CANADIAN THEATRE HISTORY

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The Owners

September 22Royal Alexandra Theatre – Fateema & ShaqMassey Report – Martha and LizStratford Festival – Ceilidh and Shannon Canada Council for the Arts – Nicole K and Sandra Rochdale College/TPM – Michael and Marianna The Dora Mavor Moore Awards [TAPA] Saskia and Anna

September 29National Arts Centre – Clara Feinstein and NatashaTarragon Theatre – Augusto soloCarol Bolt – Eunji and rossThe Farm Show/The Drawer Boy Orly and Olivia NDavid French – Lanndis Canadian Theatre Review – Sabryna and Mira SaltiThe B.A.A.N.N. Theatre Centre – Jack and Callie

October 6David French – Lanndis Linda Griffiths – Gokhan and RaunakOne Yellow Rabbit – Graham and LindaEspace Go Lyla and LouisR. Murray Shafer –Simona and Catherine RamRobert Lepage – Claire Renaud + FrankFringe Festivals (Edmonton, Toronto)- Carmen and ArmonCahoots Theatre Company – Braden and MariumHuman Cargo Theatre – Kirsten/James

It is difficult to think of a country – except perhaps Australia –so consistently populated by the abandoned and the defeated.

- John Ralston Saul

“Canada is state-of-the-art colonialism…Blink your eyes and you’re a nation, blink your eyes and you’re a colony. Blink your eyes..”

-- Michael Hollingsworth (1994)

“For American historians, the Loyalists were the “losers,” men and women who had chosen the wrong side and who, all too often, turned out to be the villians of the piece. American scholarship has tended to lose interest in these people when they went into exile, but that exile was precisely when they became important to Canadian history.”

-- J.M. Bumsted, Understanding the Loyalists (1986)

an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress.

a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country.

a territory constituting a self-governing commonwealth and being one of a number of such territories united in a community of nations, or empire: formerly applied to self-governing divisions of the British Empire, as Canada and New Zealand.

a country, state, or territory ruled by a king or queen.

“Canada’s past is more dramatic than any romance ever penned..To her shores are thronging the hosts of the Old World’s dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon…It would be a mistake to conclude that Canada’s nation builders consisted entirely of poor people. ..Princes, nobles, adventurers, soldiers of fortune, were the pathfinders who blazed the trail to Canada.”

-- Agnes C. Laut, Canada: The Empire of the North (1909)

Scene Reading

What kind of Ca-na-da is Michael Hollingsworth describing?

The Plains of AbrahamThe death of General Wolfe, Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) painting by Benjamin West 1770

The Loyalists• The United Empire Loyalists were those colonists who remained faithful to the Crown and wished to

continue living in the New World. • For some, exile began as early as 1775 when "committees of safety" throughout the Thirteen Colonies began

to harass British sympathizers. • The signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which recognized the independence of the United States, was the

final blow. • Approximately 70,000 Loyalists fled the Thirteen Colonies. • Fleeing in panic and confusion, the Loyalists faced unpromising beginnings. The lands they were to settle

were isolated, forbidding and wild. • Many of the Black Loyalists were members of an exclusively Black corps of the British army who had been

promised their freedom if they would support the Crown. Assuming their equality with white soldiers, the Black Loyalists expected similar treatment. Sadly, this did not turn out to be the case since benefits in the form of land provisions were not distributed equally. Doomed to a life of subservience, if not actual slavery, about half of the Black Loyalists soon left for Sierra Leone.

• “The common thread that linked these diverse groups was a distrust of too much democracy which they believed resulted in mob rule and an accompanying breakdown of law and order.”

– Ann Mackenzie, “A Short History of the United Empire Loyalists,” www.uelac.org

Sir Guy Carleton/Lord Dorchester, Governor of the Province of Quebec and Governor General of British North America

Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand of Quebec

Sir John Johnson, Loyalist politician and wealthy landowner

Benedict ArnoldDefected to the British side

Laura SecordHeroine of 1812

Some characters

General John Burgoyne British army officer and dramatistSurrendered his army to the Americans

Richard Montgomery Led the failed invasion of Canada

More characters

Prince Edward, Duke of KentTrendsetter

Madame de Saint LaurentSteadfast mistress

Lord Simcoe

HAYENDANEGEA (he also signed Thayendanegen, Thayeadanegea, Joseph Thayendanegea, and Joseph Brant), Mohawk interpreter, translator, war chief, and statesman; Indian Department officer; member of the wolf clan; probably b. c. March 1742/43; d. 24 Nov. 1807 in what is now Burlington, Ont.

From Canadian Dictionary of National Biography Online

King George III

Molly Brant

more

CARLETON: Sons of bitches would be more appropriate.

Cherry Valley Massacre 1778

Non.

seigneur• A feudal lord

habitant

Cornelius Krieghoff, Habitants, 1852

Vincent Massey (1887-1967)Massey Report 1951

Our military defences must be secure….but our cultural defences equally demand national attention;The two cannot be separated.

Massey Report 1951

(From the correspondence of Samuel Marchbanks)To Apollo Fishhorn, Esq.,Dear Mr. Fishhorn:--You want to be a Canadian playright, and ask me for advice as to how to set about it. Well, Fishhorn, the first thing you had better acquaint yourself with is the physical conditions of the Canadian theatre. Every great drama, as you know, has been shaped by its playhouse. The Greek drama gained grandeur from its marble outdoor theatres; the Elizabethan drama was given fluidity by the extreme adaptability of the Elizabethan playhouse stage; French classical drama took its formal tone from its equisite, candle-lit theatres. You see what I mean.Now what is the Canadian playhouse? Nine times out of ten, Fishhorn, it is a school hall, smelling of chalk and kids, and decorated in the Early Concrete style. The stage is a small, raised room at one end. And I mean room. If you step into the wings suddenly you will fracture your nose against the wall. There is no place for storing scenery, no place for the actors to dress, and the lighting is designed to warm the stage but not to illuminate it.Write your plays, then, for such a stage. Do not demand any procession of elephants, or dances by the maidens of the Caliph's harem. Keep away from sunsets and storms at sea. Place as many scenes as you can in cellars and kindred spots. And don't have more than three characters on the stage at one time, or the weakest of them is sure to be nudged into the audience. Farewell, and good luck to you.March 4, 1950.S. Marchbanks.1

“… the very idea [of a national theatre] is a historical anachronism inapplicable to this country…”

“..the theatre has been identified throughout our history as a site for a debate on the nature of nationhood.”

-- Alan Filewod, “National Theatre, National Obsession” (1990)

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Part Three: The Loyalists • The British is part two of Hollingsworth’s historical play-cycle, The History of the Village of the Small Huts. It premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1986. The British is composed of four one-act plays: The Plains of Abraham, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, The Loyalists and The War of 1812.  The plays were presented in repertory over week-nights, and as full-day marathons on the weekend.

The play

Videocabaret 2014

Videocabaret – Michael Hollingsworth and Deann Taylor

Why is this country the way it is?

• His epic cycle of plays is called The History of the Village of the Small Huts (an early translation of the Huron-Iroquois word for Canada)

• The original productions premiered from 1985 to 1999.

• Importance of designers: especially Lighting and set design by Jim Plaxton and Andy Moro;

• “Hyperbolic''' costumes by Astrid Janson

• Puppets and props by Brad Harley and Shadowland

• Integration of light and sound from day one of rehearsal

Like most Canadians, he knew more about the Alamo than the Algonquin.

Michael Hollingsworth

Unlikely chronicler

Clear Light premiered at Toronto Free Theatre (now Canadian Stage Company’s Berkeley Street space)

1973

Toronto Morality Squad shuts it down after 12 performances

Discovery– Black box stage

– Eliminates scenery, stage furniture and every other physical reference to time and space

– Hundreds of computerized lighting cues

Lighting designer Jim Plaxton “Where there’s a light, there’s a stage”

Influences

http://www.welfare-state.org

WELFARE STATE INTERNATIONAL

Engineers of the ImaginationA collective of radical artists and thinkers who explored ideas of celebratory art and spectacle between 1968 and 2006.

Shadowland

Influences: Trinidadian ‘mas’ carnival

Videocabaret produces ‘Island to Island’ workshops with artists living on Toronto Island

“A raggle-taggle band of anti-heroes…Larger-than-life sized wigs, inflated costumes..overblown two-dimensional props and the white-faced make up of mime”

Michele White, Introduction to “The History of the Village of the Small Huts, etc”

Popular Culture

Other important sources for Hollingsworth are cartoons, The Goon Show, and Monte Python’s Flying Circus

Monte Python’s Flying Circus

The Goon Show

Whistle while you work

Every colonized people – in other words every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural orginality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation: that is with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated..in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.”

-- Franz Fanon, in Black Skins, White Masks as quoted by S.M.Crean, “The Invisible Country” (1976)

“The rhetorical proposal of a national theatre in effect means the canonization of a theatre and drama that reflects the national ideals of the governing elite.”

Alan Filewod, “National Theatre, National Obsession”

Maggie & Pierre by Linda Griffiths

NEXT WEEK

Sep.29 The Occupied

Reading: Michel Tremblay, Les Belles Soeurs (1968). (BK)

Rachel Killick, “In The Fold? Postcolonialism and Quebec” (2006). (CW)

Activities:Scene readings – who?Short presentations

Yours Forever, Marie Lou is running at Soulpepper on September 25, 26 and 30 at 8 pm

Question for next week:

How is Tremblay's family drama also a commentary about the state of the nation?