26 - Contemporary English-Canadian Drama and Theater

Summary

CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH-CANADIAN playwrights articulate a diversity of voices and give expression to the country's many particular social and psychological spaces. They map its physical and mental terrain by dramatizing specific communities in terms of their histories, internal conflicts, and psychic landscapes. Since the 1960s regional history has continued to stimulate playwriting, providing local stories that inform the life of the community and the nation. These plays often revisit an apparently benign Canadian history from a critical perspective, and expose moral and political travesties. More recently, English-Canadian playwrights have been engaged in mapping specific communities in terms of ethnicity and ideology. Their divergent stories argue against a homogenous Canada and constitute a complex portrait of many colors, perspectives, and lifestyles. Thus contemporary English-Canadian plays often contest the idea of a cohesive national identity; they interrogate Canada's place in the world and its global responsibilities.

Mapping an Alternative Terrain

From the late 1950s English-Canadian drama has been developed and produced primarily in a network of small “alternative” theaters in cities across the country. These theaters were established in order to create a distinctively local drama as an alternative to the British and American plays which predominated in the larger commercial houses. Their early work was typically collaborative — collective creations by actors, writers, and directors, who imagined the social landscape of a particular community or group. George Luscombe's (1926–1999) Toronto Workshop Productions (TWP), founded in 1959, experimented with a politically engaged dramaturgy that challenged entrenched ideas of class and gender, using a variety of theatrical techniques from Brechtian docudrama to mime and circus.