The Emergence of Italian Canadian Theatre from 1947 to the present Simone Lomartire Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Ph.D University of Leeds School of English November 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Simone Lomartire i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I must of course begin by thanking my supervisor, Professor Graham Huggan, the great ‘artificer’. Over the years, his sound advice and generosity of spirit have always encouraged my intellectual creativity and interdisciplinary orientation, and for that I am deeply grateful. Graham is to me what Socrates was to Plato: grazie, con tutto il cuore, for my ‘emergence’ as a scholar. I am grateful to the following funding sources: the School of English and the Italian government through INPDAP (Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza e Assistenza per i Dipendenti dell'Amministrazione Pubblica) for full financial support throughout three years of my studies; the Centre for Canadian Studies at Leeds University; and the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK (in association with the Canadian High Commission) for financial support for my two research trips to Canada in October 2009 and July 2011. Thanks are also due to archivists at the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and to Casa d’Italia and the Centre des auteurs dramatiques in Montreal for facilitating the retrieval of valuable bibliographical material and for sending me copies of important documentation which I would never have been able to consult otherwise because of the many individuals ‘from Porlock’ who infest the globe. I would also like to remember those who made my university years memorable for all the right reasons. ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments | Of princes, shall outlive’: my lasting thanks to Emeritus Professor Rachel Killick for stimulating my thinking about the study of Quebec theatre and for her immeasurable kindness. I would also like to thank her for the generous gift of far too much of her time. Going back some years, I cannot express in words my gratitude to Professor Jane Plastow and Professor Ros Brown-Grant, ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.’ I also feel privileged to have benefited from the inputs of Emeritus Professor Martin Banham, Professor Steve Bottoms, and Professor Edward Larrissy. In the very rugged archipelago that the Italian education system is, I consider myself ‘like gold to airy thinness beat’ whenever I think of my first French teacher, Mrs ii Isabella Massacesi who, at eleven years of age, first spoke to me about French loan words. Beside her, I would like to thank my first teacher of English language and literature, Maria Giovanna Rossi, my ‘miglior fabbro’; had it not been for her, my Anglo-Italian self would never have existed. Throughout the various stages of my Ph.D, I have been lucky enough to receive support and encouragement from caring friends and stimulating colleagues. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the Fellowship of the Upgrade 2010: Amber, Beth, Christine, Hannah, Esha, and Maya. I would like to extend my thanks to Bine, Catherine, Emma, and Milena for reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of my academic work. I greatly benefited from their helpful criticism and feedback. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues in Leeds and Milano for offering words of encouragement and advice during the different phases of my thesis writing: Adi, Alberto, Angelica, Andy, Arthur, Chiara, Daniela, Dina, Ed, Elle, Francesca, Fred, Gigliola, Hannah C., Henghameh, Ilaria, Jessica, Jo, Katie, Manuel, Manu, Natalie, Pam, Pat, Roberta, Sam, Silvia, and Velia. I am also grateful to Lee for always going above and beyond the call of duty. ‘I count myself in nothing else so happy | As in a soul remembering my good friends.’ I wish to thank Chei, Ila, Vale, Alessandra, Marietta, and Dani whose love, patience, and support made this Ph.D significantly less daunting. Finally, a special thanks to Claudio Cinelli and Carlo Chiarilli for allowing me to reproduce part of their plays in this thesis (respectively: Migrants/Migranti, 20 October 2010; and Migrant Ventures, 19 July 2011); and I offer my deepest gratitude to Ms Venier, Ms Mesaglio, Antonio D’Alfonso, Tony Nardi, Caterina Edwards, John Montesano, Mary Melfi, Claudio Cinelli, and Carlo Chiarilli who patiently answered all of my questions and ushered the sub-sections of my ‘acts’ through various stages of their preparation in a timely and efficient manner. Grazie mille a mamma e papà: your biggest gift has been to want me; mine will always be to love you. iii ABSTRACT This thesis represents the first study of Italian Canadian theatre. By Italian Canadian theatre, I mean plays written in Canada by Italian immigrants, in Italian dialect, Italiese, English or French. The criteria I followed are obviously selective, yet still important. Particularly, the primary sources discussed here have been chosen from within a corpus which explicitly addresses the ways in which Italian and Canadian cultures have combined to shape the emergence of distinctive identity-based dramatic texts, even when these play texts seem to have embraced more universal interests. 1947 marks a significant milestone, coinciding as it does with the removal of the Enemy Alien Act, in which the Canadian government officially proclaimed all Italians to be ‘enemy aliens’ and forbade them entry in the country. A new wave of immigration to Canada from Italy began then. The theatre that emerged in those early days speaks of communities striving to survive emotionally in unknown territory, expressing a growing awareness of what Italian immigrants brought with them and how this affected what they had been before. Unlike earlier theatre works, post-1947 theatre also reflects on what these immigrants became in Canada and on how new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships were continually being created, negotiated, and transformed. In order to examine Italian Canadian theatre, work needs to be considered within drama, anthropology, ethnography, and cultural studies. Research in these disciplines is helpful because it reflects on ethnic identities in terms of emergent cultures writing emergent literatures. The act of emergence implies a rereading of the canon through intertextual, interliterary, and interartistic networks of exchange. This emergence is calculated according to its distance from the national referent, and the theoretical model iv proposed recognises the complex participation of various types of change – transformations, discontinuities, and continuities. Following this theoretical framework, my thesis places emphasis on three case studies around questions of emergence in Italian Canadian theatre: a period of community-building amateur theatricals in which Italian Canadian identities are established (1947–1974); a phase when Italian Canadian theatre emerges as ‘multicultural’ and as part of the subsidised arts sector through the politics of recognition of the Canadian government (1973–1997); and a third period in which Italian Canadian theatre is still emerging and is increasingly being recognised beyond national borders (1996–present). Since this is the first in-depth study of Italian Canadian theatre, there is a need to account for its historical emergence. Emergence doubles here as a historical category which reads the chosen theatre works as documents speaking to the concerns of the Italian immigrants to Canada at specific moments in history. This is not to say that the plays selected here merely reflect their own conditions of production: a cultural historical approach is needed. Cultural history reads these works not just as passively marked with the imprint of history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made and remade. Moreover, it studies the construction of the subject, the extent to which and the mechanisms through which individuals are attached to particular identities, and the shape and characteristics of those identities. CONTENTS Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................i Abstract...........................................................................................................................iii List of abbreviations ......................................................................................................vi List of figures..................................................................................................................vi Table of Contents Introduction.....................................................................................................................1 ACT I..............................................................................................................................47 ACT II ..........................................................................................................................115 ACT III.........................................................................................................................179 Conclusion....................................................................................................................261 Appendix......................................................................................................................279