City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (review)

Michael McKinnie’s City Stages is a groundbreaking book, the first full-length text to treat the complex intersection of theatre, urban policy, socioeconomics, and political ideology in what McKinnie terms ‘global’ Toronto. At first glance such a topic might not seem especially revolutionary: after all, human geographers such as Edward Soja and David Harvey have been preoccupied with the vicissitudes of urban culture for more than two decades. What makes McKinnie’s text both unique and valuable is its avenue of approach: it understands the spaces of theatre – both its literal, physical spaces and its imaginary, creative spaces – as integral to civic politics and civil life, integral enough to warrant a specifically theatre-focused study of how Toronto has developed over the last half century into a city shaped by performance. In his comprehensive yet lively introduction, McKinnie lays out the research questions that drove his study along these very lines: ‘Was the calculus of how theatre in Toronto could be staged informed by assumptions of where it could be staged? Did the particular urban geography of Toronto itself play a part in theatrical production in the city? And, inversely, did theatre play a part in the urban development of Toronto?’

City Stages also intervenes helpfully in what has become theatre studies’ critical preoccupation over the last fifteen years with issues of space and place. As McKinnie notes, despite their often effective use of research by geographers from Soja and Harvey to Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, theatre scholars of space have often resisted full interdisciplinary engagement with the social sciences, unsure how to assimilate the quantitative materials offered by urban geography and political economy into their spatial analyses. While research such as that presented in Una Chaudhuri’s now-canonical Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama has much to offer critics of theatre and performance in its assessment of how place signifies within the dramatic canon, it also tends to operate on a literary studies or fine arts paradigm, offering close readings of texts and qualitative analyses of performances rather than firmer measures of the relationships among space, politics, economics, and urban planning.

McKinnie’s work bucks this trend. In place of a series of readings of representational space it offers five case studies that explore how Toronto’s theatrical spaces have come to enable particular kinds of civic (self-)representation. McKinnie’s book is organized into two sections. The first, ‘Civic Development,’ explores the building of Toronto’s two downtown cores (at the base of Yonge Street, and at Yonge, north of Highway 401, respectively) as well as its self-proclaimed Entertainment District around the urban ideal of ‘civic theatre,’ a loaded concept whose problematic intersection with commodity consumerism McKinnie parses with tremendous skill in chapter 2. In its second section, ‘The Edifice Complex,’ City Stages turns its attention to specific theatre companies and their physical structures – 16 Ryerson Avenue for Theatre Passe Muraille; 12 Alexander Street for Toronto Workshop Productions and, later, Buddies in Bad Times – around which those companies have erected their geo-mythologies. While McKinnie’s first two chapters lay the necessary groundwork for his study and offer something of a God’s-eye-view of the intersection between ‘civic’ and ‘theatre’ in Toronto, it is the chapters in the book’s second half that are truly masterful, containing some of the most nuanced readings of Toronto’s local performance economy I have ever encountered.

City Stages has appeared at a crucial moment in Toronto’s history. With Richard Florida, one of the gurus of contemporary urban geography and the author of the ‘creative city’ paradigm, now ensconced at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute and more than ever influencing decision making at and beyond city hall, the time is ripe for Torontonians to ask what, exactly, they want from their ‘creative city’ in the twenty-first century. McKinnie’s thorough reading of the interpenetration of performance and civic culture in twentieth-century...