The Times They Are A Changing
Though this post won't be released until September 16th (with any luck that will be the day you read it, unless the guys at blogger are asleep at the switch), I am writing it on September 11th. Not exactly the cheeriest day of the year, I know, but it is a date that punctuates pretty much every facet of our lives today. So too with theatre.
Jerry Wasserman, editor of the "Modern Canadian Plays" anthology (4th edition), unwittingly hints at the perils that were about to hit the national theatre scene as his work went to press. In his introduction to the second volume of the work he devotes one of the concluding paragraphs to a lament about the collapse of the theatre publishing industry in Canada, and ends on this prophetic note:
"As I write this in the early spring of 2001, the situation is desperate but, as always, hopeful."
(I hope Wasserman will forgive me for not making a correct bibligraphic citation here - I was asleep for that class!)
A year or two later, during the Canadian Drama course that I had bought the anthology for, our professor (the much esteemed Peter Cumming), suggested that Canadian Drama (in English) could be divided, however imperfectly, into two time periods, everything before the Centennial Year of 1967, and everything after, starting with George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe as a touchstone moment.
It was then that I, the know-it-all with bad eyesight who'd gone back to school, suggested that perhaps September 11th, 2001 represented the start of a 3rd epoch in Canadian Drama. Dutifully Cumming wrote my notion on the blackboard, but we never explored the concept much further. Looking back though, perhaps I was onto something after all, even in my post-adolescent angst.
September 11th is the official reason my former employer, Theatre on the Grand, went belly up. The attacks made for jittery investors, a lot less American Tourists, and a town full of theatregoers who suddenly wanted to stay home and hold onto their children and grandchildren.
I would argue that there has also been a change in the way we make theatre. Gone are the intense debates of a "national drama" that were sparked by plays by people like David French or Judith Thompson or George F Walker (all included in Wasserman's anthology, of course). I can't think of a single play since 9/11 that has fundamentally changed the face of Canadian Theatre. Instead, I see the increasing fragmentation and struggle (like the death agony of Theatre Passe Muraille), a grasping at an ever-vanishing, ever-elusive notion of "our audience," like it was an amorphous mass who did nothing but graze in the fields between showtimes. Certainly people are trying, but is Top Gun: The Musical really the next Salt Water Moon? Is Da Kink in My Hair going to resonate like Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas? While I don't want to disparage any of these shows (all four I would highly recommend to anyone), and while their creators may have begun them before 9/11, the newer plays have come of age in a much more dangerous world.
Creativity can only flourish where it lives without fear. For the affluent creator (yes, there was a time when Canada Council grants made such a thing possible) to create plays in this country was to be like a child playing in a sandbox - no cares, no worries, and always safe in the knowledge that mom was watching us from nearby and wouldn't let anyone take us away. So it was okay to take chances, to make mistakes, to go places and do things that no one had ever done before.
But on 9/11 our mom got a broken nose for being too mean to the other kid's mommies. All of the sudden things weren't so happy in the sandbox - we realized that at any moment we too could be the ones on the plane, or even rehearsing a play in one of our fabulously designed, scantily defended theatres, and evil could touch us, and do it very easily. As a community, theatre began to fortify, with sandbags of Walt Wingfield, megamusicals (even in places like Drayton and Stratford!) and British Farces, with a steady stream of Norm Foster plays as cover fire. Thus we created Fortress Theatre - where we could be safe, where we could generate enough revenue to keep the home fires burning, and weather the economic storm. Unfortunately this had a bad effect on the creative juices, and we are just now starting to reassert ourselves, to give ourselves the permission to take chances once again.
At least I am. More to follow on that tomorrow.
Jerry Wasserman, editor of the "Modern Canadian Plays" anthology (4th edition), unwittingly hints at the perils that were about to hit the national theatre scene as his work went to press. In his introduction to the second volume of the work he devotes one of the concluding paragraphs to a lament about the collapse of the theatre publishing industry in Canada, and ends on this prophetic note:
"As I write this in the early spring of 2001, the situation is desperate but, as always, hopeful."
(I hope Wasserman will forgive me for not making a correct bibligraphic citation here - I was asleep for that class!)
A year or two later, during the Canadian Drama course that I had bought the anthology for, our professor (the much esteemed Peter Cumming), suggested that Canadian Drama (in English) could be divided, however imperfectly, into two time periods, everything before the Centennial Year of 1967, and everything after, starting with George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe as a touchstone moment.
It was then that I, the know-it-all with bad eyesight who'd gone back to school, suggested that perhaps September 11th, 2001 represented the start of a 3rd epoch in Canadian Drama. Dutifully Cumming wrote my notion on the blackboard, but we never explored the concept much further. Looking back though, perhaps I was onto something after all, even in my post-adolescent angst.
September 11th is the official reason my former employer, Theatre on the Grand, went belly up. The attacks made for jittery investors, a lot less American Tourists, and a town full of theatregoers who suddenly wanted to stay home and hold onto their children and grandchildren.
I would argue that there has also been a change in the way we make theatre. Gone are the intense debates of a "national drama" that were sparked by plays by people like David French or Judith Thompson or George F Walker (all included in Wasserman's anthology, of course). I can't think of a single play since 9/11 that has fundamentally changed the face of Canadian Theatre. Instead, I see the increasing fragmentation and struggle (like the death agony of Theatre Passe Muraille), a grasping at an ever-vanishing, ever-elusive notion of "our audience," like it was an amorphous mass who did nothing but graze in the fields between showtimes. Certainly people are trying, but is Top Gun: The Musical really the next Salt Water Moon? Is Da Kink in My Hair going to resonate like Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas? While I don't want to disparage any of these shows (all four I would highly recommend to anyone), and while their creators may have begun them before 9/11, the newer plays have come of age in a much more dangerous world.
Creativity can only flourish where it lives without fear. For the affluent creator (yes, there was a time when Canada Council grants made such a thing possible) to create plays in this country was to be like a child playing in a sandbox - no cares, no worries, and always safe in the knowledge that mom was watching us from nearby and wouldn't let anyone take us away. So it was okay to take chances, to make mistakes, to go places and do things that no one had ever done before.
But on 9/11 our mom got a broken nose for being too mean to the other kid's mommies. All of the sudden things weren't so happy in the sandbox - we realized that at any moment we too could be the ones on the plane, or even rehearsing a play in one of our fabulously designed, scantily defended theatres, and evil could touch us, and do it very easily. As a community, theatre began to fortify, with sandbags of Walt Wingfield, megamusicals (even in places like Drayton and Stratford!) and British Farces, with a steady stream of Norm Foster plays as cover fire. Thus we created Fortress Theatre - where we could be safe, where we could generate enough revenue to keep the home fires burning, and weather the economic storm. Unfortunately this had a bad effect on the creative juices, and we are just now starting to reassert ourselves, to give ourselves the permission to take chances once again.
At least I am. More to follow on that tomorrow.
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