Two Solitudes is the title of a 1945 novel by Hugh MacLennan, and to this day the term has remained emblematic of the troubled relationship and perceived lack of communication between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians. The phrase appeared again recently in a Toronto Globe & Mail article discussing how the political and economic center of the country is shifting west (“The Two Solitudes Get More Solitary,” Feb. 13, 2012). It seems the tensions between Quebec and the rest of Canada are mounting and the two groups are having a harder time than ever understanding each other.
With a territory spanning 3.8 million square miles, Canada is the second largest country in the world. It is a vast, mostly uninhabited territory, with a population of only 35 million huddled within a few hundred miles of the U.S./Canada border. (The population density is one person per 8.3 square mile—that’s roughly the equivalent of a New Yorker having a quarter of the island of Manhattan to herself.) Modern technology aside, it is no less than a small miracle that Canadians manage to talk to each other.
Added to this geographic challenge is a deep-rooted need for the two dominant cultural and linguistic groups to preserve a distinct sense of identity. English Canada, which includes 9 out of 10 provinces plus all three Arctic territories—and represents 80 percent of the population—was settled by Great Britain. French Canada, which includes a mere 8 million people concentrated in the province of Quebec, was settled by France.
The complicated love/hate relationship between the two groups is as old as the country; it reached a political apogee in the 1980s and 1990s, when the social-democratic Parti Québécois tried, unsuccessfully, to lead Quebec to sovereignty. Following this tumultuous period, the turn of the millennium saw a shift from nationalist fervor to renewed economic purpose and, for a while, questions of identity were pushed to the back burner. But with the election of a Conservative government in 2006, the party’s first time in power since 1993, old wounds were reopened and the same issues resurfaced again.
As one might expect, Canadian theatre is organized along the same cultural and linguistic lines as the country’s politics. Although pluralistic and multilingual, Canadian theatre is not so much a cohesive entity as it is a collection of separate parts; distinct institutions produce Francophone and Anglophone plays for distinct audiences, and writers have a distinct aesthetic that evolved from distinct cultural and theatrical traditions. This is compounded by the fact that population centers are located hundreds of miles from each other and the country counts only three cities with more than a million people (in descending order: Toronto, Montreal and Calgary). Isolated culturally, linguistically and geographically, Francophone and Anglophone playwrights are, for the most part, only vaguely aware of each other.
Travel within Canada is expensive, and there are few programs in place to facilitate encounters. As Catherine Banks, a Nova Scotia-based playwright, explains: “With cutbacks in arts funding it is harder to move around Canada. Nova Scotia does not have travel grants. The travel grants offered by the Canada Council for the Arts allow artistic directors to travel around to see shows, but playwrights cannot apply to go and see work that interests them.”
Vancouver actor, director and dramaturg Jack Paterson also sees funding as the primary obstacle: “As most Canadian theatre companies receive two-thirds of their granting and foundation revenues from municipal and provincial sources, the focus is more on local artists. This, although laudable in many respects, also leads to a regionalistic approach. Until there is a general focus on the future of a national theatre scene by the institutions and funding bodies, this will continue to be a challenge.”
Distinct Institutions
The 1960s and 1970s were a fertile period in Canadian theatre. There was a strong desire to move away from classics and imports from Europe and to embrace local writers. Several organizations were created in an effort to support Canadian artists. Started from scratch, with few resources, these organizations were designed to address local needs and serve local audiences. Now, 30 or 40 years later, their mandates have expanded—but the complexities of Canada’s cultural and linguistic reality, coupled with a lack of resources, have prevented them from stepping beyond the divide.
With more than 500 members, the 40-year-old Playwrights Guild of Canada (PGC) is the largest of these organizations. Originally established to publish and distribute scripts and encourage productions of Canadian plays, PGC, like the Dramatists Guild in the U.S., offers professional contract advice, advocacy, workshops and master classes, and publishes a monthly newsletter. Nothing in the wording of its mission limits membership to Anglophone playwrights. However, given its Toronto address, its English-speaking staff and its shortfall of translation resources, PGC can only serve the needs of playwrights writing in English.
In Quebec, French-speaking playwrights have access to the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD), a playwrights’ center located in Montreal, which offers dramaturgical support and advocacy. In contrast to PGC, CEAD clearly states that its mission is “to provide support for playwriting development, and to promote Canadian Francophone plays and playwrights.” Serving around 250 members, most of whom live in Quebec, CEAD is unique in that it has a staff member whose sole mandate is to advocate for Francophone plays in Canada and abroad. Given the size of the population, and the omnipresent threat of the culture crumbling under the weight of its neighbors, the Quebec government tends to take its culture seriously and fund it accordingly. Also located in Montreal (which, in itself, is a bold political statement) and comprised of about 160 members is Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal (PWM), which describes itself as a “nationally mandated Canadian play-development organization and a professional theatre centre dedicated to the development of contemporary Canadian work and new writers for the stage.” A small enclave of English theatre tucked away in one of the most culturally vibrant (but predominantly French) neighborhoods in Montreal, PWM survived the massive exodus of English-speaking Québécois to English provinces in the years leading to the two referendums on sovereignty. More modestly funded than CEAD but offering similar programs and services, PWM’s role in Canadian theatre is as important as its presence in the heart of French-Canadian culture is symbolic. While it does not serve both Anglophone and Francophone playwrights, it at least makes it possible for them to bump into each other on the way to the bar.
Clearly, all three organizations provide invaluable support to playwrights. They have been—and continue to be—instrumental in developing work by and for Canadians. But what none of them can offer yet is a larger umbrella under which both Francophone and Anglophone playwrights can gather as one group. Like long-separated lovers, Canadian theatre artists must glean information about each other however best they can, and continue to long for the day when they will be able to form a deeper, more meaningful relationship.
Distinct Traditions & Aesthetic
I spent some time on the phone with Jessie Mill, in charge of international programs at CEAD, and Emma Tibaldo, artistic director of PWM, discussing the difference between Francophone and Anglophone theatre in Canada. It is always tricky to make general statements, of course, and there are countless exceptions, but I would sum up what emerged from these conversations like this: English Canada tends to produce plays that stem from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the well-made play, wherein character and narrative are central to the work. French Canada, on the other hand, tends to follow a more European tradition, and produce work that is fragmented and concerned with formal innovations and language.
In Quebec, fragmentation can be seen as the expression of a quest for identity deeply ingrained in the culture. Larry Tremblay, who has been active in the Quebec theatre scene as a writer and performer for more than 30 years, defines the Québécois aesthetic as “the expression of an unresolved conflict. It’s a theatre that sways back and forth between two main approaches: the American approach and the European approach” (translation mine). He adds, “Thematically, it is best defined by its quest for identity.” In past years, this quest was much more openly political. But when nationalist fervors subsided, writers turned their attention inward and started exploring the more intimate aspects of the question. Today, plays like Abraham Lincoln va au théâtre by Tremblay, Rouge Gueule by Étienne Lepage and Théâtre Le Clou’s Éclats et autres libertés by Marie-Josée Bastien, Mathieu Gosselin, Étienne Lepage and Jean-Frédéric Messier, explore increasingly complex or even abstract concepts of identity, playing with structure and form to reveal truths that, perhaps, Quebec society got tired of hearing out loud.
Another defining feature of Quebec theatre is language. Spoken French in Quebec is markedly different from written French—the syntax is looser, the tone more informal, the sentences peppered with Anglicisms and regionalisms. Because of this dichotomy, the use of language in the theatre is a very conscious choice. Playwrights must position their characters somewhere on a continuum between heightened poetry and dialogue evocative of the working class, with any given choice carrying socioeconomic as well as political implications. This makes for rich, if loaded, material to work with, and the last 50 years have seen just about every possible permutation represented on stage: Michel Tremblay’s revolutionary use of joual (the street slang typically associated with the Montreal working class) in Les belles-soeurs in the late 1960s, the “international French” (a language as devoid as possible of local inflections) of the intellectuals, and the langue d’auteur (a heightened or poetic language that is neither of the previous two) favored by such playwrights of today as Daniel Danis and Michel Marc Bouchard.
Theatre in English Canada is more difficult to define. For one thing, it is spread out over a much larger and varied geographic area. “It is fascinating how each region has a different set of ideals, aesthetics and theatrical priorities developed due to the needs and resources (or lack of resources) surrounding the artistic communities,” says Paterson, who has worked extensively in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. “Where the West Coast has a rich tradition of collective creation, site-specific work and experimentation, allowing companies like Electric Company Theatre, Theatre Replacement and Boca del Lupo to create fascinating material, Ontario has a strong tradition of text-driven pieces and aims toward a certain perfection.”
English Canada’s sense of identity is also organized differently. While Quebec can be seen as a tiny island of French-Canadian culture in a vast sea of English culture, and must therefore assert its difference, English Canada faces the daunting task of defining its identity in relation to an American neighbor that is, all things considered, not all that different: The language is the same, and many of the influences, cultural as well as economic, run on a North-South axis rather than an East-West axis. As a result, Toronto theatre is more likely to be influenced by New York theatre than by Vancouver theatre.
I asked a few theatre people scattered across the country for a list of productions they saw in the last few years that they felt were most representative of Canadian theatre. The responses varied, but what they all had in common was their scope. As it turns out, what best defines theatre in English Canada is diversity. Traditional plays, musicals, devised theatre, cabaret theatre, solo shows—Canadians do it all. From Daniel MacIvor’s This Is What Happens Next, to Catalyst Theatre’s Nevermore, to Theatre Replacement’s Dress Me Up In Your Love, to Michael Hollingsworth’s The Life and Times of Mackenzie King, to Kristen Thomson’s I, Claudia, small and not-so-small companies create work that stems from their own unique sense of time and place. In addition, aboriginal playwrights such as Marie Clements and Kevin Loring are now adding their voices to the mix, carving a place for First Nations on the country’s stages and expanding Canada’s definition of what it means to be Canadian.
As a side note, I have noticed an unusual genre in English Canada: the murder play. For some reason, Canadian playwrights are fascinated with murderers and serial killers. A recent example is The Drowning Girls by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic, which started as a Fringe production by Edmonton’s Bent Out of Shape company and successfully toured the country. The play tells the story of “three of the many wives of George Joseph Smith, an Edwardian opportunist who made a living marrying women, taking out life insurance policies for them and subsequently drowning them in their baths.” I guess under their proverbial niceness, Canadians hide a much darker side.
Many Small Bridges
Despite, or maybe because of, the lack of a concerted effort at the national level to create programs and funding streams that would support ongoing dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone theatre artists and audiences, there are isolated initiatives popping up throughout the country. Seeing a need for dialogue, organizations are creating partnerships, working together as best they can to carve small but significant communication avenues between Canada’s cultures and languages.
One such initiative is the Banff Playwrights Colony. Every spring, a group of Anglophone playwrights is invited to spend two to three weeks in residence at the Banff Centre, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, to work on a new play. Playwrights work with a dramaturg of their choice, have access to a group of actors, and can consult with a master playwright. The program does not have the resources to directly support Francophone playwrights, but playwrights who have a play being translated in English can attend with their translators. I was there in 2009 with playwright Larry Tremblay to work on the English translation of his Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre. There was palpable hunger on everyone’s part to get to know each other and find out what was happening in other parts of the country. Playwrights Colony also offers, in partnership with CEAD, a biannual translation residency for an English Canadian playwright to travel to Montreal and have one of her works translated in French.
Another residency for translator/playwright teams is offered annually by PWM. Created in 2002, the Glassco Playwrights’ Residence in Tadoussac aims to “foster dialogue between cultures, languages and experiences, through the development and translation of work for Canadian stages.” Translation happens in both directions between French and English. According to Linda Gaboriau, a renowned translator of some 100 plays and novels by Quebec’s most prominent writers, who hosts the colony and serves as mentor, the residency is “a unique opportunity to talk shop, to discuss intercultural differences and the artist’s role in society, to exchange favorite recipes and travel stories, to ruminate and to be nourished by the spectacular landscape.”
Last but not least, every other year, CEAD hosts an International Seminar on Translation that coincides with its “Dramaturgie en dialogue” event—a weeklong festival of staged readings that presents new voices from Quebec. The seminar is an opportunity for 10 translators from Canada and around the world to discuss translation issues and philosophies, share works in progress, and discover new Francophone plays.
In addition to these translation efforts, at least two theatre festivals—Festival TransAmériques (FTA) in Montreal and Magnetic North, held in Ottawa in odd years and in various Canadian cities in even years—offer a platform for cultural dialogue by presenting, alongside international work, work from both English and French Canada. Past editions of FTA have included Boca del Lupo’s Photog. (Vancouver), …And Counting! (Letter Three) by Tony Nardi (Toronto), Theatre Replacement’s The Greatest Cities in the World (Vancouver) and Electric Theatre Company’s Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge (Vancouver). And past editions of Anglophone festival Magnetic North have included Don’t Blame the Bedouins by René-Daniel Dubois, translated by Martin Kevan and Élisa’s Skin by Carole Fréchette, translated by John Murrell. This year’s edition in Calgary will feature the premiere of Mani Soleymanlou’s One/Uno in a translation by the author, with translation dramaturgy by Shelley Tepperman.
It is also worth mentioning that theatres lacking ongoing translation programs sometimes get passionate about a play or a playwright and find the resources necessary to commission or produce a translation. Recent examples include Tarragon Theatre’s Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Gaboriau (Toronto); Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui’s Toxique—ou l’incident dans l’autobus by Greg MacArthur, translated by Maryse Warda (Montreal); and Great Canadian Theatre Company’s The List by Jennifer Tremblay, translated by Tepperman (Ottawa).
Bridging the two solitudes won’t happen overnight. Yet despite the many challenges, there might be reasons to be optimistic. A look at the Canada Council for the Arts website reveals that government support of translation projects in the theatre went from $9,200 CAD in 1998-99 to $57,600 CAD in 2010–11. This would seem to indicate a desire, both on the part of the artists and the funders, to bring the two parts of Canada closer together. In reality, though, there are more plays translated than there are translations produced; audiences are cheated, left out of the process.
However imperfect, the exercise is still useful and necessary. In an increasingly globalized world, where culture too often gets subjugated by commerce, standing strong in the heart of one’s identity is the surest way to maintain a sense of integrity and purpose. Perhaps if Canadian Francophone and Anglophone playwrights continue to reach toward each other, the two solitudes will grow a little less lonely.
Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal. Her play Sila, set in the Canadian Arctic, won first prize in the 2011 Uprising National Playwriting Competition and the 2012 Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival. She has translated plays by Mohamed Kacimi (Algeria), Koffi Kwahulé (Côte d’Ivoire), Étienne Lepage (Quebec) and Larry Tremblay (Quebec).
