1. LEAVING AN EMPTY SPACE
Last Saturday, July 2, director Peter Brook died in Paris. He was 97.
He is widely regarded as a genius. In The Washington Post, Peter Marks writes, “Theater as we know it was born 2,500 years ago with Aeschylus. And reborn 97 years ago, with Peter Brook.”
Brook famously begins his slim, seminal 1968 collection of essays, The Empty Space, with: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
For Brook, theatre was all about the ongoing, ever-changing mystery of the living moment.
As Charles McNulty writes in the LA Times, “A central tenet for him was that ‘truth in the theater is always on the move’ and therefore must be pursued afresh. Tradition was a valuable instrument in the chase, but it could also be a trap.”
In 1970, Brook blew the doors off the Royal Shakespeare Company with his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he staged in a white box designed by Sally Jacobs. Because Brook had been inspired by a performance by a Chinese circus, the set was adorned with trapezes and the actors, including Ben Kingsley and Patrick Stewart, performed acrobatics in service of the text. McNulty reports that, “Reactions to the daredevil antics were split, but imagination — a central theme of the play — was rekindled … with a staging that was a celebration of both the childlike wonder and mature virtuosity of the art of theater.” (Here are a few quick video moments of that production.)
In The Guardian, Adrian Lester, who played the lead in Hamlet for Brook in 2000, remembers what it was like to work with him: “Some directors will tell you what to do: stand here, walk over there, sit down. That is the most basic kind of approach, like directing traffic. Others will tell you how to say what you’re saying. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care so much how it sounds or how you moved, he was interested in what you meant. You were always left digging into deeper parts of yourself. In doing a play with him, you really didn’t know where his work finished and your work started. It just felt like you were completely free on stage.”
Brook continued working into his old age. As this obituary in The New York Times reports, “Exasperated by an England he felt was suspicious of experimentation and attracted by generous French subsidies, Mr. Brook moved to Paris in 1970, assembling a multinational, multiethnic company and founding the International Center for Theater Research. And, because he hated the slickness of modern playhouses, Mr. Brook restored the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, a derelict 19th-century theater, to a state of manageable shabbiness, and made it his actors’ permanent home in 1974.
“There he remained — until giving up his post as artistic director in January 2011.” He continued to direct productions.
Although he was venerated, Brook rejected star status. As the NYT obit puts it: “With his piercing blue eyes and quiet authority, Mr. Brook had undeniable charisma, though he disliked being described as a guru. He wryly rejected his nickname, the Buddha, since he felt that he was far from attaining spiritual certainty and, indeed, didn’t think any certainty was possible.
“He was influenced by the mystic George Gurdjieff, who believed that nothing was to be taken for granted, that everything needed questioning, and that collaboration with others was vital.”
“In the theatre, ‘if’ is the truth," Brook wrote in the conclusion of The Empty Space. "When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one.”
In The Guardian, actor Frances de la Tour, who appeared in the 1970 Dream, remembers Brook saying: “I have been so complimented on some of my productions, particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it was the actors who did it.”
+ Here are my two favourite biographical details from the NYT obituary:
“At 7, Peter staged a four-hour version of ‘Hamlet’ for his parents in a toy theater, advertising the play as by ‘P. Brook and W. Shakespeare’ and speaking all the roles himself.”
“After graduating [from Oxford], he took a job with a company specializing in making commercials. But his employment ended in disgrace after he shot an advertisement for a washing powder in the style of ‘Citizen Kane.’”
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Mustafa has dedicated “What About Heaven” to his friend Ali Rizieg, who was shot multiple times through the screen door of his home. This three-and-a-half-minute “video” is actually all audio, but it’s lovely. Here’s a link to the lyrics.
2. TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS
With his eight-song debut project When Smoke Rises, poet and singer/songwriter Mustafa won this year’s Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year.
This project, which Rolling Stone calls a “softly stunning debut”, is about the murders, grief, and loss that Mustafa and his downtown Toronto community of Regent Park have experienced in the last few years. Mustafa’s close friends Ali Rizieg and the rapper Smoke Dawg are among the dead.
And Rolling Stone is right: Mustafa’s art — and presence — are exceptionally gentle. This 48-minute interview with Tom Power on CBC Radio’s q is also marked by tenderness. In a sweetly goofy exchange, the two men laugh about how neither of them has mastered nonchalance. Mustafa admits that he’s too emotional to be cool. “Boundaries are an important part of nonchalance as well,” he says, “and, yeah, I never learned where people got boundaries from, but I personally could not find them.”
In terms of the capacity of art, one of the most intriguing parts of the interview comes when Mustafa talks about how art became a refuge — and, significantly, a place of transformation — for him when his sister introduced him to poetry when he was 12.
“I was getting into a lot of trouble when I was younger,” he says. “I was fighting a lot. I was passionate, you know. And, like, I think, with that passion came a lot of disappointment from my parents or from my family and, instead of writing lines, she would force me to write poetry to try to explain what it is that I was experiencing.” So Mustafa began writing in the blue notebook that his sister gave him, “and that book and those pages became as important to me as the ears of my mother and father.”
“Poetry granted me the ability to have my own world,” he explains, and “being in a hood where there was no corner to claim as your own — every basketball court, every park, every bedroom and living room in my household was occupied” — that was important.
“And I guess that having that book was the way that I escaped my friends, and I escaped my community, and I escaped my parents, and I escaped all of the expectations of what I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be. I loved speaking to my friends and telling that I was going to go write poetry or watch someone perform poetry. And I loved how confused they were. And that confusion was my escape. It was the way in which I was able to separate myself from the rest of the world because it wasn’t a thing that anybody cared about but myself. I felt like I had my own relationship with it.”
This doesn't mean that Mustafa turned his back on his friends or community; he embraced them more clearly — and passionately — on his own terms. About halfway through the interview, he says, “It’s so important for me to be able to speak about my friends and about myself in a way that feels, you know, freeing. It’s all about the freedom to be able to claim your own people as your own and to claim your own identity as your own.”
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The horror! Lesbians kissing. For. A. Millisecond.
3. A KISS IS STILL A KISS
In the culture wars that have become ever more central to American politics — and the global shouting match — conservatives are, increasingly, targeting queer folk by manufacturing panic about pedophilia. And it’s working for them.
The latest flashpoint is the Disney/Pixar animated movie Lightyear, a spin-off of Toy Story that contains a scene in which committed lesbian partners — and moms — share a kiss so brief it’s barely noticeable.
Conservatives are pouring hatred on the kiss, drawing a direct line between queer affection, lewdness, and child abuse. Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted, “Children are not adults. What may be appropriate for adults is not appropriate for children. That this must be said demonstrates that our society is in a state of moral collapse.” Republican senator Ted Cruz went on a bizarre rant about lesbian toys and asked, “Why do toys have to go at it?” And, in the conservative publication National Review, Armond White declares, “Lightyear proves that the folks at Pixar and Disney are past masters at audience manipulation, now known as ‘grooming.’”
As this article in Vanity Fair argues, this is all part of a concerted agenda: “Conservatives are pushing to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life, banning talk of sexual orientation in schools, targeting drag performances, and more.”
The effort includes explicit calls for violence. On his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson said, “You talk to a normal person's kids about sex in kindergarten, you get beaten up. You should be beaten up, please." More recently, he said that teachers who discuss gender identity with young students should be "thrashed" by parents. (Business Insider)
There are real-life consequences to this rhetoric. Vanity Fair: “Some LGBTQ+ Americans have already experienced new threats set off by the right's latest moral crusade. At an Idaho Pride event Saturday [June 11], 31 members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist group, were arrested for conspiracy to riot after they traveled to the event armed with shields, metal poles, and at least one smoke grenade. That same day, a group of Proud Boys stormed a California library’s drag queen story hour and began hurling anti-trans and antigay slurs at attendees. Similarly, a band of reported [make that 'self-described'] ‘Christian fascists’ harassed and threatened patrons of [a] drag queen brunch in Dallas last week. During the incident, the group began directing ‘groomer’ chants at the event’s participants and guests.”
Why is this agenda of queer erasure gaining traction? In The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues that, for right-wing extremists, “the pivot from issues of race to those of gender—which combine the rhetoric of parental control with an old-fashioned sex panic—seemed to offer immense political promise.”
A spokesperson for Heritage Action for America, the political arm of a right-wing think tank, told Reuters that this issue of parental control has generated the “highest energy (among Republicans) since the Tea Party.”
And what better way to inflame parental fury than to suggest the liberals want to abuse your kids? When Florida senator — and likely presidential hopeful — Ron DeSantis was pushing his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which restricts discussion of gay identity in Florida schools, he and his supporters immediately characterized opponents, including Walt Disney Co., of sexual grooming. On March 4th, while the bill, which has since been passed into law, was still being debated, DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, tweeted, ‘If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.’”
The quick pivot to all Democrats being groomers is interesting to say the least. It’s effective in that the charges are so vague and baseless there’s nothing to refute.
And, as Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker, “A familiar way to view the allegations of widespread grooming is that they operate as signals to adherents of the QAnon conspiracy, which alleges a broad, secretive pedophilia network organized by leaders of the Democratic Party. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist affiliated with the Never Trump movement, told me that the grooming claims solved a more mundane political problem for Republicans, too. ‘There’s a very important psychological aspect to how one defends Donald Trump if you’re a Republican, and that means the Democrats have to be worse.’ Trump’s attempted coup against the government on January 6, Longwell said, had raised the stakes. ‘You have to believe the Democrats are worse than trying to overthrow the government, and, if they’re worse than that, it means they want men to play women’s sports and that they are grooming little kids.’”
If you’re old enough, the gay groomer scare tactic is eerily familiar. In 1977, orange-juice spokesperson, former Miss Oklahoma, and Christian crusader Anita Bryant launched the Save Our Children campaign in response to a Dade County, Florida anti-discrimination ordinance that protected the housing and employment rights of gay people.
She got a pie in the face (here’s video) but, as this NBC article records, “Bryant’s work resulted in the repeal of the Dade County nondiscrimination ordinance, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, in a voter referendum. Its repeal caused a backlash in other states that had passed similar ordinances, and Bryant’s fame grew. She took her message across the country, and for the next three years was named ‘The Most Admired Woman in America’ in Good Housekeeping’s annual poll.”
After the decades of queer progress that I’ve witnessed, I did not expect this template for hateful rhetoric to re-emerge with such force.
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It’s not perfect, but it’s got a lot to recommend it, and Kinky Boots is the best show in town right now. (Photo of Jeffrey Follis, Joshua Lalisan, Stewart Adam McKensy, Ryan Maschke, and Andrew J. Hampton in Kinky Boots by Moonrider Productions)
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4. SEEING THINGS
New Film
In last week’s issue, “Roe Roe Roe”, I mentioned a documentary called The Janes. It’s about a network of women who provided safe, respectful, illegal abortions in Illinois in the years immediately preceding the Roe v. Wade decision, which made access to abortion a constitutional right in the US — until it was recently overturned. I have since watched The Janes on Crave, and I woke up the next morning feeling unexpectedly renewed, better than I’ve felt in ages. With all the horrors these days, it’s easy to despair, but The Janes reminded me of the exhilarating power of civil disobedience. This trailer will give you the idea.
Ongoing Theatre
In Djanet Sears’s 1997 script Harlem Duet, a woman named Billie gets dumped by Othello, her partner of nine years. They’re both Black and Othello is leaving Billie for a white woman named Mona. (Yes, Harlem Duet is in conversation with Shakespeare’s Othello.) Billie sees Othello as both a romantic traitor and a race traitor. Brief storylines from other time periods give the impression that this pattern of abandonment is both pervasive and enduring, and the play presents Black male fecklessness as a form of aspirational whiteness. These ideas are arresting, but their exploration almost always supports Billie’s position, a one-sidedness that flattens the inquiry. Directed by Cherissa Richards, Marci T. House delivers a confident, emotional performance as Billie. Donald Sales’s work as Othello feels less assured. And Liza Huget’s portrait of Magi, Billie’s sassy landlady, exists in a comedic world of its own. That said, there may be all sorts of cultural cues being offered here that I'm simply not alert to.
This Bard on the Beach production is running on the Howard Family Stage until July 17. Here’s my full review and here’s where to get tickets.
Stewart Adam McKensy, who’s playing Lola, the central drag queen in the Arts Club’s production of Kinky Boots, is a star! He delivers a performance that is simultaneously huge — big gestures, exaggerated vocal patterns — and informed by an emotional understanding of the character. That said, Kinky Boots isn’t perfect. In Harvey Fierstein’s book, the set-up is so obvious that the musical marks time until it finally hits a groove, and the opening number, which repeats the word beautiful 43 times, is record-breakingly boring. But that groove does get hit and director Barbara Tomasic’s production is stuffed with talent. Playing Charlie, the gormless guy who tries to save his family’s failing shoe factory by manufacturing sturdy, stylin’ boots for drag queens, Sayer Roberts contributes a bright tenor and solid acting chops. As Lauren, the factory worker who finds herself smitten with Charlie, Kelli Ogmundson is deliciously eccentric, and so is Andrew Wheeler as George, the conservative factory foreman whose eyes start to open to other possibilities when they land on Lola. Julie Tomaino’s choreography made me want to dance and Pam Johnson’s factory set pulls off chameleon-like transformations. I’ve got to say that, as a guy who’s been doing drag since I was three, it was a deep pleasure to sit in a mainstream audience that was expressing its raucous, rapturous support of drag and drag queens.
Here’s my full review of this Arts Club production, which is running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until July 31. Tickets.
Vocal Eye is offering described performances on Sunday, July 10, at 2:00 p.m. and Friday, July 15, at 8:00 p.m.
Director Scott Bellis’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Bard on the Beach is a prime example of Bard’s Big Mistake. Too often, it feels like Vancouver’s marquee presenter of Shakespeare’s plays is afraid of the language, afraid Vancouver audiences won’t understand it, so Bard dumbs down the plays by slathering them with coarse comic business. In this production of Dream, for instance, the hilarity of the verbal smackdown in which Helena and Hermia insult one another about their differing physical statures — “You bead, you acorn!”, “Painted maypole!” — gets lost because Bellis directs the actors playing Demetrius and Lysander to be so horny for Helena that they’re crawling around on their bellies, virtually humping the floor and trying to grab her. Carly Street, who plays Bottom, has great comic timing and she’s inventive — but she doesn’t know when to stop and Bellis hasn’t stopped her. Street breaks the play’s internal reality by inserting colloquial asides (“I have no idea what’s going on”), she indulges in cheap physical humour, stabbing herself in the crotch in the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, and she’s such a show-off that she sucks the air out of every scene she’s in. Amid the mayhem, some performances, including Billy Marchenski’s coolly sexy Oberon, survive. To their great credit, Emily Dallas (Helena) and Christopher Allen (Demetrius) also manage to maintain emotionally credible characterizations within the broad style. The physical production is gorgeous. In Amir Ofek’s set, Athens is a stark art deco ruin, and Christine Reimer’s costumes, which combine fantasy and 1920s fashion, are knockouts: in Oberon’s first entrance, he’s a walking, ten-foot-tall tree. But somebody really needs to tell Bard’s artistic director Christopher Gaze and executive director Claire Sakaki that Vancouver audiences deserve more than the condescension implicit in the apparent assumption that we won’t understand Shakespeare’s language and stories unless they’re turned into cartoons.
Here's my full review of this Bard on the Beach production, which is running in the BMO Mainstage tent until September 24. And here’s where to get tickets.
Upcoming Theatre
Tonight, I’ll be watching Something Rotten at Theatre Under the Stars in Stanley Park and, tomorrow (Friday), I’ll be at the TUTS production of We Will Rock You. Here’s where to get tickets and info for both offerings. I’ll post my reviews of these shows on my blog late in the afternoon the day after I’ve seen them.
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Here’s the link to last week’s issue, “Roe Roe Roe”. The first two items are about artistic responses to the US Supreme Court’s horrific reversals on Roe v. Wade and gun control. This issue has been widely read.
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