Parliamentary power play

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This article was published 06/11/2014 (4312 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prominent Toronto playwright Michael Healey may be the only Canadian artist openly thrilled that Stephen Harper is still the prime minister and could be for some time.

Healey’s political satire Proud looks at the Harper government after the Conservatives win a majority in the 2011 federal election. He is no fan of the prime minister’s rigid dogmatism and views his policies as misguided, but he has come to appreciate that Harper has emerged as the poster boy for his play, which opens the Theatre Projects Manitoba season on Thursday, Nov. 6.

“I’m grateful for Stephen Harper’s longevity because it means my play doesn’t become irrelevant,” says the award-winning Healey (The Drawer Boy) during a telephone interview. “Proud becomes irrelevant when he leaves office, although it is a play about how we select our leaders and what qualities we look for in them.”

Including a sitting prime minister as a character in his 2012 play — the last of a trilogy with Generous (2007) and Courageous (2009) — has meant his script has received a windfall of attention. Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, for which Healey was playwright-in-residence for 11 years, refused to program Proud over fears that the play was potentially libellous to Harper, although a legal opinion firmly stated that it wasn’t.

The jilted Healey immediately quit the Tarragon in protest, a divorce that became a cause célèbre in Canadian theatre. The Tarragon’s fear of a funding backlash or being ensnared in a costly court battle sent a chill through stages across the country. Theatres, including TPM, held readings as a fundraiser for a self-financed Toronto run of Proud, which went off without lawsuits. Since then Proud has been presented in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa.

In the play, the Tories grab an even larger majority than they currently possess and the prime minister is facing a caucus full of raw, rookie MPs. One of them is Quebec single mom Jisbella, whom he tutors in the ways of federal politics. Taking advantage of her ignorance, the PM manoeuvres her to sponsor an anti-abortion bill that will divert attention from his plans to dismantle the Privy Council.

It was only late in rehearsals that Healey decided to identify the prime minister character.

“At a certain point, I found it too cute to have this guy on stage that had many of the attributes of Stephen Harper but not name him,” says Healey, whose new play, Who, is about another Tory, former prime minister Joe Clark. “I could not come up with a good enough reason not to name him. It was about taking the wink out of the show.

“If he never gets named, it’s exactly the same. I don’t think anyone leaves the theatre asking, ‘Was that Jack Layton they were talking about?'”

Healey portrayed Harper in the Toronto production and says the fun is subverting the audience’s expectations about him. Some of those attributes get confirmed for a lot of laughs and others generate sympathy that left-leaning spectators don’t necessarily have for the real Harper.

“My goal is to re-humanize him, probably against his own wishes,” says Healey, with a chuckle.

The actor claims his only resemblance to Harper is being a “little doughy” middle-aged white man. Ross McMillan, the Winnipeg actor playing Harper in the TPM production, has already, much to his chagrin, been endorsed publicly as a grey-hair-helmeted look-alike.

“It’s a little embarrassing, but a couple of years ago I was mocked by some youths at a bus stop on the grounds that I looked like Stephen Harper,” McMillan says. “I told my wife and she said I was lucky I didn’t get beat up.”

The Scottish-born performer, best known for his recurring role on the locally lensed TV series Less Than Kind, says the role’s difficulty is all about determining whether Harper is masking his personality or simply doesn’t have one.

“It’s a big challenge for an actor when there is nothing to latch on to. I think people will get a chuckle out of my impersonation of a man who has nothing to impersonate,” says McMillan, who was cast without an audition.

Some theatre-goers will come away thinking Healey has gone easy on Harper because he provides the character with plenty of opportunities in Proud to justify and humanize his attitudes and policies.

“I think he is saying Harper’s brand of ideological conservatism is bad for Canada, but we need to articulate why. There needs to be more than having an emotional reaction to a politician, and it is important to articulate why he might be bad for the country,” says McMillan, 56.

Proud stands out in Canadian theatre, which seems to be suffering from a dearth of political plays. McMillan speculates that Canadians prefer to go to theatre to be entertained rather than to be challenged. Or, perhaps it is because politics here are not as flashy as in the United States.

“Canadian politicians manage to make themselves seem as dull as oatmeal,” he says. “Harper is famous for avoiding drama at all costs by doing things slowly and incrementally rather than making a big splash.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca