Should we be warned when content is troubling?
Last week in this column, Carly Maga wrote about a muchdiscussed feature of contemporary live performance: land acknowledgments.
This week I’m taking on another contentious aspect of today’s theatre: content and trigger warnings. While it’s an established convention that theatres let spectators know in advance about elements of shows that may affect their health such as strobe lights and fog, in recent years warnings have been issued about a wide range of possible mental, psychological and emotional effects.
For some, such warnings are a welcome advance in the relationship between artists, theatres and audiences. But for others, signalling content in advance has the potential to deflate the experience and may even be counter to what art is all about.
At the Coal Mine Theatre, a small venue on the Danforth known for dark and challenging work, a “back and forth” between directors and producers about content warnings happens regularly, says coartistic director Diana Bentley.
Some directors who work at the Coal Mine express concern that a warning might take away elements of audience discovery and surprise. But there’s also a concern that some content may viscerally remind someone with post-traumatic stress disorder of a painful experience. Like many others I spoke to, Bentley makes a distinction between a trigger warning — an advisory about content that holds this retraumatizing potential — and more general content warnings about violent or sexual material, strong language and mature themes.
For its production of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether last October, director Peter Pasyk and the Coal Mine team initially opted for a non-specific warning about its challenging themes. They changed tack after an audience member told them that she’d been triggered by the play’s subject matter — pedophilia — and that she would not have bought a ticket had she known this in advance. “We immediately added a very detailed trigger warning,” says Bentley, to allow future audience members to “make a clear decision as to whether or not they could participate.”
Karen Turner, senior manager of patron and operations services at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts (which houses Soulpepper Theatre and the George Brown Theatre School), had a similar recent experience: “There were scenes of torture in (a) show and (some) patrons’ feedback was that we should have specified that in the warning,” Turner says.
Curiously, the same production had been presented at another theatre with the same non-specific warning and there had been no audience comments about feeling underprepared. “This was an excellent lesson in knowing our own audiences!” Turner says.
Veteran writer, director and provocateur Sky Gilbert is on the other side of this argument: While he’s on board with letting audiences know about things like gunshots, overall he thinks that warnings are “a terrible idea, kind of dangerous for art. Basically, to me, the experience of theatre — of any art really — should be an audience goes in there expecting the unexpected. Real art is about being challenged, not having your views confirmed.”
If someone’s struggling with their mental health and is worried about whether a show will disturb them, “you shouldn’t go to plays, you should go see Walt Disney movies.”
“My heart goes out to someone like that,” Gilbert continues, but “part of art is that it’s non-spoiler. If you spoil it, it’s not art anymore.”
Gilbert is clearly speaking from the artist’s perspective; if you look at this from the audience point of view, it’s possible to see warnings as opening up the theatre experience rather than ruining it. As part of his PhD research on theatre spectatorship at the University of Toronto, Scott Mealey interviews many audience members and says he’s “shocked” by the level of anxiety many of them “seem to feel as they encounter theatre, especially if it seems unfamiliar in some way. The more I talk about it, the more stories people offer me.”
Theatre has the potential to upset “the human need for stasis, that is, fundamental stability,” Mealey says. Knowing in advance what to expect allows a spectator to “build a mode of attention that can attend to what the show is addressing or depicting, but in a controlled environment. The warning may in fact be a successful part of the performance because it is stimulating the very thinking the artists had hoped for.”
The Shaw Festival is using a content warning as part of its marketing campaign for its upcoming production of Victory, a play by English writer Howard Barker: “Warning: Victory is deliberately offensive,” reads a statement on its website.
“It is not for the squeamish and contains very strong language.”
Victory treats the experience of a widow (played by Martha Burns) trying to give her husband a proper burial during the English Restoration. There’s very strong language, objectification of women and “violent language intended to hurt along the way,” says Shaw executive director Tim Jennings.
“No one expecting a romantic comedy should walk into Victory. That’d be a horror show of an evening.”
Buddies in Bad Times artistic director Evalyn Parry has changed tack midstream in her approach to a content warning. Initially she, co-creator Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and director Erin Brubacher opted not to include a warning when Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools premiered at Buddies two years ago, but they heard back from audiences that the show broke “some expectations and taboos about audience contact, particularly sexualized audience contact,” says Parry, referring to a passage in which Williamson Bathory performs Greenlandic mask dancing.
Their choice (and here’s where last week’s and this week’s columns converge) was to add a direct audience address at the beginning of the show that served multiple functions, including land acknowledgement and a headsup from Williamson Bathory about her dance, asking spectators to put up their hands if they didn’t want her to approach them. Kiinalik is touring to numerous venues (including, this summer, the Edinburgh International Festival) and this opening section gives the creators control over how the show is framed.
Questions of audience retraumatization become particularly acute in the context of work about Indigenous experiences. Cree writer, director and performer Michelle Thrush has created and worked on a number of projects about the residential school legacy, and helping audiences through the viewing experience is a big part of her thinking: “If we bring that medicine to the stage, we have to be responsible to give a trigger warning and then to provide followup” through smudging and counselling, Thrush says. “We’ve taken the band-aid off that wound. We have to provide clear oxygen for it.”
The broader context for such discussions around audience experience and vulnerability is the world we live in: ideological polarization, “fake news,” Brexit, climate change, post#MeToo politics — conflict and darkness everywhere.
For Bentley, a way out of the trigger warning debate is to put on different plays. The Coal Mine is moving away from the kind of “gritty, edgy, challenging stuff” it’s been known for because, in the view of its management, such material is not useful in the current moment. “No one wants to come to the theatre to feel triggered … people want to come to feel safe, to feel hope, uplifted,” Bentley says.
Will other theatres follow suit and move away from potentially triggering programming, and what would the likes of Sky Gilbert have to say about this? I feel another column coming on.