Bring on the agit-prop

• By RICHARD OUZOUNIAN,
• Theatre Critic
• Originally published in The Toronto Star, November 1st, 2004.

Sometimes it takes a burning Bush to heat up the theatre scene. And with the American election just a day away, the time couldn’t be better for The Wrecking Ball to start swinging.

This evening of short political plays will be on display tonight only at the Factory Studio Cafe, but if Ross Manson has its way, it will be just the first of many chances for Torontonians to sample “fresh from the oven” social satire.

“With this election coming up, the whole world is looking at the U.S. in a way they haven’t in years,” he said on a break from a recent rehearsal. “They’re the solo superpower and they’re in full militaristic mode. No thinking person can ignore them.”

Major Canadian playwrights such as Jason Sherman, Judith Thomson and David Young have written new scripts specifically for the occasion and American poet and playwright Naomi Wallace has offered up one of her latest works.

Manson is best known as artistic director of Volcano, one of the city’s most imaginative groups and he feels this is the perfect time to unite theatre and politics in Toronto. “We all have a big stake in who gets picked on Tuesday.”

He’s not alone in his feelings. This past year has seen political theatre return to the radar in a major way.

Tim Robbins’ Embedded, about the cynicism of journalists behind the firing lines made plenty of headlines during its runs in both New York and Los Angeles. Stuff Happens, by David Hare, is the biggest hit currently at the Royal National Theater in London. From all critical reports, it’s a brilliant skewering of the Bush administration, reaching a climax when Condoleezza Rice sings “Amazing Grace.”

Even Toronto dipped its toe into the polemic pond earlier this year with The Adventures Of Ali & Ali And The Axes Of Evil at Theatre Passe Muraille.

The ingredient fuelling all of these works is a burning hatred for George W. Bush and his government, particularly as manifested by the war in Iraq. While this kind of agit-prop has been around since the ancient Greeks, it usually doesn’t hit the stage this quickly after the events that inspired it.

Yes, there were lots of plays written about the war in Vietnam, but except for Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, which burst on the scene as early as 1966, most of them didn’t appear until the 1970s, when the emotional climate around that conflict had started to cool.

Nowadays, it seems that there’s no time for “emotion recollected in tranquility,” to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth. Writers, actors and directors want to make their statements now.

Perhaps it’s driven by a sense of carpe diem generated in the wake of 9/11, or else it’s just the knee-jerk way our society reacts to everything today.

And that couldn’t be any clearer than in the works that are going into The Wrecking Ball.

Jason Sherman sardonically references Sheila Copps’ recent turn on stage in the beauty-parlor comedy Steel Magnolias, to place Copps and Caroline Parrish in a hairstyling establishment to discuss the Israeli Secret Service using Canadian passports.

But, like all of Sherman’s works, there’s something chilling under the sarcastic surface and Manson promises that the short play quickly becomes “terrifying.”

David Young’s script is a dialogue between two Canadian brothers who happen to be polar opposites; they meet after many years of separation in a bar on College St.

One has emigrated to the U.S. and is now a conservative Republican who made a lot of money. He loves what Bush stands for. His brother is a Canadian poet whose career, to quote Manson, “is in the toilet.” He’s a sad man who’s drinking himself to oblivion. He does bitter Bush imitations.

Whose view is correct? As always, Young lets us make the decision.

Judith Thomson’s work is likely to be the most provocative of the evening. She’s picked as her subject Lynndie England, one of the seven U.S. soldiers who found themselves in the centre of a media firestorm after abusing prisoners of war in Iraq. What made England’s case special was the fact she was a woman. The play is a monologue for actress Waneta Storms and Manson describes it as “vintage Thomson … a really complicated narrative. It involves her trailer-trash background mixed up with her patriotism all woven together in a portrait of working class America, the part of America, of course, that always goes to war.”

But despite the obvious temptation to take sides, Manson promises that the script “has no clear villain. It’s a social and political commentary infused with a vivid portrait of an individual.”

No one could ever accuse Manson of turning to anything less than A-list talent. His cast for the plays, in addition to Storms, include Ron White, Alon Nashman, Alex Poch-Goldin, Jane Spidell and Tanja Jacobs.

And the directors are equally impressive: Manson, Richard Greenblatt, Eda Holmes and Michael Weller.

All of this points to an evening far superior to many similar exercises, which critic Kenneth Tynan once described as “your politics left and your aesthetics left behind.”

Manson feels their message is an important one: “Because of their military, economic and cultural reach, we have to deal with America; we can’t ignore it. They’re the 500-pound gorilla.”

Anyone interested in gorilla hunting should show up at the Factory Studio Caf� tonight. Ammunition will be provided.

�2004 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

• 2 01 2005 - 00:00