| Has Howard Miller seen much Canadian theatre? | |
| Posted by: portenopete 11:54 am EDT 07/06/17 | |
| In reply to: NEW - KIM'S CONVENIENCE - Talkin' Broadway's Review - T.B._Admin. 10:00 pm EDT 07/05/17 | |
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| I've only read the opening paragraph, but I would say that plays about immigrants are hardly a staple of Canadian Theatre. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to isolate a particularly dominant theme in the canon of major Canadian plays since the early 1970's, when the Canadian regional theatre began to flourish and new writing emerged. Because there was so little Canadian playwriting before the advent of "nationalist" theatres like the Tarragon, Theatre Passe Muraille and the Factory Theatre (all Toronto theatres), the early works seen in those institutions did form an image in some people's minds about just what a Canadian play looked and sounded like. I think David French's plays about the Mercer Family- transplanted Newfoundlanders in Toronto- might have seemed quintessentially Canadian to many people. (I recall an SCTV parody which featured a Mercer-like play.) Those plays were basically intergenerational struggles between the rurally-raised, working class parents and their aspirational, stifled offspring (which is not all that different from any number of American plays). I do think that Canadian theatre has focussed on more marginal societies than the average American play. Writers like Judith Thompson, David Freeman and George F. Walker have examined- in both comic and dramatic form- people living lives of not-so-quiet desperation. As have Québecois writers like Michel Tremblay and Michel-Marc Bouchard, with a dollop of French-Canadian political resentment and Catholic guilt thrown in for good measure. So a play like KIM'S CONVENIENCE is very much a new phenomenon in Canada rather than a familiar and beloved trope. Norm Foster has had an extraordinary career writing Neil Simon-ish sitcom plays (and even has an eponymous festival in St. Catharines ON now) and the much-younger Mark Crawford has had a string of successful comedies produced over the past couple of years. But they have been more focussed on (respectively) middle-class/middle-aged straight white people and a younger, gayer world. And their work has been produced more in summer stock venues and some of the smaller regionals, not in a classically-bent company like Soulpepper. Soulpepper has had great success with many Canadian classics (including many if not all of the aforementioned Mercer Family plays and a good chunk of Michel Tremblay's canon) and it's too bad that a bit of this isn't represented in its Signature season. Of the four major productions one is a Canadian adaptation of a British classic (OF HUMAN BONDAGE) and another a Canadian adaptation of an American classic (SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY). Then there are KIM'S CONVENIENCE and CAGE, what sounds like a performance piece inspired partly by American composer John Cage. I'm not certain their offerings in New York are an accurate representation of what they have produced over the last two decades. Their original mandate and arguably their greatest successes have been European classics. They were conceived out of a grievance, when the celebrated Young Company that the late director Robin Phillips had assembled at Stratford (including Soulpepper A.D. Albert Schultz) was summarily dismissed after the 1988 season. First there was an attempted production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST starring British actress Margaret Tyzack (who was eventually denied a working visa because of protest from Equity) and then, a few years later, the celebrated debut of this oddly-named company ("soul pepper" was credited to Schultz's young children, apparently). Their first two productions were both directed by Phillips, both starred Brent Carver and they were both stunning: THE MISANTHROPE and DON CARLOS. Originally they played a short summer season but Schultz's ambitions have been great and he has made extraordinary strides in growing the company into a year-round, cross-country producer that devotes a huge amount of its resources to education and the development of new writing. (In that sense, the Signature offerings do represent what Soulpepper has become.) |
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