The Sunday Feature, January 9, 2011

Sky Gilbert as Jane and Greg MacArthur, OUT-STUDIO 303 Factory Project (photo: Pierre Bourque, reprinted with permission)

The 'Gay Play' - Straight Up

by David King

If anyone in Canada has both practical and academic expertise on queer theatre, it is Buddies In Bad Times founder Sky Gilbert. So when Gilbert predicts the death of gay theatre by 2012, one can't help but perk up and listen.

In Playwrights' Canada Press' series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (volume 7 entitled "Queer Theatre in Canada"), Gilbert takes aim at the once subversive, now mainstreamed 'gay play' as an endangered species that even queers have abandoned to avoid "the notion of being outsiders and different." While Gilbert continues to suggest that the trans movement is still unexplored stage terrain, he does raise a good point about our Canada's quarter-century old "gay play". 

The definition of a 'gay play', or a 'gay' film, is as subjective as terms like 'culture', 'edgy', queer' and 'subversive'. Over-emphasis on the 'gay' subject has led to its misinterpretation as too 'marginalized', not universal enough, or not focused enough on quality or professionalism in production (struggling low-budget and poor production efforts in plays and films have contributed to that hit-and-miss scenario). Queers, who struggled for years to be included as 'same' and not 'other', often manifest that philosophy into both a lack of activism within their own community(ies) and by walking 'straight' past the ticket counters of gay plays that they feel would only mirror the 'marginalized' or 'ghettoized' aspects of their lives. 

Five (Immediately) Memorable Shows

By Gaëtan L. Charlebois 
As the end of the year approaches it's a wise idea to look back without anger; it helps brace one for what may come in the new year. In that spirit I'm offering a list I invite you to extend with your own "immediately" memorable productions in Montreal English-language theatre.

Woyzeck, Centaur, 1974 
Felix Mirbt and Jean Herbiet's production of the Büchner play was the first performance for which I got in people's faces. I was a first year acting student at John Abbott College and actually did something about getting people to see it: I called Pam Turpin (with whom I later worked in the PR department at Centaur) and asked her if I could get a group discount for other students. She went one better and got us a handful of free tickets. I went for a second time and was hypnotized all over again by this heart-breaking story of a weak man. Decades later, when I saw the exceptional TNM production of the Berg opera based on the play, my mind was still flooded by images of that wondrous Centaur production. (Mirbt/Herbiet followed up with a Dream Play which was nearly as haunting.)

Mosquito Man, 1992
I had gone through an endless drought writing for The Mirror—one hideous production after another—when along came Bruce Smith's moving little play about losers in a bar, one of whom was played—with extreme maturity—by a young Donovan Reiter. They saved my life as a scribe.