Editorial

This Views and Reviews brings together a diverse range of reflections on a number of important issues in contemporary theatre and performance. We open the section with “Daring to Challenge Pervasive and Unfair Discrimination in the Theatre Industry” by Louise H. Forsyth. This is a review of the most current examination on gender and equity in Canadian theatre, prepared by Michelle MacArthur. As Forsyth suggests, “Canada now has a tradition going back more than thirty years of impressive reports documenting the inequitable situation [for women]” in Canadian theatre. Troublingly, MacArthur’s report highlights the extent to which “progress has not been made in any significant way through these many decades.” Forsyth positively highlights the specific and far-reaching recommendations outlined in MacArthur’s report and the way in which action is emphasized: “‘The ‘Best Practices’ section is striking in its provision of practical ideas and powerful incentives for achieving the ‘ultimate goal to support the move from awareness to action.’”

Forsyth’s review is followed by Alana Gerecke’s “On Blending In and Standing Out,” a review of CTR editor-in-chief Laura Levin’s recent monograph, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In. Gerecke’s review discusses the ways in which Levin proffers “‘camouflage’ as a performance strategy and a theoretical framework for navigating, analyzing, and insisting on the ‘politics of (back)ground.’” In a manner that resonates with MacArthur’s findings, Gerecke concentrates on Levin’s prompt “to think about performing ground when, traditionally, women and other historically marginalized persons (non-white, lower class, queer, etc.) have been relegated to the background or have been made to stand in for the formal properties of space itself.”

Gerecke’s review is followed by “Seven Reasons Why I Believe We (Still) Need a Queer Theatre,” what might be best described as a meditational manifesto, written by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s outgoing artistic director, Brendan Healy. After seven years as the company’s artistic director (succeeded by Evalyn Parry in June 2015), Healy details the values and importance of a specifically queer form of theatre. Queer is a slippery term whose mutability is integral to its efficacy. Healy’s list of “seven reasons” defines the term in a trenchantly cogent yet complex fashion and also reveals interesting insight into the particular aesthetic and political commitments that he explored during his tenure at the world’s oldest and largest queer theatre.

Theatre’s ability to intervene into current and polarizing issues is at the centre of Hans Rollmann’s review of Rabbit, Rabbit by playwright Amy Lee Lavoie. In his review of Poverty Cove Theatre’s production of the play in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Rollmann highlights theatrical performance as a “unique opportunity to present, frame, and manipulate potent political debates in a manner that presents them in their full and complex diversity.” Among the difficult issues Rabbit, Rabbit engages are sex work and pedophilic desire, and in his review Rollmann contextualizes these within national debates about prostitution law and the local history of sexual abuse in religious and educational institutions in St. John’s.

Taken together, these views and reviews highlight the potentially liberating but also precarious and fraught nature of theatre and performance as industries, as social and political practices, and as epistemic models for seeing “the world.” They bring into relief the importance of ongoing and critical investigations of the frameworks through which we understand and create theatre and performance, the effects of entrenched forms of privilege and oppression in these realms, and the difficult work required to produce positive social change.