bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Another Morning
Authors: Petch Steve
Published: June 2023

In the dark, a big band tune of the early 1940s, featuring a solo clarinet. The tune comes to an end; an audience applauds. William appears in a tight spotlight, holding a clarinet. He wears a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the collar loosened. William acknowledges the applause.
Toronto Director Training
Authors: Devine Michael
Published: June 2023

How does a young Canadian director learn the methods of communication upon which the chain of theatrical creation relies? To answer this question I spoke to 11 of Toronto’s finest young directors, keeping in mind three possible methods of learning -university or conservatory training, apprenticeships, and the formation of one’s own company. While all the directors I talked with have experience in at least two of these (most in all three], their experiences have been different. The women -Jackie Maxwell, currently artistic director of the Factory Theatre in Toronto, Banuta Rubess, Maureen White, and Mary Vingoe (all members of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre) have found that they have had to build for themselves the support structures necessary to aid their development. For the men, apprenticeships - well-selected and undertaken with clear intentions - seem an effective way of cracking the directorial network that still is dominated primarily by males. In particular, Sky Gilbert, Jordan Merkur, and Jim Millan have profited from the ad hoc apprenticeship system supported by patchwork funding from various levels of government.
Vancouver Give my Regards to Hell’s Kitchen
Authors: Weiss Peter Eliot
Published: June 2023

There seems to be a special place in Canadian popular mythology for artists who have achieved recognition south of the 49th parallel. Often in the performing arts, however, such recognition is not taken for what it is - a result of achievement worthy of international note, or of international commercial viability - but rather is looked upon with a peculiar ambivalence, as a lucky soul’s potential ticket out of the dreary artistic community that spawned him, a community where the indifference of opportunity is matched only by the poverty of reward. The assumption seems to be that the relationship between a Canadian artist and his or her community is identical to that of a chick and its eggshell - the country is something to peck your way out of as soon as you possibly can.
Vancouver Entrances and Exits
Authors: Leiren-Young Mark
Published: June 2023

Late last year, City Stage artistic director Ray Michal announced it was over. The rent for the downtown theatre space had been raised again and City Stage wasn’t going to pay. Not only would Vancouver be losing one of its premiere theatre companies, but the popular Vancouver Theatresports league would be losing their home. At that time, when Theatresports administrator, Ian Forsyth told me “off the record” that the league was going to try to take over the space, I thought he was joking. Then, a few days later, the league made the announcement publicly. As of the first of November, 1986, the Vancouver Theatresports league took control of City Stage; a few months later they renamed it “The Back Alley Theatre” and, despite a few attendance scares when they first added prime-time programming, the league has been making the collectively-run theatre a success.
Notes on Popular Theatre … / 1: Out of the Collectives
Authors: Barnet David
Published: June 2023

There are two distinct approaches to popular theatre in Canada, one emphasizing cultural identity through the use of story and character, the other stressing the communication of information and ideas. This dichotomy has been useful, particularly in Third World countries, since it allows popular theatre workers to respond to local situations in a variety of ways.
Popular Theatre in the North West Territories: Three Cultures, One Issue
Authors: Selman Jan
Published: June 2023

As a white, female and southern Canadian director, my involvement in two important popular theatre projects in the North West Territories during the past year was the most challenging and exhilarating theatre work I have ever done. This account is offered as a close-up look at theatre that has a clear and direct impact both on its audience and its creators.
Meanwhile in Toronto ... / 1: In the Neighbourhood of My Heart
Authors: Bouzek Don
Published: June 2023

I’m writing these notes part way through a process. I don’t claim it’s a model. It’s another group of people trying to make a change – socially, theatrically. We’re aiming for September 18. At an alternative event, organized by homeless people, we’ll produce a show combining Ground Zero’s work with a performance by residents from Homes First, a Toronto project to house single people. We’ll also be setting up a booth to videotape the event. It will be a community celebration on several levels.
Meanwhile in Toronto ... / 2: Via Newfoundland and Africa
Authors: Payne Rhonda
Published: June 2023

Sydney, Cape Breton, May 1987 /1 am moderating a panel on theatre in Africa at the Standin’ the Gaff festival. Before the panel begins we teach the participants several African games, chants and dances. Oga Abah, who teaches drama at Nigeria’s Amadu Bello University, leads us in a round of “Che Che Kule,” a children’s game from Mali. Oga and I both learned the game in the village of Karamazonda in Zimbabwe. I taught the game to villagers in Zambia, Oga uses it in Nigeria. Ross Kidd has taught it in a popular theatre training workshop in Edmonton. This is the stuff of popular theatre workshops: sharing simple games and songs, exchanging information.
Meanwhile in Toronto ... / 3: Ballrooms and Boardroom Tables
Authors: Hale Amanda
Published: June 2023

The Working People’s Picture Show had humble beginnings as a fifteen-minute series of uneven skits on women and unions, commissioned by Organized Working Women for their tenth anniversary convention in Toronto. We were amazed by the enthusiastic response. Although we had researched quite thoroughly and met with veterans of OWW to hear about their experiences as union activists in the workforce, the subject was relatively new to some members of our group. We strung the skits together in haste and really felt we were winging it with this piece called, for convenience, the Union Show. We viewed it as a one-off performance, and something quite different from our usual work as theatre and performance artists.
Super(stack) Inspiration
Authors: McGauley Laurie-Ann
Published: June 2023

On August 19, 1987, the International Nickel Company’s (INCO) acid plant accidentally leaked tons of sulfur trioxide into the air in and around Sudbury, Ontario. Over 150 people, mainly young campers, sought medical treatment for gas poisoning. The doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with because INCO hadn’t bothered to alert the community to the danger. When questioned as to why INCO hadn’t reported the leak, their official spokesperson assured everyone that they had expected the wind to blow the toxic fumes away. Of course INCO was prepared to pay for any damages to cars, etc. After all: “That has always been company policy.” This is the kind of theatre that people in Sudbury have been living with for a long time. And out of necessity, we’ve been responding with our own forms of theatre.
Toronto STARR: Teaching Responsible Sex
Authors: Foster Deborah
Published: June 2023

There is nothing novel about teaching individuals about their sexuality — it has been done since the beginning of time. What is new is the increasing degree to which it is taught outside the family system by groups such as STARR (Students Talking About Responsible Relationships), an adolescent sexuality education troupe sponsored by the City of Toronto Department of Public Health.
Whittaker’s Theatre: A Critic Looks at Stages in Canada and Thereabouts 1944-1975
Authors: Bryden Ronald , Neil Boyd , Plant Richard
Published: June 2023

Next to hockey referees and baseball umpires, theatre critics must rank among the most spurned of professionals – except for the rare one who happens to share your opinion, in which case you no doubt quietly applaud the unusual perceptiveness. That is, of course, when you read a review, for no-one, but no-one, reads the critics – you’ve heard the refrain.
eds. Winston Smith and Dave Carley
Authors: Luven Lynne van
Published: June 2023

The five plays in this collection have, its introduction warns us, “virtually nothing in common except that they are strong first plays that merit further production and attention.” A clever disclaimer, that undercuts all potential critical carping about the lack of unity in theme, geographical antecedents or tone of the disparate parts of New Works I. One is glad, for both purposes of academic study and subsequent production, to see these five recent plays gathered and made available to those interested in following the convoluted unfoldings of Canadian drama across this land. That said, one is somewhat at a loss as to what more can be fairly and usefully said about the collection.
From a Conversation: Notes on Playing Shakespeare
Authors: Bush Steven , Wilson Ann
Published: June 2023

Most of us who attended English-language schools received our introduction to the plays of William Shakespeare during early high school. The plays were presented to us not simply as the work of a playwright but as the work of “William Shakespeare, the world’s greatest playwright.” At some point the title of “world’s greatest playwright” became fused to the proper name as if his name couldn’t be spoken without the evaluation. Shakespeare was situated in a realm of timeless and universal truths far beyond the material conditions of the world. We were taught that the proper attitude to bring to our reading of a genius’s work is reverence. Accordingly, our reaction to the plays was awe. Not simply the awe produced by works which touch and challenge and so evoke a response, but awe produced because our reading was mediated by the signature. We knew that work which bears the signature “Shakespeare” is great art and so responded with the proper sense of appreciation.
The Tempest x 2 in Toronto
Authors: Leonard Paul
Published: June 2023

On a sweltering afternoon last July, I arrived at Toronto’s High Park in the West End of the city at 5 o’clock to reserve a choice space on the hill for that evening’s performance of The Tempest. The play was produced by Toronto Free Theatre, one of the city’s major companies established during the early 70s; TFT has been producing a play by William Shakespeare in the park each summer since 1984. Performances are free and, as a result, the project has been successful from the beginning. As I reached the performance site, it was obvious that The Tempest would not be an exception: dozens of people already were lounging and eating, laughing and reading, killing time before the show scheduled to begin in about three and a half hours. By the time my friends-and their picnic dinner-joined me at 6:30, the steep hill was so crowded it seemed unlikely that anyone else would be able to find a place to sit; yet people continued to squeeze themselves onto the slope right up to the start of the show.
Rewriting Hamlet
Authors: Weiss Peter Eliot
Published: June 2023

First of all it’s important to recognize the fact that Vancouver is a town where educated and aware people think it’s clever to say that Shakespeare’s a bore. Vancouver theatre is entertainment theatre, like it or lump it, and even the greatest of plays must be made to conform. Hence, Richard Ouzounian, doing his M.A. thesis production at U.B.C. in 1972, was able to launch a stellar career by marrying Sondheim and the Marx brothers to Beatrice and Benedict in a production of Much Ado About Nothing, to set a tone for directorial approach that Vancouver theatre has still not been able to get past. Of course, it’s not fair to blame Ouzounian for all outlandish directorial concepts for Shakespeare. The precedents had been set in the sixties by Peter Brook with his gymnastic Midsummer Night’s Dream and existential Lear. Ouzounian’s awesome feat was to make it imperative that the post-Brookian director’s concept be fun. He put a joie in jeu that West Coast directors have been struggling with ever since. In their attempts to cram Shakespeare with entertainment values, they have frequently failed not only to make his plays more accessible, but also to impress audiences with any sense of the greatness of his writing. It isn’t my contention that these directors should not have attempted their radical pop interpretations of Elizabethan texts. I would suggest, however, that perhaps they failed because they didn’t go far enough. No matter how high their flashy stagings flew, when it came time to talk the whole thing bogged down in charmless anachronism.
Shakespeare in St John’s
Authors: Ayres Peter
Published: June 2023

Shakespeare, like everything else, is different in Newfoundland. Most notably Shakespeare is important in a way that he seldom seems to be elsewhere. People like Shakespeare, produce Shakespeare, and go to Shakespeare, not because plays are presented under the sanctified auspices of a mass-audience Shakespearean festival in a place inevitably called Stratford, or because they are being done in fringe productions by terribly exciting experimental directors, but because they are good entertainment, good theatre, and good box-office. Within the last twelve months in St John’s, there have been four significant Shakespearean productions, all of them reasonably successful in attracting the audiences, and sustaining the enthusiasm, that support and have supported a number of different traditions of Shakespearean production in St John’s over a considerable period of time. Interesting as productions in their own right, and as approaches to the larger issues of Shakespearean production, they also provide a microcosm of the larger world of theatre in St John’s.
Shakespeare at Stratford: The Legacy of the Festival Stage
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: June 2023

Productions of Shakespeare in Canada since 1953 have been undertaken, for better or worse, under the overwhelming shadow of the Stratford Festival, and therefore of Tyrone Guthrie’s “Elizabethan-style” Shakespeare, his designer Tanya Moisei-witsch’s thrust stage, and architect Robert Fairfield’s Festival Theatre. The Festival’s founding director, Guthrie was of course a late disciple of William Poel, an active participant in what J. L. Styan has called the “Shakespeare Revolution” and, largely through the reputation of the experiment at Stratford, the prime force behind the multiplication of Elizabethan-style thrust stages internationally, most directly at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, and at Chichester.1
Directing Shakespeare
Authors: O’Neal Cecil , Hirsch John
Published: June 2023

John Hirsch was the Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival from 1981-1985. His tenure at the Festival often seemed overshadowed by the sustained controversy which surrounded the appointment of a successor to Robin Phillips. After the appointment and dissolution of the four-person board to serve as the Festival’s Artistic Directors, there was a search for the Canadian who had the international stature to serve as the Artistic Director of the Festival. Hirsch, one of a handful of Canadians who work regularly in major international theatres and whose work is seen as influencing the development of contemporary theatre, was appointed.
Stratford, Ontario and Stratford-upon-Avon Holy and Deadly Theatre
Authors: Berry Ralph
Published: June 2023

Stratford-upon-Avon, July: I sat through a Julius Caesar which played to a full house. At the end I was surrounded by cheering Japanese tourists; it looked like a success. The experience was distinctly unreal, for the production (by Terry Hands) was terminally undercast and contemptuously underdirected. Two weeks later I attended a preview of Othello in Stratford, Ontario. Again to a full house, the Festival Stage offered a hollow and mechanical formula for a great play. I did not then know that the lead, Howard Rollins, was suffering from viral pneumonia, and that there was some doubt as to whether he could go on for the second act. It is much to his credit that he gamely discharged his actor’s duty. Still, the two experiences had enough in common to raise again the old disturbing question: are the two Stratfords, in their Faustian pact with the tourist trade, bound for ever to celebrate the Deadly Theatre?
Towards an Understanding of Theatrical Difference
Authors: Wallace Robert
Published: June 2023

1 / In its Annual Report for 1961/62, the Canada Council stated a position on theatrical practice that has become the prototype for the creation of English-Canadian theatre: “… living theatre demands living playwrights … the Canadian theatre demands Canadian playwrights.” While the purpose of the Council’s statement was laudable, its implicit direction was, and continues to be, problematic; not only does it situate the playwright at the centre of theatrical practice, but it privileges the script for the theatrical event – rather than the event itself – as primarily important. While this attitude now predominates in mainstream English-Canadian theatre, it periodically weathers serious criticism, the most sustained of which came in the late 1960s and early 70s. As Alan Filewod points out in his book, Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada, for the emerging, fiercely nationalistic generation of the 1960s, the “repudiation of ‘colonial’ structures of thought and methods of theatrical creation … [resulted in]… the introduction of a unique dramatic genre in the collectively created documentary play.”1
The Last Will and Testament of Lolita, The Very Best Bad Girls Create…
Authors: Ives L. Patricia
Published: June 2023

Collective creations have played an important role in the development of new forms of Canadian theatre. While each collective develops its own individual approach and methodology, in most cases the creation is inspired by a particular social or ideological interest and developed through research and improvisation. More significantly, the project is from its inception a true collaboration, generated and performed by a collective of individuals. This approach is revolutionary, as it denies the traditional supremacy of the single authorial voice by incorporating equally the interests and concerns of the group. As a result, numerous feminist groups have worked collectively to create new works that address specific social and political issues. Some, like Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre, have begun to test the boundaries of the form itself and to generate work from new sources of inspiration.
Stephenville, Nfld Keeping Up with the Joneses
Authors: Downton Dawn Rae
Published: June 2023

To be or not to be indigenous – that is the question much on the minds of two underfunded Newfoundland theatre companies these days. According to their administrators, both the Stephenville Festival and Theatre Newfoundland in Corner Brook rely far too much on corporate sponsorship for their survival. Stephenville offers a summer festival of six productions, and TNL operates every year from September to May, producing five inhouse shows along with a community-involved and community-funded sixth. After Stephenville’s ninth season last summer, Cheryl Stagg gave up her job as the Festival’s producer and administrative director while remaining as fundraiser, for she has unfinished business. Stagg, for one, feels cut out by arts funding bodies, particularly the Canada Council. And she’s tired of keeping up with the Joneses.
Northern Ontario Magic Circus’s Hurried Hamlet
Authors: Eldredge Kristy
Published: June 2023

It’s a cold morning in Kirkland Lake. The Magic Circus Theatre Company, in town to perform a 90-minute version of Hamlet called Hamlet in a Hurry, straggles into the enormous, harshly lit gymnasium of the Kirkland Lake High School. The room has the wildly echoing acoustics of an airplane hangar. While the stage manager lays masking tape along the floor to form the outline of a stage, the actors try out some dialogue and their faces fall. Their voices bounce around thunderously. Shakespeare is hard enough to make captivating to high school students without obstacles like this.
Beyond Collective Creation
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Ten years ago it seemed that the genius of Canadian theatre could be summed up in two words: collective creation. The post-colonial nationalism of the 1970s spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of collective shows that transformed the theatre in this country to an extent that we have just begun to comprehend. 10 Quebec, high noon for the collective movement came in 1975 when a faction of radical troupes engineered a schism in L’Association quebecoise du jeune theatre that redefined the politics of collective creation. 10 English Canada the vogue of down-home collective documentaries reached its zenith somewhat later with the prairie-fire national tour of Paper Wheat in 1978
Letters
Authors: Lysnes Barbara
Published: June 2023

“Politics, Playwriting and Zero Hour,” Larry McDonald’s interview with Great Canadian Theatre Company’s artistic director Patrick McDonald and play-wright-in-residence Arthur Milner (CTR 53) nicely elucidated this team’s extensive contribution to the generally thought-provoking, status-quo-rejecting brand of theatre the company serves Ottawa audiences.
The Situation Heritage or Cultural Evolution: Federal Policy on Multiculturalism and the Arts
Authors: Off Carol
Published: June 2023

I want the marble to remain the marble; the granite to remain the granite; the oak to remain the oak; and out of all these elements I would build a nation great among the nations of the world.
On Their Own Terms
Authors: Yhap Beverly
Published: June 2023

You’ve got a play featuring two Chinese, two blacks, three Native Canadians, three East Indians, and five whites. It’s dynamite – it’s topical, it’s Canadian. Now try to cast it…. Do you recast the play for white actors doubling roles (saving money and hassle in the process)? Throw out the script as unworkable, strictly limited to community groups who can fill those kinds of roles? Or do you cast it as written, allowing for a wide variety in experience, endless auditions, a workshop and/or long rehearsal?
Ukrainian Theatre in Canada: Scenes from an Untold Story
Authors: Balan Jars
Published: June 2023

Early in 1934 an amateur Ukrainian drama group in a rural settlement northeast of Edmonton ambitiously staged an adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol novel Taras Bulba. The debut was apparently a success, after which the company put on a repeat performance at a left-wing community hall near the town of Two Hills, Alberta.
Developing Methodologies: Notes on a Canadian Perspective Sent from China
Authors: well Alec Stock
Published: June 2023

Earlier this year, I received a letter. It began breezily enough: “Greetings in China!” Is nowhere safe from the inquiries of Canadian journals? I wrote back suggesting ideas for an article, eliciting parameters so that I might put a perspective on the final article itself. Since letters to and from China take about fifteen days to reach their destination, I figured upon a reply, if things were not held up, in about a month. A month to the day, the letter arrived, and with it the parameters within which to work. Would I consider La Storia (Acting Company’s collective piece exploring first generation Italo-Canadians) and my current work in China with playwright Sha Yexin and his play Jesus, Confucius and John Lennon? Could I consider in what form crosscultural exchange affects my appreciation of the aesthetics of theatre as well as its thematic development?
Our Footprints Across Canada
Authors: Cooke Virginia
Published: June 2023

Two parallel dramas about the Gitksan and Wet’ suwet’en people of British Columbia and their claims to their ancestral land have been playing simultaneously for the past year. One drama is taking place in the Vancouver courtroom of the B.C. Supreme Court, where a succession of hereditary chiefs are unfolding their stories to establish their rights to jurisdiction over 22,000 square miles of land in northern B.C. – land which they never signed away. The other drama, a play entitled No’ Xya’ (Our Footprints), produced by the Vancouver-based Headlines Theatre company in co-operation with the Gitksan-Wet’suwet’en Tribal Council, is taking place at fifty locations during a national tour, after having been successfully performed in forty-one different locations in British Columbia last year. This play, directed and written by David Diamond in collaboration with Hal B. Blackwater, Lois G. Shannon, and Marie Wilson, also unfolds the stories of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people’s struggle to retain control over their land during a century of European usurpation.1
Our Land… Our Play?
Authors: Goldie Terry
Published: June 2023

The title, Ntesinan, means “our land” in Innu. The issue is white interference with, and destruction of, the Innu relationship with that land. In many ways, that is the beginning and end of the play produced last year by the Resource Centre for the Arts at the LSPU Hall in St John’s. It is a play with a cause and the cause is the play.
A Voice Behind the Masks: Three Companies, Three Continents
Authors: Shes Emil
Published: June 2023

If South African President P.W. Botha has something to fear, it is not just a clenched black fist: it is Nomvula Qosha’s smile. Denied a full education when she had to leave school and abandon her love for drama, she toiled for years as a domestic servant to support her children. Like many South African women, she was deserted by her husband. Today she is an actress, and at one point during the unpaid rehearsals for You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, life and art fused when she had to pull down her township home and salvage her belongings before they could be destroyed. “We carry a heavy burden that defeats men,” she says in the play. “But it won’t defeat us.”
3 Performances Téâtrales de Alberto Kurapel
Authors: Kurapel Alberto , Walker John
Published: June 2023

Many elements have contributed to the formation of Canadian culture and its literary and artistic manifestations. There is none more interesting than the Chilean connection, which had its strongest influences in the years immediately after the military coup which in 1973 saw the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende by the forces of General Pinochet. Many who managed to avoid or escape the concentration camps or prisons eventually found asylum in Canadian cities like Toronto, Kingston, Winnipeg and Montreal, where they have contributed to the artistic scene through their literature and presentations in other media, like film and theatre.
Prague
Authors: Krizanc John , Taborsky Vaclav
Published: June 2023

The prehistory of Prague, which won the 1987 Governor General’s award for drama, is something of a theatrical joke by now. John Krizanc was writing a play “Magnificat” which grew to about 300 pages or six hours long. Both the writer and his director and friend Richard Rose realized it was unrealistic to proceed. Reading a book about Vaclav Havel and the Charter 77 at the time, Krizanc got an idea how to save at least part of the original project. Havel always wanted to write about people determined to improve the human condition, whatever the costs. Krizanc decided to write a play about a theatre company rehearsing that medieval play, that oversized “Magnificat.” He believed he could reduce the original work to one historical act out of a three-act contemporary play. In the end, in Prague Krizanc used only several lines from “Magnificat.”
Theatrical Anecdotes
Authors: Hay Peter , Kemp David
Published: June 2023

Theatrical anecdotes are almost as old as the theatre itself. Since the earliest days the stage has teemed with real characters and real stories as fascinating as any created by the dramatist. In his excellent, lively, and amusing collection Peter Hay takes us behind the scenes and allows us to be a party to backstage rivalries, thespian eccentricity, tight-fisted producers and all the horrors and indignities suffered by actors on tour. All the great names are here – David Garrick, Sarah Bernhardt, Noel Coward, Donald Wolfit, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Helen Hayes – but it is not only the glittering and glamorous on whom Peter Hay turns his anecdotal spotlight. Directors, producers, critics, prompters, prop men, designers and even ghosts are also represented together with those legions of near-anonymous players and professionals without whom the stars would not be stars and the theatre could not exist. For example, who would ever remember Creston Clarke if it had not been for Eugene Field, drama critic of the Denver Post, who, reviewing a performance of King Lear, wrote, “Last night Mr. Creston Clarke played King Lear at the Tabor Grand. All through the five acts of the Shakespeare tragedy he played the King as though under the premonition that someone was about to play the Ace.” A dubious immortality, Creston.
New Canadian Drama 3: Albertan Dramatists
Authors: Salter Denis , Brask Per
Published: June 2023

Denis Salter’s anthology of three contemporary Alberta plays is the third in the New Canadian Drama series published by Borealis Press under the general editorship of Neil Carson. Selecting three plays for an anthology out of the plethora of productions over the past few years is not an enviable task. The selection process must indeed have been fascinating and complex and I wish that Salter had spent a few paragraphs informing us about the considerations which guided him to choose Down for the Weekend by Frank R. Moher, Checkin’ Out by Kelly-Jean Rebar and Swipe by Gordon Pengilly. Anthologies often claim to have selected the best of whatever has been collected. No such claim has been stated for this collection. What this anthology presents us with is simply three examples of contemporary Albertan playwriting. And probably in the correct ratio of realism to fantasy: two to one. All three dramatists are “emerging” playwrights in comparison to the oft-mentioned Alberta “heavyweights.” In addition, two of the three playwrights represented have, in my opinion, written better work since this anthology was published and it therefore provides some interesting retrospective insights.
Theatre and Ethnicity
Authors: Rewa Natalie
Published: June 2023

As I write Junction Avenue Theatre from Johannesburg, South Africa, is presenting Sophia town to Toronto audiences at the du Maurier World Stage. This production serves as a useful point of departure for a discussion of theatre and ethnicity in Canada. The company’s primary objective is to provide an alternative historical and social perspective through theatre. They call themselves a “non-racial” company, refusing to accept the distinctions between Black and white that prevail in South Africa and choosing to dramatize the underlying tensions that make racial difference into a political issue.
2 The Limitation of Free(lance) Speech
Authors: Gélinas Aline
Published: June 2023

For two years, from March 1985 to March 1987, I was a regular contributor to La Presse daily newspaper in Montreal, responsible for covering dance. I also occasionally did interviews and reviews on theatre, and systematically covered shows that did not belong to any clear category. As a freelancer, I was paid by the article. In January 1986, I was restricted to two articles a week – one interview and one review — which I succeeded in having weighted according to the importance of the material. In September 1986, I was asked, rather than publishing regular interviews in the Saturday arts and entertainment section, to write a weekly column for the new Sunday edition which would contain listings of all current arts activities. Dance was no longer to be included with the other interpretive arts, but placed among the recipes, gossip columns, and video and record reviews. It was emphasized to me that my column had to be “accessible“ to a “popular” readership.
3 The Exigencies of Survival
Authors: Brennan Brian
Published: June 2023

Brennan: We both find ourselves in the same situation today. We have spent a long time commenting on theatre in this market for our respective media and now, for different reasons, we’re no longer doing that. You were doing arts reviews for the CBC when the local station went on the air in 1964, and I’m wondering if you felt back then that the CBC placed a certain importance on reviewing - if, perhaps, style was regarded then as less important than serious commentary?
1 The Medium is the Critic
Authors: Crabb Michael
Published: June 2023

“Malice,” wrote Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, “is the animating spirit of criticism.” There can be few playwrights, directors and actors who would not rush to endorse Mann’s pronouncement. The very mention of the word critic is enough to make most practising artists, whatever their medium, foam at the mouth like a blood-hungry pit-bull. The fact that Mann went on to describe criticism as “the beginning of progress and enlightenment,” is a conclusion that would doubtless be challenged by those who see themselves as the hapless victims of a loathsome trade. Yet, ironically, for all the scorn and contempt in which critics are held, artists are often the first to complain when critics fail to pay them attention. Somehow, beyond the dark veil of pain and frustration, there is recognition that the critic does indeed have a role to play, perhaps even a crucial one. The problem is how that role is perceived.
Notes critiques sur la critique théatrale au Québec
Authors: David Gilbert
Published: June 2023

The history of theatre criticism in Quebec- as in the rest of Canada, for that matter- has not yet been written nor has it received any critical scrutiny.1 Clearly this prevents no one from doing criticism, nor does it prevent criticism from expanding. Historians and theoreticians of Quebec national theatre tend to draw on a heterogeneous body of secondary literature on theatre, which consists in large part of reviews of productions, to furnish accounts of past or even recent theatre activity, to distinguish among various currents, or to determine what is or is not significant. But these texts are not neutral, far from it : they are not merely slanted, marked by their origins and ideological positions, they are an integral part of a socio-cultural space and historical context. The mechanical or uncritical use of such a corpus will only contribute to the alienation of current and future audiences, not to mention the misjudgements of theatre activity that could result unless some basic precautions are taken.
1/The Canadian Theatre Critics Association
Authors: Brennan Brian
Published: June 2023

The Canadian Theatre Critics Association/l’Association des critiques de théâtre du Canada is a national organization of professional critics founded in 1979 under the auspices of the Toronto Drama Bench. Its dues-paying membership, currently numbered at 60, includes Canadian-based journalists, authors, editors, broadcasters, academics and theatre professionals who regularly contribute theatrical and theatre-related criticism, reviews and commentary to newspapers, magazines, books, journals, radio and television programs in Canada and abroad.
4/Professing a Profession
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

Because criticism is a partisan intervention in an art form (regardless of its frequent claims to objectivity), I have to begin my response to the statements of the three critics’ organizations by declaring my own position. Although I have been a critic for a number of years I am not a member of any of these organizations. I did sit on the Toronto Drama Bench a few seasons ago, in which capacity I attended several lunch meetings before drifting away. I had nothing against the people who comprised the organization; they were as varied and interesting a bunch as one might find in any professional association. It was rather the idea of criticism as a profession that bothered me.
Angels, AIDS, and Kent Stetson
Authors: Dawn Rae Downton
Published: June 2023

He saw his former swimming student one afternoon three years ago when they bumped into one another in a Halifax bowling alley. They had some bond, perhaps – they were both Islanders, both strapping young men, both gay. But they weren’t both healthy: three months later the young man from P.E.I. was dead, one of Nova Scotia’s first AIDS cases. Still, for Kent Stetson, the story’s denouement was what was truly grotesque. The young man’s family – parents, brothers, sisters, and their spouses, eleven significant others in all – came from Prince Edward Island to Halifax for the deathwatch, and to try to keep away his lover of six years.
Warm Wind in China
Authors: Stetson Kent
Published: June 2023

Caution: © 1988 Kent Stetson. This play is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Change to the script is expressly forbidden. Rights to produce, film, or record, in whole or in part, in any medium and in any language, are retained by Kent Stetson. Interested persons are requested to apply for permission and terms to the author’s agent, Great North Artists Management Inc., 350 Dupont Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5R 1V9.
Montreal
Authors: Shakespeare L’Événement
Published: June 2023

As the waitress poured our third cup of coffee, Charles Bolster flipped through a pile of papers on the table, searching for a date, a name, a footnote to fill the momentary gap in a long, word-soaked afternoon spent at The Main, one of the leading smoked meat joints along St Lawrence Boulevard. It seemed an unlikely place to meet the leading expert on Shakespeare in Quebec. Yet judging from the sparkle in Bolster’s eyes, sherry in the Ritz Garden café couldn’t possibly have increased his pleasure. It isn’t often a mild-mannered high school teacher from Ottawa is given the time to tell the full story of how he, a unilingual Maritimer, came to write the only tome on Shakespeare in (French) Quebec theatre. According to Bolster, it all began on a cold Saturday night in 1963 with a stroke of luck that nearly killed him. He was hit by a drunk driver, woke up from a coma weeks later with broken ribs, a concussion, and no ability to speak.
Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: June 2023

I’ve always felt a bit cynical about reviewing a book in a journal of which the author is the editor. So when one of the associate editors of CTR asked me to review editor Alan Filewod’s book, I thought, the biter bit. This review represents my honest opinion, without tailoring for the journal or the editor.
Architecture and the Artful Stage
Authors: Arnott Brian
Published: June 2023

The major articles which make up this issue of CTR, including the playscript for 1837, each reflect a particular aspect of the belief that theatre buildings affect playing, staging and scenography and that there is, therefore, good reason for referring to both the building and the activity with the same word: “theatre”.
Collective Conversation: The Space Show
Authors:   Theatre Passe Muraille
Published: June 2023

A polylogue about playing in both theatre and non-theatre places. Theatre Passe Muraille Clare Coulter, Diane D’Aquila, David Fox, Ted Johns, Eric Peterson, Miles Potter and Rick Salutin with Jim Gerrard and Brian Arnott.
Environments
Authors: Wilcox Richard Kent
Published: June 2023

My own experiments in what has become known as “environmental” theatre began in 1969 at the Frederic Wood Theatre on the campus of the University of British Columbia when Donald Soule (director), Norman Young (technical director) and myself (designer), received a small grant to stage a production of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata. Later we were joined by Ian Pratt (technician) and Kurt Wilhelm (costume designer) and a group of about 10 interested students.
The Designer’s Space
Authors: Svoboda Josef
Published: June 2023

Josef Svoboda, chief designer of the National Theatre of Czechslovakia, spent time in Canada recently overseeing a touring exhibition of his work. He was interviewed for CTR by Peter Perina, one of the organizers of the exhibit.
Notes to the Building Committee
Authors: Wilcox Richard Kent
Published: June 2023

Theatres are always being built in the past. The proscenium pays homage to the Renaisance, the thrust to Shakespeare. That ubiquitous monster, the “convertible” theatre seems to be straddling a fence somewhere in between. Theatre experimentation is going on. Articles are being written by the experts. Theatre consultants are listed in the yellow pages. “Is anybody out there listening?”
Acoustic Space
Authors: Carpenter Edmund , McLuhan Marshall
Published: June 2023

There are many ways to think of space — the most obvious being in terms of its visual qualities. The following thoughts on Acoustic Space first appeared in Explorations in Communication (Beacon, 1960) and is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.
Trapped in Space
Authors: Cook Michael
Published: June 2023

By the time this gets into print, the ice will still be holding us in the womb of the North Atlantic, the reason for our existence. From the air, it’s hard to distinguish land from the ice pack. Landsmen after seals walk out sometimes five, 10, 15 miles. The landscape is terrifyingly beautiful, a moon landscape of dumpers, bergs, growlers. From a distance, the sealers look like characters from a Noh play. Their movements are refined, stylized yet full of force and purpose. The world moves beneath their feet. It is an environment of immense menace and fluidity, subject at any moment to explosive and deadly change. Though the seals rarely come close to land now in vast numbers, men still go out. Because the ice is there. Children walk across harbours or practice jumping from pan to pan. The black water waits patiently, as it always has.
Ottawa’s Memorandum
Authors: Flannery James
Published: June 2023

Central and unique to the theatrical experience is the relationship between actor and audience. Yet relatively little research has been done on the dynamics of actor-audience relationships as they are affected by different kinds of playing spaces. By producing Vaclev Havel’s satire on government bureaucracy, The Memorandum, within “found” Ottawa office spaces as well as within the more traditional space of a proscenium stage setting this past year, I specifically set out to explore the problem. As I explained in my program notes for the production — a project of the University of Ottawa’s Drama Guild — I wished to pose and find answers to some of the following questions:
Behind the Brecht Conference
Authors: Lyon James K.
Published: June 2023

Living in Danish exile after fleeing the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht in 1937 conceived the idea of an international corresponding society of theatre arts to be named after the French encyclopedist Diderot. He envisaged a “clearing house” for ideas and experiences of those involved in every aspect of what he called the “theatre of the scientific age,” from stage design, lighting, and costumes to writing and directing. He planned to include figures such as W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Archibald MacLeish, Erwin Piscator, Jean Renoir, Sergei Tretiakov, et al.
The O’Neill Idea
Authors: Merin Jennifer
Published: June 2023

The U.S. National Playwrights’ Conference is held annually at the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Centre in Waterford, Connecticut to expose new playwrights to the professional theatre and to help them develop their scripts. At each Conference, 12 to 20 previously unproduced plays are worked on by their authors in a professional theatrical laboratory situation, and are presented as staged readings before Conference personnel and the general public (who pay an admission fee). The readings are considered open rehearsals of works-in-progress rather than performances of finished products, and participating playwrights are encouraged to take full advantage of the laboratory atmosphere by experimenting with and editing their scripts.
Winding Up the CTC
Authors: Rubin Don
Published: June 2023

When the Canadian Theatre Centre began to take on a professional orientation in the late 1950’s with the arrival on the scene of Mavor Moore, Jean-Louis Roux and a stageful of other theatre people, it was primarily dedicated to the proposition that theatre people had common problems which deserved to be dealt with communally. Through the Canadian Theatre Centre, information and communication services were set up. Through the CTC again, came membership in that larger communications group, the International Theatre Institute.
The Crest Controversy
Authors: Stuart Ross
Published: June 2023

Tyrone Guthrie refused to remain for more than three years at Stratford to prevent the theatre from becoming too closely identified with him. When that happens, criticism is no longer directed at the institution but at the person and its fortunes become inseparable from his. Stratford survived and prospered despite severe criticism. Nathan Cohen often savagely attacked Stratford productions for being boring disasters but with little effect.
The Citizen of Calais
Authors: Nicol Eric
Published: June 2023

The Citizens of Calais is a Canadian stage play. I think. I am not too sure what a Canadian play is, but if there is such a thing, this is it. That is, there is very little chance of its being done on Broadway. I believe this to be the acid test of a play as Canadian. I once had a play done on Broadway. It bombed. Too Canadian. It even got bad reviews from the U.S. Department of Immigration.
Back To Face To Face
Authors: Endres Robin
Published: June 2023

Face to Face — a national conference on English-Canadian theatre — was held February 27 - March 2 in Montreal. Sponsored by Concordia University, the conference was attended by more than 400 theatre people from across the country. This special report was prepared for CTR by free-lance writer, Robin Endres. “Face to Face” was the title and apparently the theme of this conference, although its implications of confrontation were misleading. There were five face to face sessions, consisting of a playwright, a director or critic and a moderator. They were not, however, provided with any topics to discuss. Their role presumbaly was to sit there, chat with each other, and answer questions from the audience of about 400, a number which diminished markedly during the three days of discussion. It was equally difficult at times for the participants to interpret the questions and for the audience to interpret the answers. A frustrating sense of people unintentionally talking at cross-purposes frequently became the dominant mood.
The Vancouver Fringe
Authors: Page Malcolm
Published: June 2023

For some ten years, mainstream Vancouver theatre has been the Playhouse, the Arts Club Theatre (with a season growing both longer and more serious over the years) and the Freddie Wood Theatre at UBC (with four major productions a year, of classics with a number of professionals in the cast). Quantitatively, this has meant a small number of plays, and a small amount of work available. These three theatres have emphasized the central repertoire of traditional and present-day drama, with little space for the experimental and avant-garde. In response to this situation, over the decade perhaps 40 groups have formed, with the main aim of presenting different kinds of theatre.