Nightwood Theatre Canadian Plays Series Editor: Anne Nothof
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Nightwood Theatre Canadian Plays Series Editor: Anne Nothof The Canadian Plays series features a broad range of new Canadian plays with an emphasis on Alberta works and theatre professionals. Publications will include single full-length plays and thematic collections by single or multiple playwrights, as well as theatre history and criticism. The target audience comprises theatre lovers, actors and playwrights, directors and producers, teachers, students, and librarians. Series Titles Hot Thespian Action: Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse Edited by Robin C. Whittaker Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work Is Always Done by Shelley Scott Nightwood Theatre A Woman’s Work Is Always Done Shelley Scott, Ph.D. © 2010 Shelley Scott Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011–109 Street Edmonton, ab t5j 3s8 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Scott, Shelley Nightwood Theatre : a woman’s work is always done / Shelley Scott. (Canadian plays series, issn 1917-5086) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued also in electronic format (978-1-897425-56-5). isbn 978-1-897425-55-8 1. Nightwood Theatre--History. 2. Feminist theater--Canada--History. 3. Women in the theater--Canada--History. 4. Feminism and theater-- Canada--History. I. Title. II. Series: Canadian plays series ps8169.f45s36 2010 792.09713’541 c2009-907004-9 Cover design by Honey Mae Caffin, intertextual.ca Book design by Natalie Olsen. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing. This project was funded in part by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada, see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at [email protected] for permission beyond the usage outlined in the Creative Commons license. A volume in the Canadian Plays series: issn 1917-5086 (Print) issn 1917-5094 (Online) Contents 7 Acknowledgements 9 Preface 15 Introduction Context, Creativity, Collectivity 51 One The Beginning of Nightwood Theatre, 1979–1988 109 Two Breaking Away and Moving On, 1989–1993 159 Three New Leadership Models, 1994–2000 and 2001–2009 201 Four Nightwood and Feminist Theory 225 Appendix A Nightwood Chronology 295 Notes 321 Bibliography 333 Index Acknowledgements This book began as my doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. I extend my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Michael J. Sidnell, and to Richard Plant, Ann Saddlemyer, and Ann Wilson for their guidance. Twelve years after its completion, my dissertation has become a book, thanks to everyone at Athabasca University Press, especially Anne Nothof and Erna Dominey, who have been won- derfully supportive. Some of the material from the introduction has been previ- ously published in the journal Canadian Theatre Review; other material from the introduction has appeared in Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada vol. 18 no. 2 (Fall 1997) and was reprinted in Feminist Theatre and Performance: Critical Per- spectives on Canadian Theatre in English, Volume 4, edited by Susan Bennett (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006). Some mate- rial in chapter two has appeared in Resources for Feminist Research vol. 31 no. 3/4 (Fall 2005) and other material from this chapter appeared in the British Journal of Canadian Studies. My thanks to the editors of these journals for first publishing my articles on Nightwood. Thanks to the cast and crew of the productions of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and This is For You, Anna that I directed at the University of Lethbridge, and to all of my col- leagues at the U of L who facilitated and responded to those shows. I have published articles about these productions in CTR and Resources for Feminist Research. I acknowledge with gratitude the University of Lethbridge Research Fund award I received in 7 the spring of 2006. Thanks as well for their assistance and sup- port to my copy editor, Paula Ayer, and indexer, Adrian Mather, and to Jamie Dunsdon, Denis Salter, and my many friends and colleagues at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. And finally, very special thanks to all of the people who have worked with Nightwood Theatre over the years, and particularly to the women I have interviewed. This book is dedicated to my husband, Bill Tice. Shelley Scott * Nightwood Theatre 8 Preface The first time I heard about Nightwood Theatre was in1989 , in Richard Plant’s Canadian Theatre course at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. I was in the first year of my two-year MA program, and had come back to academia after three years working for the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee — first as a volunteer, then as the paid coordinator of the provincial office in Edmonton. I had determined that being a professional lobbyist was not the career path for me; I missed be- ing in school, and I missed being involved in theatre even more. After completing the MA, I continued into a PhD program at the same university, and when the time came to select a dissertation topic, Nightwood jumped out at me. It represented the perfect point of intersection between my newfound commitment to Ca- nadian theatre and my long-term connection to feminism. I spent some time as a volunteer in the Nightwood office, located at that time on Adelaide Street — helping to construct a database, stuffing envelopes, working front of house, and selling tickets to the “Five Minute Feminist Cabaret.” The women I had the most contact with were Leslie Lester and Soraya Peerbaye, and the place I spent most of my time was in their office closet, digging through the theatre’s collected archives. It was a hot, dark closet and the archives were largely unorganized — just file folders in boxes, which I would drag out and sort through one by one, making an inventory and photocopying items of particular interest. Those materials are now in the University of Guelph Theatre Archives, but back in the early 1990s, I felt like I was the only one who knew the wealth of history in those boxes. 9 In addition to excavating the archives, I conducted interviews with people at Nightwood over the years. I began by interviewing Cynthia Grant and Kim Renders, the two founding members of Nightwood still living in Toronto (by then, Maureen White had moved to Ireland and Mary Vingoe was busy running Ship’s Com- pany in Nova Scotia). Cynthia had her own personal archive and was eager to share articles from Nightwood’s earliest period. Kim later became a colleague when we taught in the same semester at the University of Guelph. In 1996, the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (at that time known as the Association for Canadian Theatre Research) bestowed honorary membership on all four founding members of Nightwood. I was thrilled that Nightwood was being recognized, and I remember being espe- cially pleased that Kim was able to attend the awards banquet in St. Catharines to accept on behalf of the founders. I went on to interview all the other women who had been leaders at Nightwood: Kate Lushington (who actually stored her boxes of archival material in my basement for a time); and Leslie Lester, Alisa Palmer, and Diane Roberts, who were extraordinarily welcoming and warm. I completed the dissertation and graduated in 1997. Although I moved away from Toronto afterward, I was determined to keep my research focused on Nightwood. I inter- viewed Kelly Thornton on 28 May 2002, just after she took over the company as artistic director, and then interviewed her again in 2006 along with Monica Esteves, Nightwood’s producer. Despite these significant connections to Nightwood, my inten- tion has never been to claim an insider’s status, to relay personal anecdotes, or to settle debates. My research has always been fo- cused on materials in the public domain: the productions and play scripts, the media coverage and journal articles, the pro- grams and posters. In addition to the plays and productions, I am interested in the ways Nightwood has presented itself to the public through the media and on its own website, and in how Nightwood interacts with its supporters through vehicles such as the news- letter. I am concerned with how Nightwood has communicated its feminist mandate: for example, what kinds of terms are used Shelley Scott * Nightwood Theatre 10 in a press release? How does a program blurb convey the com- pany’s history in a quick paragraph, or how is a play described in a newspaper interview to convey what its director thinks about its feminist message? What I have discovered is that, over the years, the definition of feminism has continually changed and that, as a women’s theatre company, Nightwood has had to respond and adapt to changing attitudes — including the prevalent attitude that feminism has ceased to be relevant. While this book has come a very long way from its origins as a dissertation, my overarching focus has remained on contextual- izing Nightwood in terms of feminist theory and history; if any- thing, that focus has broadened. I had never intended to write only a straightforward history of Nightwood, although the compi- lation and maintenance of the chronology has been a paramount undertaking. Rather, I wanted to explore how feminist theory has changed since Nightwood’s founding in 1979, and how Night- wood as a women’s theatre has changed to reflect developments in feminist philosophy. This is a complex matter, for there is a great difference between feminist activism — as it is practiced by an advocacy and lobbying organization like the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee, for example — and the scholarship of feminist academia.