{"id":194,"date":"2016-03-01T18:22:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T18:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/5\/?p=194"},"modified":"2022-05-29T08:21:06","modified_gmt":"2022-05-29T08:21:06","slug":"notes-from-canada-what-is-a-classic-and-why-and-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/5\/notes-from-canada-what-is-a-classic-and-why-and-when\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes From Canada : What Is A Classic? And Why? And When?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patricia Keeney<\/strong> and Don Rubin<\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"1310423915\"\u00a0\"1304736424\"<\/p>\n

R\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Comment un th\u00e9\u00e2tre dont le mandat repose sur les \u0153uvres de George Bernard Shaw explique-t-il qu\u2019une saison puisse aussi comprendre une pi\u00e8ce nerveuse et \u00ab post-raciale \u00bb comme <\/em>Top Dog\/Underdog de Suzan Lori-Parks ? Et comment un th\u00e9\u00e2tre classique consacr\u00e9 aux traditions shakespeariennes peut-il aussi afficher <\/em>Le Retour de Harold Pinter et<\/em>Hosanna de Michel Tremblay, pi\u00e8ce politiquement provocante des ann\u00e9es 1970 sur un travesti qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois, sans parler d\u2019une reprise de<\/em>J\u00e9sus-Christ Superstar ? Or, c\u2019est pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment ce que les deux vaisseaux amiraux du th\u00e9\u00e2tre canadien<\/em> \u2013 soit le Festival de Stratford et le Festival Shaw<\/em> \u2013 ont fait au cours de leur saison de 2011, red\u00e9finissant du coup le concept de \u00ab classique \u00bb, non seulement pour eux-m\u00eames mais peut-\u00eatre pour d\u2019autres th\u00e9\u00e2tres \u00ab classiques \u00bb dans le monde. Dans cet article, les critiques canadiens Patricia Keeney et Don Rubin traitent de ce qui constitue un classique et de la r\u00e9ussite de ces classiques red\u00e9finis dans de grands th\u00e9\u00e2tres canadiens.<\/em><\/p>\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

How does a theatre whose mandate is rooted in the works of George Bernard Shaw rationalize a season that also includes Suzan Lori-Parks\u2019 edgy, \u201cpost-race\u201d <\/em>Top Dog\/Underdog? How does a classical theatre dedicated to the Shakespeare canon include Harold Pinter\u2019s <\/em>The Homecoming and <\/em>Michael Tremblay\u2019s <\/em>Hosanna, a politically provocative play from the 1970s about a Quebec drag queen, not to mention a production of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar? Canada\u2019s two flagship theatres<\/em> \u2013 The Stratford and Shaw Festivals<\/em> \u2013 did exactly that in their 2011 season, thereby redefining the notion of \u2018classic\u2019 not only for themselves but perhaps for other \u201cclassic\u201d theatres around the world. In the following essay, Canadian critics Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin ponder the notion of just what constitutes a classic and how well these redefined classics actually fared on these major Canadian stages.<\/em><\/p>\n

What is a classic? And why? And when?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crucial questions for critics and certainly for Canada\u2019s two largest and most highly subsidized theatres, both devoted \u2013 at least in name \u2013 to producing the works of Shakespeare (the Stratford Festival) and Shaw (The Shaw Festival). Now in their second half-century of production and certainly the gold standard of Canadian (dare one say North American) theatrical quality, both these companies have come to a curious decision point about how to deal with their respective mandates.<\/p>\n

Stratford has run through the Shakespeare canon at least twice (including Two Noble Kinsmen<\/em> and The Sonnets<\/em>). Shaw still has some minor GBS material left undone and, given the amount he actually wrote, that is probably a good thing. But in an age when a play only a decade or two old is already being termed a \u201cclassic,\u201d how can these companies maintain fresh points of view while serving up plays that may have long ago passed their \u201cbest-by\u201d dates. That is to say, the number of relevant core works by Shakespeare and Shaw seems to be shrinking as we move into the second decade of the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

At Shaw, the trend now is to do not just plays by GBS and his contemporaries (long the guideline) but also to do contemporary plays that reflect the \u201cadvanced social ideas\u201d by Shaw at his best. As if to underscore the point (and the changes to come in future years) the Shaw Festival this year offered a fascinating weekend seminar called \u201cThe Speed of Ideas\u201d headlined by two ostensibly contemporary American Shavians \u2013 Tony Kushner (author of Angels in America<\/em>) and Suzan-Lori Parks, the ultra-hip black dramatist whose play Topdog\/Underdog <\/em>was also on view at the Festival\u2019s Studio Theatre. At the end of the 2011 season, audiences were told that future seasons might find GBS moved off the Festival\u2019s main stage entirely. In other words, there will always be a Shaw or two at the Shaw Festival but we may actually have to look a bit to find him.<\/p>\n

Is Suzan-Loris Parks a modern Shavian? A future classic? Or perhaps even a right-now classic?<\/p>\n

No doubt the bottom line for the Shaw people is the writer\u2019s position as a social satirist, a widely inclusive genre. Parks\u2019 earlier The American Play<\/em> was certainly a ground-breaking critique of Afro-American life in which a black man in white-face with a false beard sits in an arcade as Lincoln while casual mall patrons pay to shoot him dead. Parks described the set of the earlier American Play <\/em>as \u201ca great hole. In the middle of nowhere. An exact replica of the great Hole of History.\u201d Cultural and historical literacy, symbolic acrobatics and highly intelligent outrage contribute to both the stylistic complexity and to the social immediacy of her work.<\/p>\n

Like Shaw, Parks is clever enough to almost risk missing the human foibles of her characters, so busy are they exemplifying, in the case of Top Dog\/Underdog<\/em>, their \u201cpost-race\u201d conditions. The term is both apt and useful, being one that concentrates on the particular sub-culture of the individual rather than the collective, so that, in terms of race relations, \u201cthe logic of the individual\u201d lets \u201cthe logic of the system\u201d off the hook. Given the complexities of our contemporary existence, the culture of the individual (or the couple, or the family or any small living unit of cooperation) is perhaps the truest way can talk about society at-large. Shaw knew that.<\/p>\n

In TopDog, <\/em>she ties brother to brother \u2013 here called Lincoln and Booth \u2013 in a seedy downtown rooming house where they live and work out their lives together. Younger brother Booth is essentially a petty thief and self-deluding lover boy, while Lincoln is a former street hustler and now every shopping mall\u2019s favourite fake Lincoln. In what can best be described as a series of jazz riffs, Parks \u2013 with a poet\u2019s ear for black language \u2013 takes us through the highly charged tedium of their days and nights. They bicker over Chinese takeout food, about a lack of running water, non-working toilets. They keep stumbling over the job that allows Lincoln\u2019s mind to be set free but which plunges both of them further into the desperate humiliation he is constantly masking. Tightly wound and energetically acted, director Phillip Akin\u2019s production meets the \u201cmodern classic\u201d relevance of this exceedingly contemporary work.<\/p>\n

Is this the Shaw Festival\u2019s future? Certainly audiences (primarily white and primarily over 50) did not (based on one after-show question and answer session) experience any disconnect between Parks and J.M. Barrie (whose The Admirable Crichton <\/em>was also on view) <\/em>or Shaw himself. Perhaps the throughline really is social criticism and humour, a fertile soil from which future classics can continue to grow here.<\/p>\n

Or is the Shaw Festival\u2019s future to be found in continuing to try and make classics out of such dated and polemical plays as the master\u2019s own 1931 On the Rocks. <\/em>In this case, the Festival went to a hot young Canadian dramatist \u2013 Michael Healey, author of the widely produced Drawer Boy<\/em> \u2013 to adapt this rather dubious piece of Shaviana. Healey turned the two acts around, changed a gender or two, mixed in some race but still couldn\u2019t make this farcical harangue of a play come alive.<\/p>\n

Roiling with righteous indignation, reforming zeal and lambasting mockery, On the Rocks<\/em> (inspired by Shaw\u2019s visit to Communist Russia) is rooted in 1930s British economic and social life including unemployment and extremes of poverty. Positions<\/em> are defined here instead of characters<\/em> as a newly enlightened PM proposes a radically socialist platform to cure the woes of his country. If he can\u2019t get it through parliament, he will bypass the democratic process entirely because people don\u2019t govern efficiently in a democracy.<\/p>\n

Although the arguments are lively, they are also, at least for western audiences, outdated. We\u2019ve all heard these political debates before, watched them play out around the world with varying degrees of success and failure, and then become part of political and intellectual history. The problem is that here they only masquerade as drama. In this piece, like too much non-vintage Shaw, we are given the playwright as platform orator and political analyst more than dramatist. Essentially agitprop, the play \u2013 if it has to be done \u2013 should go where it is instantly relevant. It doesn\u2019t need a contemporary trim, but a complete dramatic overhaul, a makeover. Frame it perhaps in the current politics of the Arab Spring. Re-evaluate and even re-classify it.<\/p>\n

Also on at Shaw was Heartbreak House<\/em>, a play whose farcical elements beg to be submerged by deeper meanings that threaten to inundate. This year\u2019s production barely got them wet. We need to see the passengers of Heartbreak House<\/em> \u2013 that titanic shudder of a dying empire \u2013 walking the plank over treacherous seas of romantic dream in gales of comedic exaggeration. There is certainly more inchoate complexity in Heartbreak<\/em>\u2019s doom-laden and improbable people than this badly listing version reveals, a complexity that ranks it (along with, say, Major Barbara<\/em> and Man and Superman<\/em>) as a true Shavian classic. The question remains how to make Shaw relevant to us as other than quaint entertainment and theatrical history these days? How do we do it without damaging his dramatic fabric? Are some plays in the Shaw canon perhaps more suited to classic status \u2013 bold reinterpretation \u2013 than others?<\/p>\n

Even this year\u2019s production of Candida<\/em> wavered badly. Candida\u2019s overweening maternal instincts that turn the men in her life to coddled toys cry out for Freudian interpretation from characters who should realize the demeaning roles in which their family comedy traps them, while playing these parts to the hilt. Or, one wants a force of nature Candida, a mother goddess woman in whom all other female roles \u2013 including that of temptress \u2013 are subsumed, not a tutting, strutting fussy Candida thoroughly constricted by the corset of Victorian mores in which she\u2019s so tightly laced.<\/p>\n

The Admirable Crichton<\/em> by J.M.Barrie did not fare any better as a supposed classic. Or is this latter play just another museum piece? The Festival version wants the play to laugh and sing and dance, make you feel as though you have walked into a Disney film where the quaint questions of master\/servant and the rigid class system of another era are served up with feel good flapper music, desert island dreams and cute animal narrators.<\/p>\n

In program notes, director Morris Panych (also a major Canadian playwright) asks us to look back from our lives of equal opportunity to a period of socially embedded inequality. But the social satire no longer holds and Crichton<\/em> is done as \u201can absurd comedy\u201d rather than as a fantasy with a social edge. Anyone who knows Barrie\u2019s children\u2019s classic Peter Pan<\/em> knows how psychologically charged that fantasy can be and how, in the way Barrie kept changing endings and revising his own scripts, he was profoundly influenced by the illusory nature of life both on and offstage and by the mutability of the human personality. Barrie\u2019s work \u2013 especially The Admirable Crichton <\/em>\u2013 invites a full-frontal post-modern interpretation. What it gets here is one that is statically retro and depressingly self-conscious.<\/p>\n

Drama at Inish<\/em> \u2013 this year\u2019s example of a \u2018re-discovered classic\u2019 \u2013 was written by Irish playwright Lennox Robinson (1886-1958) and is itself indeed all about staging classic plays in a light-hearted world. Described by Shaw\u2019s Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell as a type of \u201cgentle comic meta-theatre that promotes the cause of Art\u201d the play depicts a small repertory company trying to survive in an Irish seaside town with heavyweight plays by the likes of Ibsen and Chekhov, a situation that unsettles a local population bred on radically lighter fare. And so angst is injected into the comfortably bourgeois community of Inish.<\/p>\n

Drama at Inish<\/em> may speak to the power of theatre but it does so through period comedy that doesn\u2019t travel easily to us now. There is too great a gap between modern audiences and these nineteenth century parochial folk. They are merely curiosities that one peers down on from a cultural distance. If contemporary audiences are to wrestle with the place of the provocative in everyday life, it needs to do so through the revolutionary nineteenth century dramatists themselves or their modern equivalents (the authentic creators of classic dramas) and not through parodies of them as is Inish.<\/em><\/p>\n

One such modern classic is certainly Tennessee Williams\u2019 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em>. As produced at Shaw it is a lightning strike of character clash and it dazzles. Williams himself has said that \u201cthe theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one\u2019s office for a job.\u201d A poet of dramatic emotions, his plays always try to catch \u201cthat true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent \u2013 fiercely charged \u2013 interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.\u201d The inhabitants of Williams\u2019 world are driven by nobility and dreams, as director Elia Kazan once said, hung along a live wire between \u201cthe mind\u2019s despair and the heart\u2019s hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams was almost as prolix as GBS himself in his stage directions. For Cat<\/em>, he specified \u201ca quality of tender light on weathered wood\u201d and a room that evoked \u201csome ghosts.\u201d Designer Sue LePage took these suggestions to heart in the Shaw production, creating long planked walls and endless shutters, lit to caramel by late afternoon sun in the high-ceilinged bedroom opening humidly onto a wrap-around balcony. This is the stage, \u2018deeply scarred by time, weather\u2019 and emotional extremity upon which life and death will dance and fight. We find out who the ghosts are as the play proceeds.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Tynan once called Cat<\/em> a birthday party about death. It is certainly that. The Shaw production quivers with the neurotic ambivalence of Cat<\/em> memorably in a late scene that skulks around the play\u2019s sordid theme of mendacity, like the careful feline of its title, alternately hissing and tentative. Maggie has just told Big Daddy the lie that she and Brick are pregnant. Always attracted to the sleek, fiery quality of her spunk and strained ambition, he stops the show with the lascivious movement of his hand fondling her breasts and wandering slowly down to her crotch, Big Mama and the whole damaged family watching, as he utters the words: \u201cThis girl has life in her body, that\u2019s no lie.\u201d This play, understood, maintains the genuine energy of a true classic.<\/p>\n

\u00a7\u00a7<\/p>\n

The Stratford Festival, on the other hand, managed their classical mandate somewhat differently although, to make ends meet, they are now regularly doing \u201cclassic\u201d musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar <\/em>and zipped up musicalized productions of plays such as Twelfth Night<\/em> (in which John Lennon makes several amusing appearances). Add in a first-rate production of Pinter\u2019s modern classic The Homecoming <\/em>and a gender bending Richard III <\/em>and you have the word \u201cclassic\u201d truly examined, interpreted and thoroughly re-assessed.<\/p>\n

One important aspect of the classic question connects to the strong case made by critic Richard Schechner for what he calls the possibility of detaching \u201crole-characteristics\u201d from \u201cactor-characteristics\u201d on the assumption that any skilled performer can theoretically play \u201cclass, gender, race, body type.\u201d Schechner admits that gender may be the most resistant to open casting, so deeply encoded is it in most cultures. If so, Stratford actress Seana McKenna, proves the theory playing the character of Richard III in Stratford\u2019s 2011 production directed by her husband, Miles Potter. McKenna says she began rehearsals without make-up and wearing trousers so that she could more convincingly \u2018masculinize\u2019 herself. For McKenna, Richard is \u201cpretending to be many things he\u2019s not. I\u2019ve just added another layer.\u201d<\/p>\n

McKenna\u2019s Richard is all performance and tricky language. Hence, more emphatically male interpretations of the part \u2013 dark and brooding \u2013 may predispose us to a Richard that pulls away from the crackling malevolence that McKenna\u2019s mercurial interpretation brings. She prances, slides and somersaults through Richard\u2019s many plots like a trapeze artist. This Richard may be slight of build and light of voice but he is ugly, short, balding, drably clad, his stringy hair hanging limp with the sweat of malevolence.<\/p>\n

When he confesses how amazed he is that he is now seducing Anne, whose husband he so recently killed (\u201cwas ever a woman in this humour woo\u2019d?\/ Was ever a woman in this humour won?\u201d), when he expresses shock that she responds (\u201cUpon my life, she finds \u2013 although I cannot \u2013 \/ Myself to be a proper man,\u201d) we can\u2019t take our eyes off him, nor shut our ears to him.<\/p>\n

In McKenna\u2019s performance, the heft of the hunchback can be felt in the wiliness with which he schemes, his delicious surprise at some new twist, his perverse delight in sharing it with us, the ironic way he sees the mean world into which he was born and his supremely inventive, exhaustively manic compulsion to crawl all the bloody way up to a throne he will be unable to maintain. So here we have a western classic, successfully re-genderized.<\/p>\n

For Stratford\u2019s Twelfth Night, <\/em>the theatre\u2019s Artistic Director Des McAnuff offers a pitch-perfect combination of a skewed and illusory Illyria mixed into a feverish modern musical. Two miniatures set the tone: an Elvis-style white guitar stage left and a grand Elizabethan sailing vessel stage right. Both indicate the range of mania and masking in this super skillful production of deception and disguise. The play\u2019s delightful poetry also inspires a full flowering of musical modes throughout as past meets present, as classic meets contemporary, from cool jazz riffs to Beatles\u2019 keyboard moments \u2013 a John Lennon clone in immaculate white and round sunglasses tickling the ivories. As successfully as the Greeks, McAnuff infuses the drama with music.<\/p>\n

Contemporary touches work wonderfully. Brian Dennehy\u2019s Sir Toby Belch enters thwacking a golf ball while the disguised twin Viola bats a softball. All this while intricacies of plot unfold. At the bar later, Feste launches into a folksy \u201cCome and kiss me sweet and twenty\u201d that crescendos in a manic rock moment to \u201cPrithee hold thy peace.\u201d Shortly after, the sublimely silly knight Aguecheek pukes into a sink as the doorbell rings signaling another entrance by Lennon, now delivering pizza.<\/p>\n

Another classic \u2013 Moliere\u2019s commentary on critics and criticism, The Misanthrope <\/em>\u2013 is here turned into a debate on quality, judgement, taste and behaviour. These are real questions in a post-modern world where evaluation of any kind is too easily dismissed as politically incorrect because it\u2019s bound to offend someone. But that\u2019s the idea isn\u2019t it, offense in the service of improvement?<\/p>\n

Interestingly, it is the language of Richard Wilbur\u2019s 1954 English translation which becomes the most important actor on the stage, alive with wit, cut and thrust. \u201cTrust the words,\u201d says Wilbur \u201cto convey the point and persons of the comedy.\u201d Stratford\u2019s production does that, bon mots<\/em> dropping into the subtle net of rhyming couplets as naturally as winter pears off a tree. This is our own world of celebrity, shredded effectively and at an acceptable remove.<\/p>\n

It must also be said that other Misanthropes<\/em> have also thrived utilizing contemporary adaptations, including one production whose characters sported cell phones and laptops. No doubt the next one will feature I-Pads and hand-held televisions. But Wilbur\u2019s English translation is truly for the ages, articulating elegantly the stability of the old-fashioned world desired by Alceste and perhaps many of us, not the insecure one of a seventeenth century aristocratic salon nor our own skittishly mobile mode of being.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the season\u2019s highlight at Stratford was coming to truly understand how much of a modern classic Harold Pinter\u2019s The Homecoming <\/em>really is and how staggering its power lines which zing like lighting through this magnificently horrible family, buzzing them like electrical shock so that they are hurt, even deformed but outwardly unchanged. This is a family not merely dysfunctional but emotionally deprived, hollowed out, depraved. Truly a play in which, as critic Michael Billington has written, we find \u201cthe absence of a conventional moral framework.\u201d Is it that which most alarms us? A perfect vehicle for Greek tragedy, The Homecoming<\/em> is nevertheless not tragedy. Nor is it, despite many rueful laughs in Stratford\u2019s cannily paced production, comedy. It is pure Pinter and it may be the masterpiece in which this playwright most fully defines his own unique genre, his own version of what classic really is.<\/p>\n

Pinter\u2019s text is a perfect mix of colloquial and banal, most recognizable as his \u201cmusical score,\u201d (in the words of director Jennifer Tarver), that drops into moments of profundity, sending up little fizzing flames that barely muffle the roar of primal hungers. We are equally affected by a person sitting in a chair or not sitting in a chair: a person seducing someone with a glass of water, or pricking academic pretense with the crossing of a leg, \u2018a tucking up into bed\u2019 nursery rhyme that comforts with dark sexuality. Pinter takes working class domestic drama, winds it up tight and lets the tension ooze out in a quixotic mixture of bare-faced, blatant rapacity and na\u00efve gentility.<\/p>\n

The central question in any production of this play is how to interpret Ruth. How to make her transition from saint to sinner believable. Pinter provides the ammunition that the actor and director must follow: what she says and, perhaps more crucially, what she doesn\u2019t say; how she moves about the room encroaching ever more imperiously upon male territory, the way in which she, sitting smugly at play\u2019s end on the throne of power, creates a take it or leave it contract for working conditions as the family\u2019s classy mother and part-time whore.<\/p>\n

Whether a feminist manifesto or a dramatist\u2019s deus ex machina<\/em>, Ruth embodies some core truth that keeps us coming back. Perhaps the mystery of this coup de theatre<\/em> is the real genius of The Homecoming<\/em>and it may even be the fire at the heart of any genuine classic. Whatever it is, the play remains a mystery, gnawing away at a level deeper than reason.<\/p>\n

A final word here on the idea of a Canadian<\/em> classic. The work in this instance is Michel Tremblay\u2019s 1970s hit, Hosanna, <\/em>produced this year at Stratford\u2019s tiny Studio Theatre. A play that is itself rooted in disguise, denial and bad taste, the Stratford production plays it as tightly stretched drama shot through, like rotting silk. A dark sheen creeps everywhere: in shadowy mirrors and around fusty costumes; in an awful erotic painting on the wall; in blinking neon lights just outside the room. The theatrical journey betweenThe Homecoming <\/em>and Hosanna <\/em>\u2013 both played in the same theatre \u2013 seems only to involve a single step, from London\u2019s north end to Montreal\u2019s east end.<\/p>\n

Yet there are real differences. Though these may be the same dispossessed people, rudely lost and crudely looking for love, Pinter\u2019s people move in a nasty threatening world of understatement and undertone \u2013 full of significant tiny actions and fraught dramatic moments. Tremblay\u2019s, on the other hand, are watching themselves in mirrors, effectively serving as both actor and audience.<\/p>\n

It is hard not to compare the original 1974 Tarragon production starring Richard Monette (later Stratford\u2019s artistic director) with a modern restaging. Monette\u2019s manically driven performance in the title role brought to genuine life an outrageous drag queen dressed to imitate Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra in the classic Hollywood film. His was a performance of brittle glittering pathos, a rage of heartache and hunger. Unfortunately, this Hosannah<\/em> has none of the fury that Monette brought to the role, trading laughs for a sad, one-dimensional sense of languish.<\/p>\n

Even without the politics and the Quebecois dialect that fuelled the original production, a new production of this play needs to find its essential theatricality and the levels of illusion that define it. It is as much about performance as Richard III. <\/em>To present it as sociology is to miss the power of subculture and the play\u2019s ironic commentary on fantasy and delusion. Clearly, different classics need different treatments. Although this play about identities courts a universal theme, it needs to be connected more closely to its original context or it simply runs the risk of remaining a curious period piece, a sad declassifying of a classic.<\/p>\n

In the end then, a real question still remains for those of us \u2013 directors and critics especially \u2013 who are professionally concerned about such things as canon and authenticity and authorial voice. How can classically-mandated theatres around the world keep inventing new ways of seeing, being and becoming? Where is the line to be drawn between museum and myopic post-modernism? Canada\u2019s two flagship companies seem to be looking both ways at the moment, unsure of their most artistically effective and economically viable directions. They are at a crossroads and the way they take will determine both their futures and our notions of classical theatre.<\/p>\n

\n

\"1310423915\"\u00a0\"1304736424\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is a Canadian theatre critic and author of nine volumes of poetry and one novel. Don Rubin<\/strong> is founding Editor of the quarterly journal Canadian Theatre Review<\/em> and Editor of Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre.<\/em> They both teach at Toronto\u2019s York University.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2011 Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
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