Seeing Toronto the Good at Factory and Travesties at Soulpepper (by Soulpepper?--do they own the Young Centre?) in the same week left me with debate-play brain freeze.
Andrew Moodie's contemporary work follows a black lawyer who must defend a female cop against charges of racial profiling. He happens to be married to a Franco-Ontario (read: white) woman and the story frequently abandons its legal-procedural core to show her worrying about her jaded students while waiting for street cars. The acting is excellent and some of the lines are quite good, but its left-right axis and middle class focus (the few characters who are on the front lines of the gun-violence issue get little to say though, in fairness, the snooty character who traces his lineage back to the family compact is also given only perfunctory treatment). In trying to balance the classic left-right arguments so perfectly, Moodie leaves out other voices that would have made the debate more dynamic, more unpredictable.
Travesties is a debate about the social usefulness of art that playwright Tom Stoppard has ramped through a vaudeville act that includes singing, dancing and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I don't buy the arguments that what Travesties has to say about the culture wars is relevant today. Yes, we still debate about art, but the debate has evolved and changed, making Stoppard's main question here--does art have to be socially useful?--largely irrelevant. No, art doesn't have to be socially useful. Art can be anything. Canada's current debate about art is: Given that art doesn't necessarily have to have any social use, should the government fund it? Which makes Travesties seem awfully dated, despite how hard it tries to make us giggle.
Moodie's play might lack the Stoppard's encyclopedic theatre knowledge and self-referential smugness, but at least it's an argument we're having right now.
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