Our Theatre: Too Kind?

Interesting article in This Magazine (July/August issue) on Canadian political theatre by this writer entitled "The Dangers of Playing it Safe: How kindness is killing Canadian political theatre". One example he gives is Tomson Highway who can't get productions of his plays because it's hard to find enough professional Aboriginal actors (and directors are afraid to use non-Aboriginals because they are "worried about being accused of 'cultural appropriation'"). I wonder about that; there is the concept of "color-blind casting" -- in the production of Our Country's Good by the UW Drama Dept that I saw earlier this years, the cast who doubled as convicts and English officers included one black woman, and the two aborigines were played by an East Asian and Indian student (I believe). And if you can translate Les Belles-soeurs into Scots or Yiddish -- well, what I am saying is, this is theatre! Tomson says it's okay! So do his plays!

The other example is My Name is Rachel Corrie which was given a secret reading in Toronto at an undisclosed location. (I know! How thrilling!)

Here is something from Hipparchia's Choice by Michele Le Doeuff. I don't know if it is apropos. But I have been to Aikido for the first time in two weeks, and Kilkenny intermittently in hand I transcribe from my favorite philosopher:

Over the last twenty years interest seems to have been concentrated on the theoretical possibility of destroying language and undermining all speech. Having started as a theoretical phenomenon, this focus soon became social; it became integrated into everyday relations between intellectuals. We were begged not to use old words, all of which were suspected of bearing within them the sedimented residue of oppressive enemy thinking, either 'bourgeois' or 'metaphysical', depending on the preferences of the person you were talking to. Words were thought to be saturated with 'naiveties' (which were themselves complicit in an order which had to be broken) and were accused of surreptitiously leading back to theories which, it went without saying, we had all agreed to rid ourselves of. In a consensus on reciprocal censorship we have reduced each other to silence.

and

Of course ordinary reference points can be criticised and commonly held ideas may be untoward. But it is one thing to discuss something step by step with another person, with his, her or our common liberty in view, and quite another to practise the intellectual terrorism which robs the other of speech.

Excuse me, I have been called to bed.