The rumours of the death of Canadian Stage have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, from my perspective, the Toronto theatre company is truly alive for the first time in many years.
With John Logan's Red now open, it's not at all difficult to pick which of the city's not-for-profit theatres has had the strongest autumn artistically. That would be Matthew Jocelyn's Canadian Stage, hands down.
Now, naturally, Factory Theatre, Tarragon and Theatre Passe Muraille mostly focus on new plays, so they take on an extra risk and are more likely to stumble.
And yet, Canadian Stage - in its second season selected by new artistic and general director Jocelyn - has embraced "risky" programming and has still had a remarkable run of critical acclaim. There was the rejigged return of Volcano's Another Africa; the beautiful and poignant I Send You This Cadmium Red, another double-bill; the orgiastic dance-theatre anarchy of Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice (which played to 90% capacity); and Company Theatre's English-language premiere of German play The Test. (Yes, I wasn't particularly won over by The Test personally, but I'm not so egotistical that I can ignore the raves it received elsewhere.)
That's why it's frustrating to read Toronto Star critic Richard Ouzounian, in his review of Siminovitch-winning director Kim Collier's production of Red, still railing against Jocelyn's vision for Canadian Stage, even as it has found a definite groove. He calls it "a regime that seems to feel that being different is the answer to everything."
That sounds like a compliment disguised as an insult to me. What is the alternative to "being different", after all, but "being the same"?
That's what Canadian Stage was for an awfully long time - and I, for one, am relieved to see those days are over.
Toronto is the largest city in Canada and it should be a theatre hot-spot internationally, and yet for many years its biggest and best-funded not-for-profit theatre company was producing the safest work in town.
Forget the chimera that what this city most needs is a commercial saviour in the model of the defunct and discredited Livent to be the birthplace of great theatre. In places like London, Chicago and New York, almost all the exciting work that goes on to worldwide and, yes, even commercial, success, is born through R&D in the not-for-profit sector.
Particularly on its difficult-to-fill main stage, however, Canadian Stage has had a reputation for staging plays that you could see at any regional theatre in any of the smaller cities across the country or in the United States in ways that were, for the most part, pretty unoriginal.
Whether or not these productions pleased or displeased audiences, the theatre company was definitely a follower, not a leader, frequently taking what had had commercial success in New York or London and aiming to recreate that here in Toronto in a not-for-profit setting (and, too often, failing at it).
Though Canadian Stage's audience was aging and in decline (or defecting to Soulpepper), many did not see the old vision - which was really a non-vision dictated by the anxiety of filling the Broadway-sized Bluma Appel theatre - as a problem, just something that needed to be tinkered with.
Many still don't. "Sometimes being good is all we ask," writes Ouzounian at the end of his Red review, wishing for a production that was more like the one he saw in New York.
Had I been reading that review in a newspaper rather than my laptop, this is the point where I would have balled it up and thrown it violently against the wall.
"Being good" is not all we ask of art, theatre or otherwise - and it's ironic that this should be argued in a review of a play where the main character, abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, goes off on a passionate rant about "living under the tyranny of 'fine.'"
"I am here to stop your heart, you understand that!" Rothko yells at his young assistant in the play. "I am here to make you think! I am not here to make pretty pictures!”
