BWW Special Coverage: Canadian Playwrights Discuss The Theatre of Politics at Spur Festival

Special Coverage by Mirella Christou

Anyone who has witnessed rapid-fire exchanges on Parliament Hill knows that the way our politics is conducted can be rather theatrical. On the flip side, politics has been a popular thematic standby for the world of theatre since the times of Aeschylus.

What politics has on offer to the contemporary dramatist includes the opportunity to explore complex characters, juicy themes and built-in conflict. In short, the requisite components for an interesting play.

On Sunday, April 14, three prominent Canadian playwrights - Michael Healey, Hannah Moscovitch, and Guillermo Verdecchia - joined together in a lively repartee at Toronto's Spur Festival, raising the curtain on the question: do playwrights, like politicians, have powerful roles in society that shape and help audiences reflect upon relevant social issues, provoking action or new ways of thinking? Also, can this type of material be too hot to handle?

Each of the three playwrights has, in some measure, elicited audience interest and engagement with their works. However, the consensus was the "power" manifests rather differently on the stage than in the halls of legislature.

In Proud, Healey examined a fictional scenario involving Prime Minister Stephen Harper grappling with a problem child MP.

In This is War, Moscovitch wrote of soldiers facing horrors on deployment in Afghanistan, their traumas unknown and unseen by citizens back home.

In The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axis of Evil, co-written by Verdecchia, the Bush era "war on terror" is parodied in a piece of sharp satire.

Whether you have identified as a political junkie or not, there is a sense that these pieces aim to appeal to contemporary times and issues.

In Verdecchia's eyes, all theatre is political, which he feels is due to the fact that theatre exists in a socio-economic context. Even Cats, he claims, is a political play.

"It's about the politics of the banal and of idiocy," teased Verdecchia, to a volley of laughter in the glass-enclosed Gardiner Museum.

In The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axis of Evil, Verdecchia's stated objective was to be as obscene as George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the Iraq invasion, he said. But he concluded that it was an impossible task. "All we had were some fowl words, while they had armies," he said.

Meanwhile, Moscovitch's approach with This is War was to expose a world she felt was under-reported in the media. The question she was compelled to address was: what were Canadians doing in Afghanistan?

Moscovitch discovered the seed of the story her play would tell while working on a CBC radio drama series Afghanada and also, from a photojournalist friend who furnished her with what he had seen while accompanying Canadian troops in Afghanistan's war zones - stories that had not seen the light of day. Moscovitch took those stories and fictionalized them for her piece.

What resulted was that most of The Civilians who came to the show walked away shocked, she said. "People barfed in the bushes outside of the theatre. They weren't exposed to this world..."

To her relief, the soldiers that attended the play expressed appreciation to the playwright. "They were thrilled," she said. As for the politicians who attended, Moscovitch couldn't say they felt the same way.

While, to Healey's knowledge only one Conservative politician came out to see Proud during its Toronto run. But, that isn't the end of the story. In fact, it could all change once the play makes its debut in Ottawa this fall, where Healey will once again play the part of Harper.

So, as it turns out there is an appetite in Canada for political theatre, even controversial material. It remains to be seen, however, if there's an appetite for theatrical politics.

Fo rmore information on the Spur Festival, visit http://spurfestival.ca/