Guys & dudes

>> Gents, blokes, fellas, whatever you want
to call them, men are dominating the
2007–’08 theatre season

by AMY BARRATT

Women don’t write plays. Especially Canadian women.

This is the conclusion I have reached after perusing the 2007–’08 subscription seasons at the Centaur, infinitheatre and the Segal.

While I’m delighted to see new works by local playwrights Vittorio Rossi and David Gow, as well as an old favourite, Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, by Michel Tremblay, in the Centaur line-up, I can’t help noticing a certain gender uniformity that extends to the two Rest-of-Canada playwrights in the season, John Mighton and Daniel Lillford. Of six plays in the upcoming Centaur season, one—The Syringa Tree, a highly acclaimed one-woman piece—is by a woman, South African Pamela Gien. The Centaur will be hosting the award-winning touring production starring Caroline Cave.

Infinitheatre is offering its own “subscription” deal in the form of the Infinite six-pack. Sixty bucks buys you six tickets to mainstage infini shows. Unlike most other subscriptions, which are non-transferable, this one actually begs to be passed around. There are only three shows in the infini season, so you can split the cost with a friend and see all three, or shoot the wad with five friends at one performance.

The six-pack is undeniably a good deal. It’s also just the thing if you want to be sure to avoid anything written by a woman. The mainstage plays are: That Woman, by Daniel Danis, an unnecessary remount of last season’s Talisman Theatre production, starring infini artistic director Guy Sprung; Gas, by National Theatre School playwriting graduate Jason Maghanoy, a portrait of five American soldiers fighting in Iraq, directed by Guy Sprung; and Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?, the latest from infini favourite Trevor Ferguson (Long, Long, Short, Long). The play, starring Brett Watson and Lina Roessler, has already been produced Off Broadway, where it was well received, in a Bridge Theatre production directed by Robin A. Paterson. The infini version has the same actors but is directed by Sprung.

Now, you may say, perhaps infinitheatre looked at all sorts of plays, by men and women, and these three just happened to be the best. Trouble is, we know what kind of plays infini takes seriously, because they do a series of public readings each year. The playwrights they are looking at in the Pipeline this year are David Freeman, Bruce M. Smith, Jaspreet Singh and Guy Sprung (dude, bloke, fella, guy).

Of nine playwrights implicated in six productions at the Segal Theatre in 2007–’08, three are women. At this point in the article, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? One of the three, Kristen Thomson, is even Canadian. Her one-woman piece, I, Claudia, will be performed by Michelle Polak. The only other play in the season with female input is The Diary of Anne Frank. The Segal will be presenting Wendy Kesselman’s 1997 “adaptation” of the original 1956 version by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The rest of the Segal season includes Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, a new Houdini musical based on a book by Ben Gonshor, and in Yiddish, The Wise Men of Chelm, book by Abraham Shulman.

It’s really too bad Judith Thompson, Marie Laberge, Sharon Pollock, Carole Fréchette, Yvette Nolan, Kit Brennan, Joanna Glass, Colleen Curran, Alexandria Haber, Ann Lambert and countless others don’t write plays.