National coverage

[paul_m_malone]

Hello folks,

It's hard to overlook how "Torontocentric" Canada is if you grow up in the
west. It's only the last couple of federal elections that they've actually
waited for the polls in B.C. to close before declaring a winner. (My aunt
from Saskatchewan used to say, quite seriously, "Who cares how you vote out
west [sic!], you're all Communists anyway.") And ten years ago, when I was
doing my M.A. in Hamilton, Sunday shopping was unheard of in most of
Ontario, and you couldn't find an open restaurant on a weekday evening;
coming from Calgary, I thought I'd landed in Hicksville, until I heard
Hamilton schoolchildren use "Albertan" as a synonym for "retarded." Then I
realized I was supposed to be the hick.
My main theatrical memories of Toronto during that year are of how awful
most of the theatre I saw was (worst of all at U of T), and of a review of
_Unidentified Human Remains_ in one of the local minor-league entertainment
mini-tabloids that started out something like, "Brad Fraser's play, like all
Western plays, is about isolation and unemployment . . ." and continued in
terms something like an anthropological description of Finnish clog dancing;
quaint stuff, and worth a look if you don't have anything important to do.
Although we as academics generally do a better job of covering the national
bases than the journalists do, and there are some excellent collections of
both plays and criticism which either concentrate on the non-central regions
or represent a broad national spectrum, sometimes academic coverage falls
into the same Toronto-centric attitude. It isn't uncommon for most of the
sessions at the Learneds to focus on Toronto or southern Ontario (usually
labelled as "Canadian"; other theatre is often labelled "regional"); and
during lunch a few Learneds ago, I remember the amused disgust with which a
couple of U of T grad students responded to the announcement of a two-day
conference in Vancouver on Vancouver theatre (exagerrated for polemic
effect): "Ooooh, yeeccchhh, grody, who'd want to spend a whole weekend
talking about theatre in Vancouver?" The fact that we were spending most of
four days talking about theatre in Toronto was something they took as divine
right. (Okay, I was presenting a paper on Michel Tremblay; but usually I
write about western theatre--or German theatre.) Of course, in a country
this size, it's also a problem that most of our annual conferences are held
in the eastern half of the country, and often some westerners simply can't
afford to go; when the Learneds are held out west, many easterners don't
show up.
The problem is, when our entire culture is permeated with these biases, how
can either journalism or academia rise above it? I think academia does a
pretty good job sometimes; but I gave up on journalism overcoming this
particular hurdle before I even got a driver's license. Maybe what we need
is a truly national _online_ theatre review service . . .  Something
small-scale enough that Conrad Black won't ever be tempted to buy it.
This message is already too long, so I'm quitting here.

Paul M. Malone
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1
CANADA


-----Original Message-----
From: Deborah A. Cottreau <cottreau at DUKE.USASK.CA>
To: CANDRAMA at hermes.csd.unb.ca <CANDRAMA at hermes.csd.unb.ca>
Date: November 12, 1998 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: National coverage


>Gaetan et al,
>
>I never really understood how "Torontocentric" this country was until I
>moved further and further away from the so-called "centre".  If you feel
>this way in Montreal, Canada's second largest urban centre, imagine how
>they feel in St John's where they do some amazing, kick-ass work, or haow
>they feel here in Saskatchewan, which, generally speaking, is overlooked
>by the rest of Canada most of the time -- except, of course, when Lepage
>comes to co-direct...
>
>Deborah Cottreau
>
>On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Gaetan Charlebois wrote:
>
>> I don't know about the rest of you but after months of forcing myself to
>> slog through the Globe and Mail and just a couple of weeks of the
National
>> Post, I've given up on any kind of national theatre coverage emerging
from
>> Toronto (don't get me started on MacLeans). I think the final insult came
>> with the first Sat. edition of the Post not having a word about
>> theatre...anywhere. And if I open our soi-disant National Paper (G&M) one
>> more time to find JUST the theatre in Toronto covered, I'll join a
>> monastery.  Why aren't we, in the rest of the country, more yanked off
>> about this?
>>
>> Gaetan Charlebois
>>
>