Grey Power

Get your goat: Marina Stephenson Kerr and John Bourgeois in Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? Photo Bruce Monk. Courtesy Manitoba Theatre Centre.

It was the year of the goat. This year’s most celebrated import — Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia? — was staged in Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg and Toronto. “It was a good play,” said one of its producers, Manitoba Theatre Centre head Steven Schipper, “but it was a great conversation afterwards.”

The drama focuses on a man who risks his happy family and professional eminence by falling in love with the titular quadruped, proving just how far a play must go now to shock viewers into paying attention. It also reminds us of what the theatre can do better than any other medium: it forces us to confront something we’d rather not, thank you very much. Theatre is inescapable; it’s intimate, sometimes cozily so, or sometimes, like here, uncomfortably so. You’re in the room with a goat lover — deal with it.

The Goat plays Albee’s usual two-level game, working both as a parable about the perils of getting all you want and as a straight-up story of a man who falls for a cud chewer. The denouement, in which the actual goat arrives on the scene, was as appalling and vital a moment as I’ve witnessed from the stalls in years.

Joanna McClelland Glass’s Trying, another import (of sorts), came to stages in Vancouver and Toronto. The Saskatoon-bred Glass, now a U.S. resident, wrote a first draft of the play in the late 1960s; it was based on her experiences working as the personal assistant to a curmudgeonly retired judge writing his memoirs. The script didn’t quite gel at the time, and would sit in a drawer for almost 30 years until Glass finally felt able to revise.

The product is a satisfyingly well-constructed play in the Driving Miss Daisy tradition, where two characters reach across their differences to develop an understanding. An aged lion playing an aged lion, Paul Soles (who starred in the Toronto production after doing it in Ottawa in 2004) served up a fiery, affecting performance, one to cap an already distinguished career.

Soles’s bravura turn was one of several strong ones delivered by the old guard. It was the year of the veteran, not of the promising newcomer. In a one-woman show at Montreal’s Saidye Bronfman Centre, Martha Henry positively inhabited the persona of Rose in a play of the same name. The character was a Jewish firebrand nearing the end of her allotted life. With her customary instinct for, well, the dramatic, Henry sat on stage as the audience entered the theatre and remained there, in character, during intermission.

Henry’s longtime fellow traveller, William Hutt, took his final bow as Prospero at Stratford, exiting (with no speech) and after only two curtain calls (he would take no more) with the same class that took him through his 50-plus years on the stage.

Living it up: Michel Perron, Jean Archambault, Kent Allen and Patricia Yeatman in Centaur Theatre’s production of David Fennario’s Condoville. Photo Yanick MacDonald. Courtesy Centaur Theatre.

With Condoville, foul-mouthed Montreal playwriting legend David Fennario checked in on the characters he first brought to life in his international hit Balconville (1970). The play, a drama about the gentrification of a French-English lower-class neighborhood in Montreal, packed Montreal’s Centaur Theatre with linguistically mixed audiences and garnered glowing reviews.

Fennario’s success was a rarity: a homegrown play that attracted both solid houses and serious buzz. Otherwise, it wasn’t a great year for Canadian plays — except abroad, where dramas incubated in years past won unprecedented laurels.

Call it the year when Californian dreamin’ became a reality. A silly tribute to classic musicals, The Drowsy Chaperone — the brainchild of Second City alums Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, as well as Bob Martin (its star) and Don McKellar — triumphed in Los Angeles. Its promoters are talking up a New York run; whether it’s off-off, off- or actually on Broadway has yet to be determined. Either way, this charming bit of fluff has come a long way from its origins as a skit created for a Toronto bachelor party.

Twentysomething Montrealers Jerome Sable and Eli Batalion also scored a hit in Tinseltown with J.O.B.: The Hip-Hopera, a rap retelling of the Book of Job that was previously staged in Montreal and Toronto. Sable and Batalion’s break-out success (they’ve toured the continent and been given $100,000 by a U.S. producer to polish up the show) reflects the vitality of Montreal’s Anglo street-theatre scene. Bryna Wasserman, the Bronfman Centre’s honcho, recently spent a full week going to impromptu dramas staged in fly-by-night venues.

"Nobody’s waiting for a Canada Council grant these days," she says. "It reminds me of my early days in New York, where groups would secure some between-tenants space and make it happen."

Trey Anthony’s Da Kink in My Hair received its American premiere in San Diego. Again, a Broadway run is being discussed, but talk is far cheaper than a New York theatre booking. The show — a soap-operatic series of monologues and songs from the Caribbean-Canadian ladies who frequent a Toronto salon — had its usual enthusiastic audience reception. A San Diego paper reported that "opening night audiences talked back, laughed, wept openly, clapped along, and leaped to their feet during the finale." But critics didn’t love it. The play’s U.S. producer-director Marion J. Caffey is still working with Anthony to ready Da Kink for its ultimate close-up.

Gotta dance: The CanStage production of The Overcoat, presented by American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Photo David Cooper. Courtesy American Conservatory Theatre.

Further up the West Coast, San Francisco hosted another Canuck-originated piece, The Overcoat, which emerged from Vancouver in the late 1990s. Jointly conceived by Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling, the drama was justly praised by The Wall Street Journal as a “show of marvels.” It is a wordless retelling of the Gogol short story of the same name, about a put-upon clerk who saves up to buy a fancy overcoat. Using Stravinsky as its soundtrack, the piece married modern dance with scenes seemingly inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The dancing is often hypnotic, the massive set overpowering, the story economically and touchingly told. The clerk’s waltz with his beloved coat is at once beautiful and pathetic.

It’s hard not to compare the show to Movin’ Out, the latest so-called jukebox musical exported (in this case, from Broadway) to Toronto. Like The Overcoat, Movin’ Out (currently running at Toronto’s Canon Theatre) tells a story through dance set to music (Twyla Tharp’s choreography to Billy Joel’s pop). By comparison, Movin’ Out comes off as tawdry, overblown and filled with unoriginal, sometimes embarrassingly unimaginative dance numbers. Its Vietnam sequence was particularly ham-fisted and would have been offensive if it hadn’t been so amusingly bad. In this bit of theatrical free trade, American audiences got the better deal.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Toronto mathematician-playwright John Mighton — who won both the Governor-General’s Award and the $100,000 Simonovitch Prize this year — sold out a run at Glasgow’s respected Tron Theatre with Half Life. The play, about the long goodbye that is Alzheimer’s, is based on snippets of conversation Mighton heard in a nursing home while he cared for his mother in her decline. He took the drama through more than 30 drafts and several workshop productions at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre before giving it its final form this season.

If there’s a lesson to be learned this year, it’s the importance of patience, of training for the long run, not the sprint. Evidently, a theatrical career ain’t over until it’s utterly over. Mighton last produced a play eight years ago. He waited for Half Life to come to him: “Eventually, everything started to point me in this direction.” David Fennario’s last big success was in the 1980s; meanwhile, Glass stewed on the script for Trying for almost 30 years. In a more ruthlessly youth-oriented theatre scene, we’d have been deprived of Hutt, Henry and Soles’s performances this year. It is a truth seldom acknowledged: sometimes older is better.

Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.

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