Where are the celebrity Canadian playwrights?
Here are three plays that deserve to be considered contemporary classics
Take a gander at the drama section in your local bookstore. You’ll probably be greeted by rows upon rows of Shakespeare plays. There’ll be some other classics: the Ibsens, Chekhovs, Wilsons. Maybe a smattering, too, of contemporary American works.
Look closer, however, and you’ll notice the undeniable dearth of Canadian dramas. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, there’s a stray copy of Tomson Highway’s “The Rez Sisters” or Michel Tremblay’s “Les Bellessoeurs.” But, glancing at those shelves, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s no such thing as a contemporary Canadian play.
Of course, that’s not the case. Our theatrical landscape is brimming with writers whose works populate stages from coast to coast. Yet I’d bet that many casual theatregoers would be hard pressed to name a single contemporary Canadian playwright.
I don’t blame them. For an arts scene as rich and diverse as Canada’s, we have few plays that could be considered contemporary classics: regularly programmed in theatres and taught in high school literature classes.
It’s not for a lack of talent. Many playwrights in this country deserve to be cultural celebrities, with broad appeal that transcends their discipline and who can fill a commercial theatre on name recognition alone. Like what Tom Stoppard is to the U.K. or Tony Kushner for America. Instead, our playwrights are held back by a broken programming pipeline and general apathy toward second-run productions, both stifling the development of homegrown voices.
There’s no denying the prestige of mounting a world premiere. Theatres pour precious money into development programs for new works, ushering them from page to the stage and elevating emerging voices in the process. Every artistic director wants to be the one who scouted a new play that would go on to be the “next big thing.”
But what happens after that initial production?
Too often, Canadian plays receive a world premiere only never to be touched again, left to collect dust and languish as an odd curiosity in the canon. It’s a difficult truth we often fail to recognize: almost every theatre would clamour for a world premiere; very few would touch an unknown play that has previously been mounted yet is still in development.
But it’s in that process, as a play is revisited by a fresh cast and creative team with a new vision, when a work is truly tested — that it can stand not only the test of time but the test of various interpretations. It’s also here, in the crucial months and years after a play’s premiere, when a playwright can sharpen and refine their work after it’s played once before an audience. But far too few writers are offered that opportunity to continue developing their plays after their premieres.
That’s starting to change. In recent years, we’re seeing companies and artistic leaders treat world premieres as the start of a journey, rather than an end of a road. Plays in the Canadian canon are ultimately better for it.
Look at “Women of the Fur Trade,” playwright Frances Koncan’s
historical comedy that serves as a timeless and irreverent examination of Louis Riel’s Red River Rebellion as seen through the eyes of three women. Its developmental journey is astonishing. The play debuted at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival, winning the coveted award for best new play. It later opened at Winnipeg’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, with direction by Audrey Dwyer.
I first saw Koncan’s work last season at the Stratford Festival, where it was mounted after some further development. In my three-and-ahalf star review of Yvette Nolan’s production, I described it as a “sharp, smart and side-splitting work.”
Less than a year after that run, Koncan’s play is back, this time in a new production directed by Kevin Loring for Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts, in a co-production with the National Arts Centre Indigenous Theatre and the Great Canadian Theatre Company. (Renae Morriseau is credited with the original direction after having to step away before the show’s opening.)
This new production, which I caught last week and which closes Sunday, reaffirmed my initial thoughts about “Women of the Fur Trade”: it’s timeless, touching and laugh-out-loud hilarious. And somehow this iteration felt even sharper and tighter, while this cast (completely different from the Stratford company) mined moments of humour that I hadn’t noticed before. Together, the five-actor ensemble stokes the comedy like flames in a fire pit. Yet you’re never concerned they’re going to fan it to extinction as Koncan’s bottomless satire is like a never-ending fuel source.
“Women of the Fur Trade” isn’t alone, with presentations of other promising new plays lined up across the country. “Casey and Diana,” which also debuted in Stratford last year to rave reviews, dramatizing Princess Diana’s visit to a Toronto hospice for AIDS patients, will run at Halifax’s Neptune Theatre next spring in an entirely new production. The play is also slated to run at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius in the first half of 2025.
Meanwhile, Marie Farsi’s “Fifteen Dogs,” a stage adaptation of André Alexis’s novel of the same name, recently was presented at the Montreal’s Segal Centre, just a year after its premiere at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. This latest run wasn’t a new production per se, as the core creative team was the same as in Toronto, but much of the cast was new.
Time will eventually tell whether these plays turn into contemporary classics and stand the test of time. But if there are three plays that deserve to become contemporary classics, these ones are it.