World Theatre Day: My God Is It Ever The Time to Invest in Canadian Plays

This World Theatre Day I am, once again, standing on the same soapbox I have been standing on for the last fifteen years and advocating for the theatres in Canada to invest more in Canadian plays. The current trade war and threats to our sovereignty from the United States of America are a glaring reminder that we should not be pedalling American history and American culture to the detriment of our own Canadian stories- those that capture our history, heritage, and the diverse cultures of these lands we call Canada. 

How was the United States of America able to produce Great Playwrights like Albee, Angelou, Durang, Hansberry, Hellman, Hughes, Ives, Kushner, Mamet, Miller, Nottage, O’Neill, Sondheim, and Wilder? It certainly wasn’t from centring playwrights from England or Canada for the past century. The American ability to tune out the rest of the world, to believe in their inherent superiority in all things, and to give their own fifty states their 125% focus has created their formidable tradition of both plays and musicals, where they have come to dominate the industry- and of course this has spilled over into their dominance in television and film as well. 

We don’t need to put tariffs on American plays. We just need Artistic Directors who boldly choose to program Canadian work instead. Artistic Directors and the entire crux of the industry needs to shift it’s focus to Canada and Canadians. 

In Nova Scotia the biggest problem that I see is that the plays that are being produced by every single theatre company here tend to fall under these two broad categories: the play is either a well established play written elsewhere, like Little Shop of Horrors, or a small select group of well established Canadian plays like Marion Bridge or The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, or, conversely, the play is brand spanking new and locally written, or Canadian written from within the past five years that has had a lot of buzz around the country (Casey & Diana, The New Canadian Curling Club, Mad Madge…). I don’t want to insinuate that Daniel MacIvor plays and the hit Canadian plays of the season aren’t great. They’re all great. What we are still missing, however, is this huge trove of Canadian plays that have been written since the late 1960s and early 1970s in every city and town in this country that are just sitting there on dusty shelves in libraries and archives growing obscure and being discarded. Can you imagine if they opened Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Billy Rose Theatre in 1962 and it closed after 664 performances, and then they put the play on the shelf at the local Script Library at New York University, and maybe they sold it directly through United States Playwright Press, and no one ever produced the play again? Or, if they produced it sometimes in New York, but actors and directors in Massachusetts had never even heard of it because they didn’t have access to the NYU Script Library? It’s absurd. It’s ABSURD.

Why can’t I see a Judith Thompson play from the canon in Halifax? Brad Fraser? Stewart Lemoine? Marty Chan? Leslie Arden? Ronnie Burkett? Michel Tremblay? Erin Shields? Tara Beagan? Donna Michelle St. Bernard? Anusree Roy? Djanet Sears? Michael Healey? 

I love seeing all the new Nova Scotian plays that are produced here every year, but what always drives me wild is that knowledge that whether they get one production or maybe two to continue their dramaturgical work, they will disappear into the ether and never be seen or heard from again. This is true not just of emerging playwrights, but established writers as well. I would be shocked if I saw Ami McKay and Ken Schwartz’s play Nothing Less!, which played at Two Planks and a Passion back in 2017, ever again, especially at a different theatre, and McKay is an accomplished novelist. 

The few times that I have seen folks produce these older Canadian Plays, Matchstick Theatre doing David French jumps out for sure, I have been filled with the hope that maybe the idea would catch on, that maybe we would all start to divest ourselves from needless outside influence and distractions and allow audiences to experience Canadian greatness instead of American greatness. Leaving Home can go toe to toe with Long Day’s Journey Into Night any damn day, and I will die on this damn hill. 

This Canadian hill. This Nova Scotian hill, by God. This hill in Mi’kma’ki. 

Please, go raid the Dalhousie Script Library. Go borrow Jerry Wasserman’s Modern Canadian Plays Anthologies. Pay attention to what is happening in theatres in this country beyond just Toronto and Stratford’s hippest buzz words. Be curious about the history of the theatre in this country. Who built Neptune Theatre? What was it before it was Neptune Theatre? Why are Theatre Passe Muraille and Factory Theatre and Tarragon Theatre in Toronto so important? Why did the Edmonton Fringe Festival get started? Who were the first female trailblazers in Canadian Theatre history, the first Black trailblazers, the first Queer trailblazers…. what plays did they all write?

American culture has permeated into all of us. We grew up largely watching American television and American movies. Maybe our parents even watched American news. And we didn’t question it, we soaked it all up like sponges. But we know, also, that that doesn’t make us American. But what would we be if we had had the opportunity to be fully immersed in our own stories from birth, like the Americans take for granted? We have the opportunity right now to create this reality for ourselves and for the future Canadian generations. 

American plays and musicals will be there and will thrive whether we produce them here or not, but the fate of Canadian plays and musicals depends on how much we care about them and how we show that care and that curiosity and that love, especially as the world seems to be free falling around us. 

Happy World Theatre Day. Elbows Up.