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.