The Strangers Within and Outside the Canadian Stage

This article reviews Barry Freeman's 2017 book, Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics. With precision and intellect, Freeman layers multiple theoretical frameworks to examine Canadian theatre, predominantly focusing on performance in Toronto. Freeman fruitfully explores how the definition and production of who is a stranger on Canadian stages is contextually contingent and changes over time, as well as the ways in which it is a construct of complex power relations in society regarding nationalism, multiculturalism, and globalization. This book is a significant contribution to the study of theatre in Canada that combines complicated theories with practice and provides illustrative examples to explore the ways in which theatre can ethically encounter difference in an age of 'liquid modernity.'