Читать книгу Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History - D.A. Hadfield - Страница 14

Many of the challenges of new play development that confront feminist theatre practitioners today echo the difficulties encountered in the late 1960s in the quest to establish a “Canadian National” theatre, as Rina Fraticelli pointed out in her report The Status of Women in the Canadian Theatre. However, it is the differences, rather than the similarities, between the two emerging traditions that highlight how much higher the stakes are for a theatrical tradition that offers a challenge to the institutional status quo on the basis of gender, rather than on the basis of nationality or “culture.” Since Fraticelli’s original report was not publicized as part of the governmental policy statements on national culture, the analogy—which Kate Lushington argues would do much to alleviate a strident “fear of feminism” both within the theatrical institution and outside it—was buried along with it. Lushington summarizes:

After all, when incentives to encourage Canadian playwrights were introduced, no one called us “strident colonials and xenophobic separatists”; there was no widespread fear of offending the British by “too strong a nationalist stance”; no one suggested that we should stop sleeping with Americans. Nor did anyone label the Tarragon Theatre “a Canadian ghetto,” or worry that its playwrights would write only about awfully decent peace-keeping forces, beaver and moose. (10)

While the heady days of government arts and culture funding did much to encourage burgeoning Canadian playwrights and some experimental theatre companies and works, the majority of their efforts went into conventionally scripted plays based on traditional narrative structures (or into building the most impressive venues for housing a borrowed theatrical tradition). In fact, English-Canadian theatre in general offers few real production development alternatives to playwrights beyond the logocentric model, a tradition that is reinforced by the difficulties such alternatives offer the historiographical process. Since script-based theatre lends itself most readily to historical visibility, and historical visibility leads, remarkably easily, to an assumption of “quality” (i.e., it wouldn’t be in print if it weren’t good/successful/important, etc.), it is easy to see how quickly the accretion of texts creates the aura of merit for a playwright. This relationship between text and success has real economic ramifications for Canadian playwrights, working within the economically based business model assumed by most theatre boards, which are now often populated with and controlled by members of the business community to maximize the potential of corporate sponsorship for productions. Since “corporations usually restrict subsidy to safe, conservative commodities” (Wallace 144) the historiographical process of textual commodification is almost essential for a playwright to gain entry into the process of production and repetition that characterizes much artistic programming.

From a playwright’s perspective, being commissioned to create a work increases the odds of a “successful” production—one that might reach an audience and generate enough revenue to allow a playwright to live through the writing of another play—and enough textual residue to gain admission to the mutually reinforcing system of texts and merit. Therefore, the stakes for a playwright who prefers not to work within the logocentric model are even higher. Many playwrights and (academic) critics have pointed out that Canadian theatre is an ardently conservative institution, “not normally linked with the political, let alone artistic, avant-garde” (Lushington 6). When Urjo Kareda was dramaturg at the Stratford Festival, which receives more government funding than any other theatre company in Canada, he considered one of the most valuable aspects of his job his ability to “draw Canadian playwrights to the festival” (8). He lists the Canadians commissioned to adapt or create scripts for this most prominent company: John Murrell, Tom Cone, Larry Fineberg, Sheldon Rosen—an exclusively male coterie who have all, Kareda notes, gone on to enjoy national and international success in the wake of their Stratford tenures.

In order to be considered eligible or desirable to create a commissioned work, a playwright—especially a feminist playwright—must have a proven track record of “success” as it might be defined by a conservative, most likely male, artistic director (most employed artistic directors are of necessity conservative) and his board of directors. In Canadian theatre, the size of the gamble is too great to allow anything else. Christopher Newton’s choice of Judith Thompson to direct a new adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the 1991 season provides an excellent example of this process at work. The Shaw Festival, like Stratford a theatre company that receives a sizeable chunk of government support, hedged its bets on several fronts: Thompson is one of the few women in Canada to have achieved a national and international reputation for “success” as a playwright and director; while her scripts contain identifiably feminist elements, she works within a fairly traditional, logocentric definition of her craft; and she was hired only to interpret an adaptation of a recognized “classic” of male-authored modern drama.¹ Some of the obstacles Thompson encountered during the development of this production, moreover, illustrate the difficulties that are inherent in the process, especially for a female playwright whose mere presence automatically raises the spectre of feminism. Even a commissioned script must negotiate a network of collaborative influences before a production can be realized, meaning that even a commissioned playwright does not have absolute freedom to create as she envisions. Lizbeth Goodman describes the tightrope act: some playwrights prefer not to work to commission, as they find that in writing only for themselves, they produce their best work. For instance, award-winning British playwright and founder of the Royal Balle performance art company Charlotte Keatley reports that she prefers not to work to commission because she “‘wants to be free to change [her] own mind in the process of writing, which is a process of exploration,’ but also admits that without commissions, the material needs of the playwright may not be met” (Goodman 90). Canadian playwright Margaret Hollingsworth casts this dilemma in specifically feminist terms:

What artistic director in his right mind would take a chance on a play which is likely to provoke a hostile or uncomprehending reaction, not only from a portion of the males in the audience, but from some of the females who still identify with the male point of view as well? Theatre works best when it’s provocative, but provocation isn’t safe. The theatre is in a precarious financial position; plays must break even at the box office; women are told that they must learn to write successful plays, that there’s no room for failure. Product is what counts; process is only useful when it leads to success. (25)

While financial and institutional factors generally mitigate against commissioned work by feminist playwrights, historiographical studies of feminist theatre nonetheless represent a large percentage of commissioned work, simply because these works are more likely to reach production and leave behind a record of their existence to consider. Moreover, the qualitative verdict that is created and endorsed by this historical record will silently but overwhelmingly reflect the political compatibility between a feminist playwright and the theatre company that produced and presented the work.

Without the celebrity cachet necessary to work in an established theatre (translate: one that can afford to pay her a decent wage for her craft), the unknown playwright has two main options. Which one she chooses will depend on her vision of feminism and the type of impact she wants her work to have. These two options can be roughly categorized as the script-centred mode of production, and the “collective model.”