Has fringe been politically neutered?

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This article was published 29/07/2015 (3732 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the fall of 2011, a local indie theatre company staged a play called Generous by Michael Healey, one of the country’s most controversial writers. In it, a Calgary oil exec gleefully scorns the environment then seduces a reporter while the heritage minister stabs an opposition MP to stave off a non-confidence vote.

It was a riot, a hot mess of complicated morality and improbable politics and outrageous characters. It tapped into the moment, especially for a city just finished with a federal election and smack in the middle of a provincial one. It was, pretty nearly, the last overtly political play I’ve seen in Winnipeg.

Just three days after the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, where experimental theatre and edgy ideas are meant to collide, my beer tent lament is about the almost total lack of politics on stage. In an election year, in a year when Winnipeg began to talk about our racial divide, in a year of Vladimir Putin and IS and four million Syrian refugees, this was the least political fringe I can remember.

Instead, as it has been for several years, the fringe was dominated by personal storytelling, which often told us a lot about the performer — their daddy issues, their brother in jail, their cross-Canada road trip — but not much about our world and how it’s run. There was lots of sketch and stand-up comedy, much of it hilarious, almost none of it political, even though the best social commentary, the most eviscerating political criticism often comes from comedians. In one review, I gave fringe-favourite God is a Scottish Drag Queen a hassle for hauling out a cheap Harper joke but it ended up being the only Harper joke I heard in the 25 shows I saw.

Forget Parliament and the Senate scandal and elections and Justin Trudeau. Where were the shows about small-P political issues — poverty, immigration, climate change, rape culture? Roughly half of the 180-odd fringe shows are produced locally. Did any tackle Winnipeg’s biggest issue — our relationship with indigenous people? I spent nearly every day last week at the fringe and I didn’t hear of one.

A show by a bunch of kids was one exception that merits a mention. Siloam Mission, working with Aboriginal Youth Opportunities and the Louis Riel School Division, put on Blink’s Garden, a fun caper with a deeper message about income inequality.

In past years, the odd political show stood out so much as to be among my most memorable, including local raconteur Bill Pats’s look at capital punishment or indigenous actor Cliff Cardinal’s ambitious and shattering look at life on the reserve.

In their imperfect ways, those did what theatre, at its best, is meant to do, illuminate complicated issues, using characters we care about to help us grapple with an issue, a point of view, an experience, a problem. The theatre can help us understand political and social problems better than almost anything, better than an attack ad, better than a policy paper, better than an editorial. It can make an argument for change that’s more potent than any a politician or a protester might deliver.

Instead, much of the theatre I see now, at the fringe and on the city’s professional stages, feels neutered, like we have nothing better to talk about than ourselves.

Maybe there’s a chill, a fear that overtly political plays will run afoul of overly-sensitive government funders. That’s what many fear happened to Toronto’s SummerWorks festival, which lost $50,000 in grant money after it mounted a play about the Toronto-18 terrorist plot. Healey’s Proud, which featured a surprisingly nuanced and sympathetic Stephen Harper, was rejected by a major Toronto theatre company for fear Harper himself might sue. I’m not sure such a chill really exists — Theatre Projects Manitoba mounted a wicked production of Proud last year. If the chill does exist, surely it shouldn’t filter down to the fringe, where the ambitious, experimental, anything-goes ethos seems to be waning.

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Maybe playwrights and producers worry that if we can barely get citizens out to vote there’s no way we can get them to pony up for a night of political agitation disguised as entertainment. Maybe everyone figures there’s just not much of a market for a play about climate change.

Except there is. One of the most-talked about plays in London last year was 2071, co-written by a British playwright and a climate scientist. Along with a hit show about a meddling King Charles III, one about the Occupy movement and another about illegal migrants, it prompted Guardian theatre critic Micheal Billington to laud the revival of political theatre in the U.K. recently. A new generation has inherited the “conviction that theatre has a moral duty to address the state of society,” he wrote.

Where is that conviction in Canada?

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca