But what did you really think?

by Matt Radz

Theatre? Theatre? Let's see... theatre. Ah yes, of course I remember now. Half a dozen years spent on what felt like a death-watch for the mainstream, with the only diversion being shows that might as well have been billed "Firetrap Theatre Presents a Folding Chairs Production of Unsufferable Pretentions, Part VI," is not something easily forgotten.

A Transforming Experience, truly. Already a devout sceptic on assuming the role of "The Gazette Theatre Critic" at the turn of the century, I emerged from the six-season idyll in the aisle seat even more pious, an unrepentant non-believer in theatre's right to exist just because seeking applause on a nightly basis is such a noble calling.

Not that I ever doubted Theatre's magic, when it's right. No other form of public entertainment comes even close in beguiling charm or visceral impact. But such magic happens almost never. In my case, less than a dozen times in a lifetime of playgoing that began at age seven.

For this I blame stage practitioners and the hermetic world they have erected around themselves, the defensive walls they have put up to keep out us ordinary churls. As if going to a play required some special skill or secret knowledge.

One of the most striking aspects of the local anglo scene is that the audience is so small its members are on a first-name basis. The theatre I saw is under occupation—by academics and at least three levels of culture bureaucrats, a cozy little world of insiders, that includes the coterie of part-time critics typecast in the role of Happy Cheerleaders. The funding has become an ungodly mix of government and corporate largesse.
F
or all the impact that the art of Aeschylus, Chekhov, Ibsen and Tremblay has in this part of the microchip world... let me put it this way: During half a dozen seasons of professional playgoing as The Gazette's readers' proxy, there were precious few evenings, in either language, that would make me care a whit for the "struggle," the "journey," the "sacrifice," that our theatricians regularly claim for themselves in the program notes.

Go talk dedication with a Maple Leaf Chicken Plucker. Now that's a struggle. The wages are probably comparable, but no one claps (or jeers) after you've lopped off head number 1,000 that week. (A real head, not a stage prop.)

Art Armstrong, a Montréal poet, a much younger and angrier man than I, graciously shared some of the aesthetic pain. Too often, over post-performance cocktails, he'd ask the same penetrating question—WHY?

"Why?" as in "Why do they bother?" for the most part. But also "Why do we need an amateurish stab at another stale piece of Broadway musical crap? " Or "Why does a director bowlderize Shakespeare or Ibsen with a gimmicky reading so shallow, it shocks only with the clumsiness of its overreaching stagecraft?" What's the motivation here? To get attention? To nail down The Next Big Job?

And then there were the truly vile nights. Witnessing eccentric efforts that pushed us to wonder whatever happened to theatre as "the vehicle for the ascent of man"? Those tedious hours when the Shavian ideal was scaled down to look like a rusty tricycle with a bunch of petulant egos squabbling over who gets to ride it first.

Not to say theatre is child's play and doesn't take itself seriously. Au contraire. With How We Put It On workshops, meet-the-cast sessions, director's gyms, to say nothing of the endless drone of college lectures, there is no shortage of hot air off stage. Theatre biz is so busy being important, it too often forgets its work is Play. (Which is not to be confused with Stupid and/or Naked.)

Mainstream outfits, the Centaurs, the Bronfman/Segals, the Jean-Duceppes, the Soulpeppers now have Mammon do their programming, with results so predictably bland you might think that Mediocrity, not Greed, is the most powerful force at work in the Universe. (In this, theatre is no exception. Everywhere we look, mediocrity makes out like a bandit.)

If theatre people wonder why their toil goes so universally unnoticed, it's because they keep talking only to each other in a jargon increasingly arcane and stylized.
"What's any of this have to do with us?" was another of Armstrong's after-show FAQs.
One more yardstick: For this we missed Jeopardy? Coronation Street? Was the stage experience sufficiently satisfying to abandon the high-definition home hearth? Too many times, the answer was "Oh, my god," or just a shrug.

So yeah, of course I still remember theatre. Stanislavsky said that he hated "the theatre" in theatre. It wasn't long into the first season that I knew exactly what he meant. So no, I haven't had the urge to see theatre, lately. I've seen enough. Like everybody else I'm staying away until it gets more interesting.

"Only people who go to theatre, go to theatre, but everybody goes to the movies," is how Daniel MacIvor put it in explaining his move into filmmaking. MacIvor is one of the dozen and more outstanding Canadian playwrights whose work has been confined to the bookshelf by the colonial mindset of a cultural establishment that favours classics and mainstream American or British hits.

Canada already has a magnificent National Theatre, but it's gathering dust on the bookshelf. One of the great revelations, and pleasures, of the Gazette gig, was discovering and reading the scandalously obscure work of the likes of MacIvor, George F. Walker, Anne Chislett, Kent Stetson, Sharon Pollock, Vittorio Rossi, John Mighton, Jason Sherman, Morris Panych, Claudia Dey etc. ... etc. and revisiting neglected giants like Voeden, Ryga, Reaney, French, Freeman and Fennario.

With tenured mediocrity in the driver's seat, our playwrights have been thrust into the same tragic melodrama—call it Lack of Opportunity—as our most talented stage performers, directors and technicians. While we subsidize the writing of plays in this country, we do not yet support the showing of them. Anyone embarking on a career in the theatre soon learns the true meaning of "sporadic."

Forget past glories. Theatre must re-invent itself on a nightly basis, or perish. In fact, "theatre was never what it used to be," as noted by one of the geezer thesps in Slings and Arrows, Showcase Network's terrific spoof of Stratford.

Dramatic art has been on the brink of extinction for at least 3,000 years, so it's bound to hold on to beat the system for just one more performance, grants or no grants. The intangible personal rewards and, even more important, theatre's eternal potential, will see to that.

The greatest theatrical experience in your life is the one yet to happen. Who knows? It might be tonight, despite the prohibitive odds stacked against it.