical.” Tony Mack, an Australian artist, suggests, “Theatre for the very young may well be on the cutting edge of theatre practice, as it asks such basic questions as, ‘What is theatre?’ and ‘What is a human being?’” Kim Peter Kovac, director of youth and family programs at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, asks, “Can we create a dramaturgy for babies?”

It seems to me that baby theatre is in its infancy. Thus far, it’s been theatre for babies. What about theatre by babies? And most baby theatre is about nothing. According to the Toronto Star, actors in One Thing Leads to Another “blew bubbles, hummed, played peek-a-boo, waved colourful silks, and banged on pots and pans.”⁴ Next it’ll be baby talk. Why not scripts with a little muscle? Why not My Battle with the Bottle? Or Travelling down the Birth Canal: The Musical? Or I Nearly Got Aborted! Based on a True Story. Another thing: why aren’t babies writing the reviews? None of the reviews even quoted babies – everything was through the eyes of adults. “He loved it so much he pooped his pants,” said one mother.⁵ That’s just demeaning. I’ve had the same reaction to several plays, and not because I loved them.

In early 2018 Talk Is Free Theatre, based in Barrie, Ontario, promoted a show called The Curious Voyage:

Talk Is Free Theatre (TIFT) presents Canada’s largest ever, intercontinental immersive theatre experience with The Curious Voyage, running Oct. 23 to Nov. 10, 2018 in Barrie, Canada and London, England. Taking place over three days, the theatrical adventure will provide a unique, personal experience for every audience member, surprising them with curious artistic encounters as they inhabit new worlds in Barrie, Canada and London, England. The experience culminates in a site-specific mystery musical (a well-known Tony Award–winning work), a story that extends and reflects the journey of the previous three days. $1,950 single / $3,600 double plus flights & meals.⁶

I repeat: $1,950 each, not including flights and meals; $3,600 for two.

The Curious Voyage is the brainchild of Arkady Spivak, artistic director of TIFT. There were eight separate three-day performances, each with a capacity of 36. The play attracted a fair bit of coverage: two articles in the Toronto Star, CBC’s Q, a three-part review in a blog called The Slotkin Letter, businessinsider.com, the National Post, Time Out London. In an interview with Lori Wolf-Heffner, Mitchell Cushman, the Canadian who directed the mystery musical, explained the point of the exercise:

“I find that if you’re offering people an experience that they feel like they’re going to remember for the rest of their lives, then you actually start getting people’s attention. The hardest thing in theatre is to be anonymous,” he says. “There’s all sorts of research, especially for the Millennial generation, that people are spending less money on physical things and more money on experiences,” he says. He believes the time could not be better to offer immersive theatre, because it harnesses the power of the live performance.⁷

According to Karen Fricker in the Toronto Star, the production cost $650,000, which came “almost entirely from government grants, and private and corporate fundraising; only 4 per cent comes from ticket sales.”⁸ The expenses included “some 52 flights” for the producers, creative team and performers.

In case you missed it the first time, the TIFT website informs us that The Curious Voyage will return:

On the heels of a triumphant premiere in London, UK, Talk Is Free Theatre’s The Curious Voyage, the innovative audience-specific immersive theatrical experience, will transfer to Toronto in spring 2020. The upcoming version of The Curious Voyage will offer two-day and one-day experience options created especially and uniquely for each individual patron, whereby who they are or what they each bring to the journey will influence the artistic outcome.⁹

We’re told that The Curious Voyage is made possible with the “generous support” of a few private sources and several government and quasi-government sources, including the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, Bruce Grey Simcoe, Downtown Barrie, the City of Barrie, Tourism Simcoe County, County of Simcoe and the Ontario Arts Council.

But apparently there will be no remount of “Canada’s largest ever, intercontinental immersive theatre experience,” as this iteration of The Curious Voyage will be confined to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Another item of interest: TIFT’s website informs us that this past January the company hosted the YPT production of One Thing Leads to Another.¹⁰

Back to the real question: Can we create a dramaturgy for babies?

I think we already have. In American Theatre, Weinert-Kendt tells us:

A few clear best practices have developed: Shows are staged in non-traditional spaces with cushions or blankets rather than proper theatre seats … Shows invariably begin with the performers already moving around the space and welcoming the audience. Official running times almost never exceed 45 minutes, though there’s often some time for unstructured play built in post-show, and cast sizes tend to be very small, not only for reasons of dollars-and-cents economy but because small children can only follow so many people at once. There are no sudden lighting changes.¹¹

But can we create a dramaturgy for the 1 per cent?

I’m not sure. More experimentation is in order. Maybe Paris instead of London.

This is how some very bright and very talented professional theatre artists spend their time. And my peers on arts juries – i.e., other professional theatre artists – award them money for doing plays for babies and the superrich.

We artists like to claim that we are truth-tellers – “canaries in the coal mine.” Maybe that was true at one time. Today, artists might be ostriches in the coal mine; or maybe we’re not in the coal mine at all.

Continue reading “Ostriches in the Coal Mine” →

1. Vaudevillians in the Monashees

Getting to Room Temperature is a one-person play about my mother’s polite quest for euthanasia. The main and only character is a lot like me, but we decided to hire a real actor, Robert Bockstael. We did several test presentations, and the response was excellent. We were accepted at Ottawa’s 2016 undercurrents festival, where we broke attendance records and got great reviews. We then took Room Temperature to a small festival in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Success in Canadian theatre means having a “midsize theatre company” buy one’s production (the script, actors, set, etc.: the whole show) or buy the rights to produce the script. Either would typically result in a two- to four-week run in a 200-seat theatre.

Theatre companies were uninterested. But the artistic director of a community cultural centre in the Okanagan Valley, who had read about the play on Facebook, wanted to buy the show, and she also had interested colleagues in other B.C. towns. Community cultural centres, typically, buy one performance and stick it in a 400- to 600-seat theatre. While “theatre companies” present or produce theatre, “community cultural centres” rarely produce anything but present a bit of everything – mostly music and musical plays and standup comedy. Room Temperature – “a hard-hitting, sentimental and funny one-person play about dying” – is not their usual fare.

In March, we did nine performances over three weeks in six B.C. locations: on the Gulf Islands, in the Interior and in a Vancouver suburb.

It was fantastic. We crossed oceans and mountains. We performed in cavernous auditoriums and, on the Gulf Islands, in rustic community halls. We were vaudevillians in the Monashees. Audiences laughed and cried and more than half the audience stayed for talkbacks. They, along with hospice and palliative care workers, told us: you got it exactly right. The tour was lucrative and fun and gratifying.

In Toronto, I described the experience to colleagues. The response was amazement and admiration: “You escaped the professional theatre circuit.” “You did a play on a topical and important issue.” “You connected with actual people.”

All that brought to mind my column in the last issue of Inroads about how the meaning and practice of political theatre has changed over the years.¹ We used to care about content; now our concern is “the participation of ‘target groups’ (e.g., women, Aboriginals, visible minorities). In the case of target groups, this redefinition of ‘political’ was enforced by arts funding bodies.”

Recently, in the Globe and Mail, J. Kelly Nestruck wrote, “Following a couple of years of programming in which Tarragon, a Toronto contemporary theatre, has fallen short on representing the diversity of contemporary Toronto, this season could be seen as a step forward.” Artistic Director Richard Rose explained the change in his theatre’s programming: “Obviously, the priorities within the Canada Council have changed, so we’re trying to acknowledge that.”²

Tarragon is perhaps Canada’s most important theatre (measured in new plays that have had subsequent productions). Its artistic director confesses that he changed his theatre’s mandate because a government agency told him to. And there’s not a whimper.

In his 2007 history of modern music, Alex Ross writes, “To the cynical onlooker, orchestras and opera houses are stuck in a museum culture, playing to a dwindling cohort of aging subscribers and would-be elitists who take satisfaction from technically expert if soulless renditions of Hitler’s favorite works.”³ Yes, that’s pretty cynical. But artists must from time to time entertain such negativity. To transpose Ross’s aphorism to midsize and small Canadian theatres: artists work for dismal wages to perform technically proficient, obscure plays for an artistically pretentious sector of the upper middle class.

Since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve been asking ourselves, “How do we breach the cultural divide?” Maybe the simplest answer is: get out of the big cities. Big cities are the home of liberalism and formal experimentation and government-enforced cultural diversity. Big cities are the home of theatre companies. Big cities are where we talk among ourselves.

Small cities and suburbs are the home of community cultural centres and Trump supporters. And that’s where we took our sweet story about a mother and son, our fairly sophisticated (I hope) exploration of death in the rich countries, and our discussion of assisted suicide. This is what we said about Canada’s most famous anti–assisted suicide campaigner:

Here’s what Margaret Somerville gets wrong. She thinks we’re in danger of going from a world in which God decides when we die, to one in which strangers decide. But in fact we’re long past God deciding. Science and society have extended our lives, not God. If Somerville wants God to decide, we’ll have to get rid of not just the vaccines and penicillin, but – let’s admit it – the unions and public health care and the welfare state. And we’ll have to go back to dying at 40 instead of 80.⁴

All in all, it seems an important message to carry across the cultural divide.

2. The Walmart effect

Canada and the United States have lost quite a few jobs in manufacturing, and almost all unskilled, nonunionized work pays less than it used to. People blame computers, free trade or immigrants, or all three. But there might be a simpler, proximate cause.

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in 1962. By 1990 Walmart was the largest retailer in the United States and in 2000 its worldwide workforce reached one million. According to Wikipedia, “Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2016, as well as the largest private employer in the world with 2.3 million employees.”

In Wal-Mart: The Bully of Bentonville, Anthony Bianco suggests that there are many secrets to Walmart’s success.⁵ It was, for example, a pioneer in the use and development of technology, setting the pace for stock management and “just-in-time” delivery. In 1987, Walmart developed its own private satellite communication system – the largest in the United States.

As resistance to its expansion grew, the company sought to reshape its image. In 2010, Walmart committed $2 billion to ending hunger in the United States and, soon after, declared its commitment to sustainable agriculture, local farming and providing affordable, high-quality and healthy food.

There was one point, however, on which Walmart would not budge. From the start, Walmart insisted on the lowest wage package possible. It paid minimum wage or slightly above. It forced employees to work split shifts. It kept work hours and length of employment below the level at which statutory benefits and income security would kick in.

Keeping pay down meant keeping trade unions out. On the very few occasions in which employees successfully organized, Walmart reacted brutally. A month after being forced to sign a first contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), representing workers in Jonquière, Quebec, the company shut the store.

Not surprisingly, Walmart’s low-wage strategy influenced most of its retail competitors. But it wasn’t just retail. Before Walmart, suppliers set prices. When Walmart grew powerful enough to make offers that could not be refused, suppliers too were forced to cut costs – by reducing wages, replacing workers or going offshore.

How does one measure the impact of Walmart’s low-wage strategy? How does one compare that with the impact of technological change, free trade and immigration? I have no idea. An interesting project for an economist, no doubt.

But here’s some wisdom gained from hindsight: We should have put a lot more effort into helping the UFCW’s organizing efforts. We should have sat down in front of Walmart distribution centres instead of G7 meetings. It should perhaps have been the left’s absolute priority.

All that might be closing the barn door long after the horses have fled. But here’s another thing:

When you talk to these people, they are still bitter about the trade issue, furious about what was done to them. They worked their butts off for Bill Clinton, and look what he did to them. Then they worked their butts off for Barack Obama – they turned over their treasury to the Democrats and they went door to door – organized labour had one demand to Barack Obama … they wanted “Card Check,” to make it easier to organize a union … Do you think he got that passed when he had both houses of Congress? He did nothing. He just let it die.

So here’s something else we might do to reach out to those who might vote for a Canadian Donald Trump: Make it a lot easier for people in the private sector to join a union.

Continue reading “Across the great divide” →

To live outside the law, you must be honest.
— Bob Dylan, “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” 1966

It happened that my wife and I were discussing sixties music one day in October. Her parents, longtime CCF-NDP activists, had listened to Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. I suggested that her parents selected their music according to their politics. Whereas I, a half-generation younger, selected my politics according to my music – chiefly, the songs of Bob Dylan.

The next morning we learned Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. For three days, Jennifer and I listened to “early” Dylan: his first seven LPs, recorded between 1962 and 1966. I’d been a fan since the release of the third of these, The Times They Are a-Changin’, in 1964. I was 14.

I didn’t just listen to Dylan. I learned to play the guitar in 1968, and within a couple of years I’d memorized the words to perhaps 50 of those early songs. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that those songs laid the foundation for the person I am. There is, for example, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s anthem to equality and humility and the difficult lesson of learning you’re just like everyone else:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? …
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.
How does it feel?

There’s this from “To Ramona”:

I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one
And no one is better than you.

From “Chimes of Freedom”:

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

From “My Back Pages” (rumoured to be Dylan’s farewell to “the movement”):

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school.
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow.
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.

From “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”:

I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff;
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough,
But the joke was on me,
There was nobody even there to bluff;
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough.

From: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you;
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you;
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore;
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

From “One Too Many Mornings”:

It’s a restless hungry feeling that don’t mean no one no good,
When everything I’m a-sayin’ you can say it just as good.
You’re right from your side, I’m right from mine.
We’re both just one too many mornings an’ a thousand miles behind.

And there are Dylan’s stories about the American underclass as told in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and my personal favourite, “North Country Blues”:

Come gather ’round friends
And I’ll tell you a tale
Of when the red iron ore pits run plenty,
But the cardboard-filled windows
And old men on the benches
Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

Of course, none of this means Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize. I’m pleased, because I think we artists are too prone to celebrating the obscure. As for those who fear that the selection committee has damaged by stretching too thin the category “literature,” let me quote Dylan’s friend and colleague Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
— “Anthem,” 1992

The Nobel committee made a crack and let in a bit of light.

When Canadian theatre was born in the late sixties, it had, like the decade, a left-wing and nationalist temperament. There was no funding for the arts at the time, and there were a total of six Canadian plays in existence, so if you were going to found a theatre company dedicated to the production of Canadian political plays, you had to be obstreperous – which might be an apt description of the era’s artistic directors and theatre companies like TWP, Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre, Globe Theatre (Regina). There was one Canadian playwright – George Ryga – so, not surprisingly, a lot of the early plays were collective creations. And the target was a general audience, not theatre artists, of whom there were too few to fill a Volkswagen van.

That’s the theatre world I entered when, in 1976, I started working with Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company. Founded a year earlier (we were a bit late to the party), GCTC was dedicated to producing Canadian and political plays. “Canadian” meant written by Canadians, and “political” meant, to us, political parties, history, social issues. It was pretty broad, but not borderless; “the personal is political” and “everything is political” were not GCTC slogans.

In the beginning, GCTC productions came from Canada’s small repertoire of political plays: Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe; Carol Bolt’s Buffalo Jump; The Mummers Troupe’s Company Town; Sharon Pollack’s Komagata Maru Incident. When these ran out, the company commissioned plays or its members wrote collectively or individually. Slowly, GCTC’s work was being recognized, especially after a 1982 tour of Sandinista!, a collective creation about the Nicaraguan revolution.

I was made resident playwright about then, and my annual contribution was always explicitly political: Zero Hour (the CIA in Central America), Cheap Thrills (poverty), Learning to Live with Personal Growth (poverty again), 1997 (the future of work).

It wasn’t long, however, before the theatre world passed us by.

In those early years, GCTC was a “collective”: everyone was paid the same, and all full-time staff were members of the board. We had an artistic director, but also an “artistic direction committee,” which voted on the season. These structures were seen as more or less important by various members at various times; but we all understood – well, let’s say most of us understood – that what made GCTC political was not what happened offstage, but the content of the plays. We were willing to compromise on everything but that.

Increasingly, however, out there in the broader theatre world, “political” had come or was coming to mean other things: “formal experimentation” or the manner of creation (e.g., collective creation or improvisation), or the participation of “target groups” (e.g., women, Aboriginals, visible minorities). In the case of target groups, this redefinition of “political” was enforced by arts funding bodies, and in the case of formal experimentation and manner of creation, by artists on juries.

The explicit political content that GCTC specialized in back then has been largely abandoned. Such plays still get written, of course, but they’re seldom produced. Consider plays like Michael Healey’s Proud (2012), George F. Walker’s Dead Metaphor (2013), Tommy Taylor’s You Should Have Stayed Home (2010), my own Facts (2010), or The Public Servant (2015), a collective creation from Common Boots Theatre (whose artistic director, Jennifer Brewin, and I are married). All (especially mine!) are intelligent, funny and provocative plays on important political/social subjects. All these plays have been successful with audiences and reviewers, but not with Canada’s artistic directors.

Facts’ domestic journey is not untypical. It has enjoyed international success: it toured Palestine and Israel in Arabic; it ran for a month in London, England, to sold-out houses and rave reviews; and I believe it is still running in rep in Istanbul in Turkish. In Canada, however, after a successful premiere at GCTC, it has been self-produced and produced by United Players, a “community theatre” in Vancouver. Reversing centuries of cliché, amateur theatre companies are now more adventurous than our professional theatres.

The Public Servant was a major hit at GCTC (100 per cent attendance) and also, recently, in Toronto in a Common Boots–Nightwood coproduction, but no one else has picked it up. What is going on in the brains of artistic directors in Canada’s capital cities I can’t imagine.

There is a counterexample: “Whether it is home invasions or bullying among young girls, few Canadian playwrights are as acutely tuned to contemporary issues as Vancouver’s Joan MacLeod,” wrote Robert Crew in the Toronto Star (November 14, 2013). Her plays do get produced. The Valley, for example, has been recently produced by Alberta Theatre Projects, the Tarragon, the Belfry, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Arts Club and perhaps others.

Many will claim that financial exigency demands light entertainment. Certainly, ever lighter entertainment is the first reflex of theatre boards and artistic directors when facing financial difficulty. However, the near absence of political theatre from the stages of Canada’s midsize and large professional theatres is not due to the tastes of audiences but to the tastes of artistic directors and the boards that hire them. (Our small companies, meanwhile, busy themselves exploring new forms.)

The newspaper, wrote American humorist Finley Peter Dunne (“Mr. Dooley”), “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” I think that would be a good goal for theatres. It’s a challenge bringing theatre to the afflicted, of course – and we should do more of that.

It’s less of a challenge to afflict the comfortable. In my experience, audiences want to be challenged. They want to hear provocative and strange and uncomfortable ideas, and to be stimulated to think in new ways. They want smart, funny, dramatic plays about the world they live in. They want theatre that’s about something.

But instead, our theatres bring comfort to the comfortable – that is, they provide light entertainment for the well off. And for that, theatres get government subsidy derived from taxation of the comfortable and the afflicted, both.

I think we have to do better.

This article first appeared in #Cdncult: Reporting and commentary about Canadian performance culture in Internet times (spiderwebshow.ca/cdncult). Volume 7, Edition 7: ART & POLITICS.