{"id":439,"date":"2017-10-29T09:25:52","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T09:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/16\/?p=439"},"modified":"2023-03-19T10:43:46","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T10:43:46","slug":"english-canadian-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/16\/english-canadian-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"English-Canadian Theatre: Embracing a Country’s Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Morrow*<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 1990s, Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock said something to me that has always stuck in my head. \u201cThe faces on the stage,\u201d she observed, \u201caren\u2019t the faces on the street.\u201d I can no longer remember the exact context for her remark, though it may well have related to a woeful lack of cultural diversity in Canadian theatres at the time\u2014and perhaps more explicitly to a dearth of \u201cethnic\u201d performers in contrast to the country\u2019s multicultural population. By extension, I am certain it was a critique of English Canada\u2019s major public theatres, which were then predominantly mounting productions of British and American plays and musicals, generally those that had recently enjoyed success on Broadway and in London\u2019s West End.<\/p>\n

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Bruce Hunter as the polar bear Angu’juaq and Jani Lauzon as Huumittuq in The Breathing Hole<\/em> at the 2017 Stratford Festival.
Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, Pollock\u2019s remark is happily becoming dated. I write this having just seen a revival of her 1970s immigration drama The Komagata Maru Incident<\/em> at the Stratford Festival, Canada\u2019s largest theatre festival, where the cast consisted of actors of Chinese, South Asian and aboriginal ancestry, with only one white performer, in the role of a German. A weekend previously at Stratford, I had watched the premiere of a new Canadian play concerning the Arctic and its native Inuit people, The Breathing Hole<\/em> by Colleen Murphy, which featured a large multiracial cast under the direction of Reneltta Arluk, the first Inuit director to stage a show at the festival.<\/p>\n

These productions reflect an overall trend toward a greater diversity on English Canada\u2019s stages, a trend given a significant boost of late by the Canada Council for the Arts. Under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (a one-time drama teacher), the council\u2014Canada\u2019s federal arts funding agency\u2014has had its budget doubled and has set about restructuring its grants to, in the words of its CEO Simon Brault, \u201ccreate a larger space for emerging artists and artists from culturally diverse communities.\u201d It is also making a significant investment in Canada\u2019s historically under-represented Indigenous artists.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Funding incentives aside, Canadian theatres have every reason to become more diverse. The communities they serve are changing their racial make-up and must be cultivated to grow theatre audiences. Either that, or theatre becomes increasing elitist\u2014the preserve of white, well-to-do patrons\u2014and, by extension, increasing irrelevant to the culture at large. At the same time, the artists coming out of Canada\u2019s theatre schools have begun to reflect the country\u2019s diversity and their work is often informed by their own cultural backgrounds.<\/p>\n

In Toronto, the largest and most multicultural of Canada\u2019s cities, there are professional theatre companies devoted to representing African- and Asian-Canadians.[2]<\/sup><\/a> Buddies in Bad Times, the city\u2019s long-standing queer theatre, has also begun exploring LGBT issues within different cultural contexts in works such as Tawiah M\u2019carthy\u2019s Obaaberima<\/em>, a solo performance about the life of a Ghanaian \u201cgirlboy.\u201d So, too, the venerable feminist company Nightwood, which has presented works such as Nirbhaya<\/em>, Ya\u00ebl Farber\u2019s searing docu-drama about misogyny in traditional Indian culture.<\/p>\n

Factory Theatre, another well-established company (founded in 1970), under current Filipina-Canadian artistic director Nina Lee Aquino, has made diversity its byword. For its 2016-17 season, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Confederation (Canada\u2019s \u201cbirthday\u201d), it deliberately programmed plays dealing with the Canadian experience outside the white mainstream. Its most singular recent success, however, was a revival of a popular Canadian play from the 1980s, David French\u2019s tender romance Salt-Water Moon<\/em>, given a radical reinterpretation by Indo-Canadian director Ravi Jain in which its two characters, a white boy and girl in 1920s Newfoundland, were played by actors of Afghani and Vietnamese descent. The production has since toured to other theatres in Canada and received a commercial remount in Toronto.<\/p>\n

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Ania Soul as the Musician, Kawa Ada as Jacob Mercer and Mayko Nguyen as Mary Snow in Factory Theatre\u2019s Toronto
production of Salt-Water Moon<\/em>. Photo by Joseph Michael Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elsewhere, artistic directors have been cannily cultivating new communities. In suburban Vancouver, the Richmond Gateway Theatre co-presents a festival of shows from Hong Kong companies, performed in Cantonese with surtitles, to reach out to the region\u2019s large Chinese population. And as a new generation takes over Canada\u2019s legacy theatres, the artistic directors themselves reflect a greater diversity. Like Aquino, Richmond Gateway\u2019s Jovanni Sy is of Filipino origin, while Stafford Arima, the new artistic head of Theatre Calgary, is a Japanese-Canadian who directed the 2015 Broadway musical Allegiance<\/em> starring George Takei (Star Trek<\/em>) and Lea Salonga (Miss Saigon<\/em>).<\/p>\n

It is also no longer enough that casting is multiracial or colour-blind\u2014the creators, too, must be diverse. Canadian Stage, an otherwise forward-thinking Toronto company known for presenting avant-garde work by the likes of Robert Lepage and Marie Chouinard, provoked a minor tempest on Twitter when observers pointed out that its 2016-17 season consisted entirely of shows with white writers and directors. After a deluge of angry Tweets bearing the hashtag #CanStageSoWhite\u2014a nod to the 2016 Oscars controversy\u2014the theatre\u2019s artistic chief, Matthew Jocelyn, was compelled to make a formal apology.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, Jocelyn could have pointed to a lack of non-white creative artists in the Canadian theatre, but that excuse won\u2019t cut it today. Some of Canada\u2019s most exciting younger talents now come from minority groups and their artistry is not limited to portraying their cultural experiences\u2014although they do that very well, too. Note two much-toured popular successes of recent years: Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em>, a Korean family comedy-drama by Ins Choi, set in a corner grocery store, which has been turned into a Canadian television series; and A Brimful of Asha <\/em>by the aforementioned Ravi Jain and his mother, Asha Jain, in which the pair recount her humorous attempts to arrange his marriage in India. One of Canada\u2019s hottest directors right now is Weyni Mengesha, an Ethiopian-Canadian (and the great-great-granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie) who is equally comfortable directing the revisionist work of African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and the history plays of Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

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Rosie Simon, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ronnie Rowe Jr. in a scene from Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em>,
produced by Toronto\u2019s Soulpepper Theatre. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ah, Shakespeare. His name had to come up eventually. One would have to be willfully blind to describe all the diversity in new Canadian theatre without acknowledging that the country\u2019s two largest, oldest, best-attended theatre festivals remain devoted, in true colonial style, to the work of dead white European males. The Stratford Festival, which boasts a 240-member repertory company and an annual budget of $62 million (Cdn), is the biggest Shakespeare festival in North America, while the Shaw Festival\u2014also located in southern Ontario, with a budget of $31.5 million (Cdn) and a rep company of 160\u2014is dedicated to both the plays and (more significantly these days) the intellectual rigor of the Irish dramatist-philosopher Bernard Shaw. Being major tourist attractions, with large numbers of American visitors, the pair also rely strongly on classic musicals and family fare as a staple of their programming. Here, as noted at the beginning of this article, diversity is more likely to be found in the casts and creative teams, and to influence a director\u2019s interpretation of the classics\u2014for example, Jillian Kieley\u2019s feminist treatment of Euripides\u2019s Bakkhai<\/em> at Stratford in 2017, or Peter Hinton\u2019s contemporary version of Pygmalion,<\/em> with South Asian actor Harveen Sandhu playing Eliza Doolittle, at the Shaw in 2015.<\/p>\n

Video 1<\/h6>\n