Alisa Palmer says if the play has a mission, it’s to embody dialogue across generations, communities and identities.
Body Politic, a new play that involves infamous bathhouse raids, scandalous magazine articles and a lead gay character struggling to straddle the generation gap, is a historical reimagination of controversies surrounding the monthly gay publication The Body Politic, published in Toronto from 1971 to 1987. The Globe and Mail spoke to prominent director Alisa Palmer about the production.
One of the themes addressed in Body Politic is the generation gap in the LGBTQ world. Is part of this play's mission to provide some historical context to young people?
I would say in one respect that a mission is a problematic thing to have for a play. Everybody will be engaged and provoked in different ways. But Lemon Tree Creations commissioned Nick Green to create a piece about The Body Politic, and he pursued the idea of what to do with history. Traditionally, the voice of history is owned by the winners. So Nick was trying to communicate something that happened in the past, in the present. So which version of the past do you say to be true? From that emerged a dialogue between two generations. So, I think, vis-à-vis any mission, it would be to try to embody the dialogue, not just between generations, but all different communities and identities. Which in fact, was what The Body Politic was.
We're sitting in a park in the Gay Village right now, not far from where the protests over the police raids on Toronto bathhouses happened in 1981. How have things changed since then?
Well, there's a line in this play, that this neighbourhood as a point of reference for young gays and lesbians and queers isn't necessarily the hub it used to be. There's the whole concept of post-queer and post-gay, where you don't need to be a physical, geographical community to be gay. So there's that change.
The Body Politic magazine stopped publishing in 1987. As a forum for the types of discussion which that publication fostered, is a place like Buddies in Bad Times Theatre taking its place?
That's a good theory. There's a big drive in theatre of late to provide that function for any number of communities, and to have people in a living context, discussing and wrapping their heads around ideas and revealing themselves. I think Buddies is at the forefront of that. But it's happening increasingly all over with live performances. I think because of the strong Internet presence, the yearning to be in direct communication with each other is really strong again.
Besides this new play at Buddies, I understand you've got a couple of things you're working on. One of them at the Stratford Festival, yes?
Yes. It's inspired by Hamlet, with the indie band Stars. It's a new play, with text written by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
That would be the novelist and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald, to whom you are married.
Correct. And I'm also doing an adaptation of her novel Fall on Your Knees, with Hannah Moscovitch and Jeanine Tesori, the composer who won a Tony Award for Fun Home. That's in development now.
And you're more than three years into your post as artistic director at the National Theatre School. How's that coming along?
It's a place where I've wanted to be for a long time. The National Theatre School is forming new artists so they can go out and participate and contribute and express themselves. That's a lot of what I do. It's about different views and different perspectives, and training people for a theatre I don't even know what it's going to be yet. Which is a fabulous paradox.
Body Politic runs to June 12 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story included incorrect information about the date Body Politic runs until at the Bad Times Theatre. This version has been corrected.
Brad Wheeler