Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
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.”
Beginning with the Word
In the Toronto area, one of the most committed companies with a specific mandate for developing uncommissioned and unsolicited new work is Tarragon Theatre, a theatre that works explicitly and implicitly within the model of single-authored, script-based productions. Tarragon’s reputation for “success” makes it a desirable model for many theatres engaged in the process of new play development. Former dramaturg/artistic director Urjo Kareda described Tarragon as “a playwright’s theatre. Nothing happens here until a script or a writer walks through the door” (Cottreau, “Writing” 5). As Kareda himself admitted, the writers who were most likely to attract his attention when they walked through the door exhibited “a voice that is muscular, that leaves a lot of air, that asks more questions than it answers, that is interested in various kinds of form, that has a nose for the theatrical. . .. I think I’m probably much more friendly toward plays with gaping, interesting holes, rather than nice, neat constructions” (Cottreau, “Writing” 7, 8), qualities that are at least potentially congenial to feminist representation at the level of script. Moreover, for feminist writers working in this mode, being involved at Tarragon increases the odds of materializing on both stage and page. Kareda stressed that “it is the giving of time, continuity and commitment from a theatre to a writer which represents the most crucial currency” (Kareda 9), and was prepared, if necessary, to wait a year or more for the playwright’s vision and voice to manifest itself. Such a commitment from Tarragon brings with it the increased likelihood of arts council grants, an essential source of funding to allow a playwright to develop her new work (uncommissioned playwrights, unlike other theatre workers, are normally paid only from a percentage of box office receipts, another way the system implicitly endorses product over process). Moreover, a developing playwright at Tarragon is virtually guaranteed an eventual production there: having waited sometimes years for a script to materialize, Kareda would do everything in his power to make sure it achieved some sort of embodiment on stage. At times, as Kareda noted (10), his commitment to a playwright extended to mounting productions of scripts developed prior to her/his arrival at Tarragon.
Just as important, a production at Tarragon increases the likelihood of allowing the play to complete the passage from page to stage and back again, inscribing its mark into Canadian theatre history. Reviewers regularly attend and publish on Tarragon productions, and Kareda’s development and production records are preserved and publicly accessible through the University of Guelph archives. Moreover, Kareda has been known to venture into the process of historiography to ensure the survival of a work beyond Tarragon: “I have pursued and hounded publishers to see that new plays, once performed, can also be printed so that others can experience them; I have entered the dreaded world of marketing to make sure that the wonderful new plays by Judith Thompson or Don Hannah or Colleen Murphy . . . find homes beyond their premières at Tarragon” (Kareda 10). Tarragon plays, with their predominantly logocentric structure, offer relatively few challenges to the traditional processes of theatre historiography, making it easier for them to endure as a visible part of a Canadian feminist theatrical tradition. Writers such as Carol Bolt, Sally Clark, Margaret Hollingsworth, and Judith Thompson, whose names are by now a relatively well-known part of Canadian theatre, have all benefited from working with Tarragon.
It must be stressed, however, that Tarragon offers a congenial home for a very specific type of feminist theatre, those plays that are concerned with unravelling or exploring the representation of women at the level of script, rather than within the broader context of producing structure; or, in Ann Wilson’s terms, those that are more concerned with “what is represented” rather than “representation itself.” (Some critics might argue that plays following this structure are not “feminist enough” for consideration, but I think this is an unfair and overly simplistic dismissal.) While Kareda’s choice of texts left room for non- or anti-hegemonic feminist scripts, and while he acknowledged the contributions of designers and actors, and “the resonances that [these] collaborators will eventually add” (Kareda 7), the play, and its Tarragon production, emphatically revolved around the absolute authority of the individual playwright: “The first production of a new play—the culmination of the development processes—has to be the writer’s production, presenting the writer’s vision of the play as interpreted by the most gifted collaborators possible” (Kareda 8). In addition, Kareda’s philosophy of new play development implicitly reinscribed the separation between “public” and “private” experience that much feminist theatre seeks to combat. Kareda’s ideal playwright may have personal or emotional baggage, but he did not see the playwrighting process as the place to confront or deal with it. In 1986, Kareda described his role as dramaturg as supportive, but not strictly personal: “[I]t is vital, in this context, not to be tempted to trespass from dramaturgy into therapy. Sometimes what blocks a work’s creation is the writer’s own emotional state, but one mustn’t pretend that one is equipped to deal effectively with the psyche in order to obtain a second act” (Kareda 9), a position that he