Out There

Brent Carver as Kemp, in Morris Panych's CanStage producton of Vigil. Photo by Lucas Oleniuk

This theatre season has been, and continues to be, an annus mirabilis for Canada’s lesbian- and gay-identified theatre artists. In November Morris Panych directed his own play, Vigil, for Toronto’s CanStage, starring the Tony-winning (and gay) actor, Brent Carver. Panych, an Albertan ex-pat with homes in Vancouver and Toronto, is also directing Take Me Out, an American drama about a pro-baseball player exiting the closet – now on at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre. As if this weren’t enough, the former actor turned director-playwright, who usually works with his longtime companion, now husband, the set-designer Ken MacDonald, has three other plays being produced this season across the continent: in Vancouver (Dishwashers), Ottawa (Earshot), and, of all places, Hartford, Conn. (The Overcoat).

At the Shaw Festival this spring and summer in Ontario’s wine country, Alisa Palmer will direct her lover Ann-Marie MacDonald’s play Belle Moral. Another artist who shares MacDonald’s Cape Breton roots and same-sex orientation, the actor-writer Daniel MacIvor is currently touring his one-man show, Cul-de-Sac, across the country in advance of a possible New York run. The Albertan ex-pat, Brad Fraser – the man who penned the hits Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love and Poor Superman – this fall brought his latest, Cold Meat Party, from Manchester, England, where it debuted, to Toronto’s Factory Theatre. The playwright behind the lesbian-soap-operatic Dyke City cycle of dramas, Sonja Mills, opened Ottawa’s National Arts Centre season in the autumn, with The Danish Play. And the late Timothy Findley’s gender-bending Elizabeth Rex (which premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2000), is currently enjoying its first Japanese production. Phew.

This excellent year coincides with two recently celebrated anniversaries – that of English Canada’s premier women’s theatre collective, the lesbian-friendly Nightwood Productions, and Toronto’s gay and, to a lesser extent, lesbian theatre company, the evocatively named Buddies in Bad Times. Both turned 25 in the year just ended. And so a brief meditation on our theatre’s increasingly lavender tinge appears in order.

Although this has been a good year for the rose-lovers, there hasn’t been – to stretch this metaphor to the breaking point – a striking amount of theatre about what it means to prefer roses. As the country moves towards legalizing gay marriage, its theatre artists – often that one step ahead – have moved beyond dramatizing the struggle for tolerance, the differences and similarities of homo- and heterosexuality, into riskier business, in some instances, or more conventional, in others. To all the material that formerly fuelled their work – to explorations of gay-bashing, the AIDS crisis, bathhouse tricks, butch-femme role-playing, the pros and cons of leather and of pornography – they’re bidding farewell. The season’s one straightforward – so to speak – coming-out drama (Canstage’s Take Me Out) hails, not surprisingly, from an America still caught in the love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin two-step.

In order to evoke the same frisson as his earlier plays, Brad Fraser in Cold Meat Party has one character, a washed up gay pop-singer, experiment with – the horror – heterosexuality, and has another, a right-wing politico, propose to have himself castrated – the true horror. Back in 1988, MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which was incubated by Nightwood, shocked, or titillated, or elated Toronto audience-members with what was supposed to be the first lesbian kiss in Canadian theatrical history. “When we brought it back last season [in 2003] to CanStage,” its director Palmer recalls, “there wasn’t even a ripple in this fairly mainstream audience after the kiss.”

MacDonald’s offering this season, Belle Moral, has no overt lesbian content. Nor does Mills’ Danish Play – a drama about a great aunt who fought in the Danish resistance in the Second World War. And Panych has never spent much dramatic time telling explicitly gay stories. “I don’t carry a banner for any oppressed group,” he says simply. Once such an attitude would have generated controversy, at least in gay villages across the nation. The community’s loud tribunes would have cited him for contempt, for failure to stage “our stories.”

Still, there are exceptions to the been-there-done-that rule. In his one-man show, Daniel MacIvor acts out the reactions of various suburbanites to the murder of a gay neighbour. And Buddies’ long-time artistic director, Sky Gilbert presents his own take on Alfred Hitchcock’s film classic Rope. The Hitchcock original fictionalized Leopold and Loeb, a pair of wealthy gay lovers who committed thrill murders in jazz age Chicago; Gilbert’s play Rope Enough, transports the glitteringly evil pair to present-day Toronto. But, again, these are exceptions.

In his controversial 1999 treatise, The End of Gay, Bert Archer proposed, essentially, that mainstream acceptance of homosexuals, the Will-and-Grace-ing of the commonweal, meant the end of gay and lesbian distinctiveness, that identities forged through oppression would dissipate in its absence. If this season’s offerings reflect a coming trend, he’s right. At least in the special enclave of the theatre, identified gay and lesbian playwrights, actors and directors have arrived. But what do they have left from the long slog to professional eminence? Is this the endpoint of liberation – at last, to have the chance to produce work resembling everyone else’s?

David Oiye, the current head of Buddies, has had to reposition his theatre in an era when gay plays and players are increasingly getting stage time in large, populist theatres. “We took a retreat two years ago because it wasn’t even clear whether there was a need for a gay theatre per se any longer,” he says. “We’ve decided to stake out our place as a centre for alternative theatrical techniques, for playing with the interaction between technology and art, for mixed media shows, for finding the place where performance art and theatre meet, and, yes, for continuing to explore gay and lesbian themes. Will it work? I don’t know … I hope so.”

An era has ended, one that saw Canadian gay-themed dramas conquer theatres across the country and, in some cases, stages abroad. We can see, more clearly in retrospect, that we’ve just emerged from a heroic, creative period. In the collective exhale, it remains unclear whether the resulting influx of identified gay players into the theatrical establishment will change the nature of the game. "I’d like to think that there’s an extra smartness in the work of the best gay theatre people,” Palmer says. “At Nightwood, we always thought of ourselves in the role of court jester. You know how the court’s so-called fool could mock his master, the king, so intelligently, so adeptly, with such infectious humour, that the fool became master of the moment, and the king became, if only briefly, the jester’s fool.” Her sense: although the subject has been changed, the individuals in question can, like Oscar Wilde, speak well on many themes.

Alec Scott is a Toronto playwright and theatre critic.