Jordan Tannahill - Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama

copyright Jordan Tannahill, 2015

first edition

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Tannahill, Jordan, author

Theatre of the unimpressed : in search of vital drama / Jordan Tannahill.

(Exploded views)

ISBN 978-1-55245-313-1 (pbk.).

1. Drama--History and criticism. 2. Theater--Production and direction. I. Title. II. Series: Exploded views

Theatre of the Unimpressed is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 411 4.

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Dedicated to Erin Brubacher,
who continues to inspire and challenge me
through every success and failure we share.

If youre willing to fail interestingly,
you tend to succeed interestingly.
Edward Albee

A my and I have endured a lot together: puberty, breakups, the death of parents, Burning Man. Throughout our decade of friendship weve each moved through several boyfriends, minimum-wage jobs and dive apartments, though she always a few more than me. Like her spirit animal Janis Joplin, shes a woman of hard living and restless nomadism, a life thats endowed her with the lowest threshold for bullshit of anyone I know. Last summer Amy called me and said, I have to see a play. Wanna come? She said it was a friends show a remixed Shakespearian comedy in a local pub and she needed a wingman to help get her through it. I told her it sounded like she was going in for a root canal. She confessed: I generally see theatre out of obligation.

At intermission Amy turned to me and apologized. I nodded toward the door, and she scrunched up her mouth; she was torn. Just tell her you got a migraine, I offered. Life is short. We downed our drinks and made a beeline for the exit. As we waited for the streetcar, watching would-be patron after would-be patron walk up to the pub, realize there was a play happening and turn on their heels, Amy mused, I expected to hate it. Didnt you? Its like were resigned to being unimpressed. She let the thought linger in the humid summer evening around us as she lit a cigarette. I mean, Christ, in medieval courts the jester would be dismembered if they were boring.

Dismembered?

Beheaded. She exhaled smoke through her nose. I guess the stakes are high if youre worried your head will end up on one.

She told me that only the jester possessed the power to ridicule the king. The criticism he lobbed, cloaked in satire, could undermine a kings authority while provoking laughter and breathless apprehension. If he was good enough, the jester could incite revolt, toppling the king while he was laughing.

As Amy spoke, I imagined the medieval court as a microcosm of any civic state, and the jester the artist, in other words its socio-political release valve. If the jester does not offer challenging and brave revelations about the king, his comedy has no potency, and the king will grow bored and mutter, Off with his head. And this was the crux of the problem with the terrible play we had just endured: it was too unaware or afraid to be challenging, too eager to please, too afraid to take risks that might scare off or provoke its audience. We grew bored until we drew our fingers slowly across our throats.

As a cultured urbanite in her late twenties, Amy has colleagues and friends who make theatre. In a couple of instances shes even found herself briefly dating men who made theatre. But for the most part she manages to successfully avoid it. Other engagements always have a way of conveniently supplanting plays in her calendar. She will politely ignore Facebook invitations, and only when she is really pressed, out of inescapable social duty, will she relent. Playwright Anthony Neilson might have been speaking directly about Amy in his 2007 Guardian article headlined Dont Be Boring: The most depressing response I encounter when Im chatting someone up and I ask them if they ever go to the theatre is this: I should go but I dont. That emphatic should tells you all you need to know. Imagine it in other contexts: I should play Grand Theft Auto; I should watch Strictly Come Dancing. That should tells you that people see theatregoing not as entertainment but as self-improvement

Was this sense of theatrical obligation widely held? And if so, what elements were making an invitation to the theatre feel more like a trip to the dentist and less like scoring Beyonc tickets? These were not idle questions for me. Im a playwright, theatre director and, with my ex-boyfriend, William Ellis, I run Videofag in Torontos scrappy, bohemian Kensington Market neighbourhood. In October 2012, Will and I spent a month of late nights sweeping two decades of hair out of every crevice of an old barbershop, removing the mirrors, swivel chairs and faded photographs of pompadoured eighties hair models, slowly converting the space into a small storefront theatre. Turn a corner at the far end of the performance space and you walk into a cozy room with a seventies avocado-coloured dining table, a dozen paint-by-number thrift-store artworks hung salon-style, a sink of dirty dishes and a rickety bookshelf stacked with queer theory and Canadian poetry. This is our kitchen.

The view from the kitchen window is a cinderblock wall, which lends the room a perpetual nighttime feel. Even our breakfasts are eaten by candlelight. We have about five minutes of hot water every morning, which means shared showers. Will and I have perfected the groggy synchronicity of simultaneous bathing he wets his hair, I wet mine as he shampoos his, I shampoo my hair as he rinses his, etc. a slippery, naked tango weve continued even after breaking up. The odd cockroach makes a cameo in our cutlery drawer and the bassy thumps and off-key wails of the K-Pop karaoke bar next door rattle our walls until three in the morning every night.

While a bit squalid, Videofag is our home. And its become the home of a vibrant community of mostly Toronto artists operating on the margins. Its not unusual for Will and I to emerge from the shower in towels to find a cluster of actors making tea for their rehearsal, or doing a wig-fitting in our bedroom, or running lines on our couch. Our kitchen routinely becomes a green room, our bathroom doubles as a paint-and-props workshop and our backyard is a graveyard of discarded set pieces. Some nights, artists even sleep in the gallery one on the couch perhaps, and a couple in the spare bedroom all in a space about the size of a suburban two-door garage.

All this is to say that I spend most of my life immersed in theatre. Which is why Amys feelings of obligation unnerved me. In that casually tossed-off comment, had she hit upon some unsayable truth I too had felt but not yet allowed myself to admit? Had I too begun to see theatre out of a sense of duty? Theatre seems to be doing its best. There are a lot of nice plays. Well-plotted, well-acted, well-designed, well-intentioned, well-received and Im bored by almost all of it. Im even bored by instances of these things within my own work. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut hed become. Or like the long-term romance whose incendiary early days had cooled into amicable cohabitation a functional companionship sporadically punctuated by passion, perhaps on New Years Eve or an anniversary.