Une fete pour Boris, a play at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, has generated a lot of controversy.
Aside from predictable skirmishes over plays about the Middle East, Canadian theatre has been eerily free of controversy of late. Well, the plays themselves have been, anyway.
In a curious plot twist, the outrage that used to be reserved for taboo-tackling productions has instead been directed at politically incorrect or provocative press releases, YouTube videos, posters - and even audition notices.
Recent incidents at the National Arts Centre, Halifax's Neptune Theatre and Toronto's SummerWorks festival have raised intriguing questions: Should challenging theatre be accompanied by challenging promotional materials? And what are the parameters of the free-speech zone necessary to create vital art?
The latest skirmish to erupt was between a group called the Radical Disabled Artists Network and the National Arts Centre. RDAN accused the NAC of using "offensive" language in its description of a show called Une fête pour Boris at the NAC's French Theatre.
In various places on the English parts of the NAC's sprawling website, former artistic director Denis Marleau's technologically innovative production was sold as "the story of a legless cripple who invites a bunch of legless cripples to a birthday party for a legless cripple."
At first glance: Yikes. But, hold on: The term "legless cripple" comes directly from an English translation of the 1968 absurdist play by Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard. And the play, incidentally, is as much about actual disabled people as Samuel Beckett's Happy Days is about the plight of women buried up to their necks in mud.
When the NAC communications department defended the language on that basis, however, RDAN replied that it didn't object to the use of the dated expression in the performance - only out of context, on the website. Bernhard, dead for 21 years, could say what he wanted, but the uncredited, official voice of the NAC had to be more enlightened.
The French Theatre, which has a decidedly artful approach to its advertising, had earlier in the year stood its ground when some Ottawans complained about its provocative 40th-anniversary-season poster by Montreal artist Sophie Jodoin, featuring a drawing of a woman's naked torso with a hook for one hand. But in the case of Une fête pour Boris, the NAC either decided it didn't have a leg to stand on, or that it simply wasn't worth the trouble, and the language in question was taken off-line. A poster can be pretty easily defended on artistic merit; an online press release is more nebulous territory.
But what about viral videos? At last year's SummerWorks festival, artistic producer Michael Rubenfeld got in hot water not due to his programming - which included a memorable fake-feces-filled farce about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - but for his online promotional campaign.
Following up on an envelope-pushing 2008 promo he shot featuring many of Toronto's attractive young female playwrights having a pillow fight in their pyjamas (which set some older feminist theatre artists a-grumbling), Rubenfeld waded into even more sensitive territory with a YouTube short called How to Pitch a Play in Canada. It featured a white actor trying to get a grant from the Toronto Arts Council by pitching a show about a gay aboriginal.
Again: Yikes. But the video's punchline was a shot of an aghast Arts Council representative; the joke, in a bit of Ricky Gervais-style cringe humour, was on the insensitive actor making the pitch. The message: Popular misconceptions notwithstanding, theatre practitioners don't get grants simply by ticking a certain number of special-interest boxes.
Given the artful ambiguity of the promo, not everyone got the message; some felt it was an attack on a show called Agokwe: Gay Love on the Rez that had recently swept the city's Dora Awards. After complaints from First Nations artists - including playwright Tara Beagan, who had taken part in the previous year's politically incorrect pillow fight - Rubenfeld issued an explanation and full apology on his blog.
The most unusual theatrical apology in recent memory, however, took place in November after Halifax's Neptune Theatre sent out an audition notice on a Canadian Actors' Equity listserv for its upcoming production of Peter Pan. The offence? The list of characters had been copied directly from J.M. Barrie's 1904 play, including a reference to the "Pirates/Indians" of Neverland.
How to portray these Neverland characters in a modern Canadian production is certainly an interesting artistic question. But as soon as the insensitivity police descended - Beagan weighed in here, too - Neptune and Equity scrambled to offer their regrets, reproducing the 100-year-old dramatis personae. "It was an oversight on our part, not realizing how offensive that might be to some First Nations people," George Pothitos, Neptune's artistic director, said in a statement released on the same listserv. "I sincerely apologize."
Compared to the heyday of 1990s political correctness, there seems to be a solid consensus today that theatre artists have the right to be provocative when they're onstage. Think of the furor that greeted David Mamet's Oleanna - about a female student who accuses her professor of sexual exploitation - when it opened off-Broadway in 1992, compared to the general indifference that greeted its flop Broadway revival last year.
But what about the edges of art - the posters, the press releases, the Twitter feeds and blogs? Might we be on a slippery slope, leading to a place where a poster for Neil Labute's satire Fat Pig contains an apologetic asterisk and a footnoted advisory: "This play is actually about how weak-willed men are cruel to overweight women. Sorry!"
Once asked by a disapproving journalist why he gave his play that provocative title, Labute provocatively replied: "Because Stupid Bitch was already taken." When it comes to defending the sanctity of the extraneous elements of theatre, however, few will take as aggressive a defence. Not even me. While I'm all in favour of outraging audiences, what's the point if they haven't bought the ticket yet?