Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
Nightwood Theatre has always meant for me a kind of uneasy trust, uneasy because the joys and frustrations of working collectively so often nearly cancel each other out. To an actor who was also a nascent writer and director, collective theatre made a lot of sense; weren’t, after all, four heads better than one?
Probably, but I have learned that there is a tremendous price to pay for bucking the conventional power hierarchy of the theatre, and that it is more than just the considerable headaches of “collectively” filling out grant applications. To share administrative responsibility and creative directorship on all levels at all times is simply, in our poverty-stricken milieu, unrealistic. The theatre cannot support us all, so one person must be selected or “cast” and this, of course, betrays the spirit of the collective. Resentments are sown, take root, and grow. (Nightwood 48)
Vingoe’s reference to the “headaches of ‘collectively’ filling out grant applications” highlights one of the most serious material challenges to collective companies: the difficulty of obtaining funding for a non-traditionally conceived theatre company. Granting agencies are most comfortable assessing applications that name a single artistic director (preferably with an established reputation and thus likely male), or at least a single individual “in charge” of the company, who serves as an implicit guarantor that any forthcoming monies will be responsibly channelled into a successful theatre production, and whose singular “vision” will create seasonal programming of artistic coherence and financial viability. In her Ph.D. dissertation and a subsequent article in Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théátrales au Canada, Shelley Scott outlines (“Feminist” 123–44) how Nightwood’s own history of funding applications—which “reflect an on-going attempt to balance different agendas: the desire to be taken seriously within the theatre community, which demands artistic leadership; the desire to retain the support of the feminist community, which prefers alternative approaches to organization; and the desire for a clear working relationship between the Board and the staff, which is an issue for any theatre company” (“Collective” 127)—traces a language and structure that is subtly tailored to appeal to the interests of funding bodies. Eventually, Nightwood found it desirable to move away from a formal collective structure altogether, as outlined by Kate Lushington in a grant application letter:
Since I joined Nightwood last September as the first Artistic Coordinator from outside the group of founding members, the Board has been under-going a year of structural transition, from an open ended collective approach to a more traditional structure, with the establishment of standing committees to handle tasks, intensive Board recruitment, and the setting up of terms for Board Members. (Scott, “Collective” 202)
As more evidence of the difficulty a non-traditional company like Nightwood might experience, Scott offers her observation about the types of archival materials Nightwood preserved, from which she attempts to reconstruct a history of the company:
For the most part, what is preserved are the official materials demanded by government bureaucracy and funding agencies: grant proposals, fundraising letters, financial ledgers, lists of people who have donated money or corporations who have refused to do so. The paper accumulated over the years speaks volumes about how much time and effort a company must devote to raising money and the importance this holds for their survival. Furthermore, it returns us to the accident/intention dialectic as it relates to the building of a theatrical season, indicating how much the company’s choices are dependent on the granting of funds by external bodies, and the influence, subtle or overt, those bodies exert on the works produced. Projects are abandoned because no money was forthcoming, and it is difficult to speculate how a project that was not realized might have altered the direction of history had it ever seen the light of day. (“Feminist” 11)
Collectively-run alternative theatre companies might be the most appropriate, congenial, or only avenue for many feminist productions,5 but this same quality often compromises a company’s ability to qualify for the types of blanket funding—or sometimes any funding—that would allow the company to survive, much less free those working there from the constant round of funding proposals or below-poverty level monetary compensations. The Nightwood experience is echoed by the Maenad theatre group in Calgary, whose rejection letter from the Canada Council underscored this problem: “In that Maenad’s application did not meet what were described as ‘the Council’s published artistic and administrative criteria’ (letter to Maenad, March 1993), the fact remains that the kinds of collective and collaborative process that is at the heart of our mandate never did and never will” (Bennett and Patience 12).
Ever resourceful, many feminist alternative theatres have turned to even “more alternative” ways of bringing their works to public view. One such method involves the workshop process, which allows a company to explore the possibilities of a piece without incurring the expense and risk of a full-scale production. For many fledgling playwrights, and even for established playwrights going out on a limb experimenting with a different kind of theatre than they might be used to, workshops can provide an important venue for trial (and possibly, error) that doesn’t threaten a small theatre’s financial stability or expose the playwright to a very public, and possibly very unsympathetic, audience. Beth Herst describes the ideal workshop process as a potentially invaluable challenge to the traditional process of play production, which seeks to uncover the single, unified, transhistorical truth lurking somewhere close beneath the surface of a playtext, all within the time frame of “three weeks to rehearse, one week to tech” (8). At its best, Herst argues, the workshop offers an alternative that could actually serve to subvert the entire director-led process of theatre production that is currently predicated on linear, character-based narrative drama. The workshop process, on the contrary, offers a forum for ongoing debate, which has the potential to “make ‘meaning’ a problem rather than a premise, a plural and unstable construction to be investigated rather than a fixed and manifest ‘truth’ to be discovered. It can create a space for multiplicity, encouraging, even demanding, a self-consciousness about theatrical mediation and its effects . . . ” (7) In short, a workshop setting could match form with function for many feminist theatre events that rely on a constant dismantling and questioning of traditional, monolithic authority.
Not surprisingly, in the current conservative climate of Canadian theatrical production, which resists much innovation that challenges the status quo, the workshop process mostly fails to achieve the deconstructive potential Herst envisions. In order for workshopping to provide a truly subversive challenge to the current process, Herst argues, it must be practiced in its most radical form by the very theatres that endorse the traditional theatrical process workshopping seeks to subvert. These more mainstream theatres are also the most likely to have the type of operational funding that might allow for the workshop process. For “fringe” theatres to be the only ones practicing workshopping as an alternative form merely serves to re-emphasize the hegemony of the “mainstream” mode of production. However, as Herst goes on to point out, most mainstream theatres practice workshopping largely as a preliminary version of the “process,” a condensed form of the full-scale production work to come, rather than the polyvalent, exploratory process required by much feminist theatre. Such an attitude can do more to hurt than help feminist theatrical alternatives. Elliott Hayes’s comments about stasis and “the workshop syndrome” once again reveal parallels between current feminist theatre practice and earlier advocates of indigenous Canadian theatre:
Many Canadian theatres, confronting the criticism that they are not producing enough Canadian plays, conduct workshops in order to demonstrate their sensitivity to the problem. While such workshops can be invaluable to our playwrights under the right circumstances, they also can be detrimental for, invariably, they contribute to a “masterpiece mentality” in Canadian actors and in our audience. The “masterpieces” are worth producing, or watching; other plays “need work.” (36)
Rather than offering a positive production alternative, workshopping as it is practiced by most mainstream (including “mainstream alternate” theatres like Tarragon) becomes at best merely a prelude to a “real” production, at worst a dead-end for a play that will never make it one. And, from the point of view of history, a play that currently begins and ends with a workshop may as well almost not have happened at all, as it effectively disappears