Intermission Magazine: Toronto theatre can be a bit risk-averse.
Artistic directors, constrained by limited funding, program obvious crowd-pleasers over boundary-pushing experiments. Playwrights, afraid to ruffle feathers, create spaces that validate the public’s existing beliefs, rather than raucous experiences designed to provoke. Audiences, faced with shrinking free time, opt for known commodities over innovative, but potentially disappointing, duds. And, as any magazine freelancer will tell you, theatre section editors tend to prioritize artists who readers already know over unfamiliar faces.
2 comments:
I really like media like this. Media that represents the struggles of queer life and is more of a call to action than entertainment. The particular quote “And there’s often an ‘it gets better’ element, where they want to show how heterosexual society can change to include queer people. This play is the photo negative of that, screaming with rage and crying for a revolution.’” really stands out to me. It sums up my feelings towards a lot of mainstream queer media perfectly. I am tired of changing myself for society, it is time for society to change for me. Reading the words from the director, I might have to find a copy and read it for myself. Based on the descriptions and pictures, the staging was done incredibly thoughtfully and purposefully. The eeriness of the backdrop fits the energy and adds to the overall vibe. Theater that makes you think is arguably the most important type. It means it’s successfully reached you, which is the primary goal for a lot of theater makers.
Reading about Canadian theatre is super interesting to me because as a Canadian, I almost never hear about Canadian shows/plays. I have a lot of respect for Roberto Zucco for pushing the boundaries a little bit for Canadian theatre because the article is right…Canadian theatre whenever I do hear about it is always very safe and of course that’s because their budgets aren't big enough or because they have to cater to their audience but the fact that Roberto is pushing these boundaries really brings me hope that Canada will begin to embrace theatre that doesn’t follow the norm as much and that they will begin to take risks with their theatre. I appreciate that Roberto chose a play about queerness in its totality and not just a play about queerness that’s been watered down for mainstream audiences. I really enjoy the fact that they’re enhancing the rage that anchors this play through its lighting, set, and sound design and that they’re leaning into the hard lessons this play teaches instead of pandering to what they think their audiences will like instead.
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