RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES
This paper explores through personal experience and from a cultural materialist perspective the conditions which shape the reproduction of theatre and theatre history in contemporary Nova Scotia. It focuses on the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre, the ways in which its theatre is produced, recorded, 'archived,' represented in documentation (including reviews), and reconstructed in theatre history and criticism. It draws upon the author's own histories of and with the company as a way of posing problems and raising issues pertaining to the writing of contemporary theatre history in the Maritimes.
Se basant sur ses expériences personnelles tout en adoptant une perspective matérialiste, cet article examine les conditions qui façonnent la reproduction du théâtre et de l'histoire du théâtre en Nouvelle-Écosse. L'auteur concentre son attention sur la compagnie théâtrale coopérative Mulgrave Road: les moyens par lesquels cette troupe est produite, décrite, « archivée », représentée par les divers services de documentation (y inclus les comptes rendus journalistiques), et reconstruite par les historiens et les critiques du théâtre. Pour cet essai l'auteur se base à la fois sur l'histoire du théâtre Mulgrave Road esquissée par lui ailleurs, et sur ses propres rapports avec ce théâtre, pour soulever de nombreuses questions portant sur l'écriture de l'histoire du théâtre contemporain dans les Provinces Maritimes.
Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre is among other things, a small, low budget, co-operatively run, rural, alternative, artist-run, community-based, political, touring, Maritime theatre company dedicated to producing new plays about north-eastern Nova Scotia. And thereby-in each of those adjectives-hang some tales. Each of these 'tales' is potentially the basis of a history or histories of the company, each is produced by (among other things) the discourses of the company itself, and many are contradictory or mutually exclusive. Mulgrave Road Co-op is different, and constructs itself differently, in its various capacities-as a member of the Professional Association for Canadian Theatres, for example, of a council of Nova Scotian Co-operatives (the other members of which work in agriculture or fishing), of the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, of Actors Equity, and so on. In each of these cases Mulgrave Road can be constructed differently as (say) a professional company (management), a worker's co-op, a group of 'artistes,' an agent of social-intervention, or an employer dedicated, as the company's articles of incorporation say, to 'the socio-economic development of Eastern Nova Scotia, primarily Guysborough County.' It all depends on your interest.
I'm interested here in the production of theatre history in the Maritimes, and Mulgrave Road is useful for my interests because of my own investment in the production of its history: I have been involved with the company first as a reviewer; next as the writer of a short history of its early years; then as a member of and advisor to 'the company' (as I'm constructing it at the moment, invoking both the corporate and theatrical senses of the word-I often also call it 'the co-op'); then as a director and writer; and finally as a theorizer about its organization and, in this paper, its history.
In light of the different narratives through which the company's history could be and has been constructed, and in light of my own histories of and with the company, I propose to look in two ways at the historiographical problems presented in 'reproducing Mulgrave Road.' First, I plan to proceed with no pretensions to proper scholarly detachment; rather I would like to foreground the nature of my engagement, and by extension the engagement of anyone involved in the production of theatre history. Secondly, I would like to sketch three aspects of the production of Mulgrave Road's history: the discourse of the company (including its theatre productions); the reception and perception (reproduction) of its work in reviews and criticism; and (implicitly, throughout) the histories that have been and could be written of it. I want to view each of these--the discourse of the company, the reception of its productions, and the construction of its histories-as sites of struggle, assuming a set of complex relationships both within the company, and between the company and the cultural, theatrical and historical contexts within and through which it works. I want, that is, to consider the production of theatre by Mulgrave Road, and the production of its theatre history, as a complex series of negotiations.
Theatre history, of course, like other history, is always already written, and in the case of a theatre company the primary documents upon which the historian draws-that archival record of policies, minutes, grant applications, newsletters, correspondence, and press releases that together with its productions form the discourses of the company-are already shaped by the interests, investments, and narrative strategies of their particular authors writing for particular audiences for particular purposes. Interestingly, too, in the case of Mulgrave Road, the general manager of the company from 1978 to 1989, Ed McKenna, was trained as an historian, and while at the Co-op was president of the local historical society. It might be assumed that he was conscious, as he prepared grant applications, policy statements and press releases, not only of the different discourses in which he was taking part, but also of the ways in which he was thereby discursively constructing the company and its history. When, for example, he writes in a 1979 Canada Council application about 'Clayton Digdon, garage proprietor, who, with the aid of tools such as a ball peen hammer and a bar of soap, kept our rusty Ford on the road the last two years, for not much more than the price of a few beers and free tickets to the shows,' he is clearly and purposefully (re)producing a discourse of rural regionalism and close ties to 'the community' (however defined).
McKenna was also constructing a regionalist vision of the company through his political commitment to what he calls 'community-based professional theatre,' a narrative that helped to shape the future of the company, privileging his version over those of other members for whom Mulgrave Road was preeminently an artist's co-operative. And when I quoted this same colourful passage in a history of the company that was funded through a group grant headed by a geographer to explore 'small town life in the Maritimes,' I was contributing to the construction of a particular myth of the company.2 I was also responding to my need as a newcomer to the region to perceive a supportive relationship between a small, rural, Maritime community and its artists, not to mention my need as an urban Ontarian to idealize that relationship. Finally, in quoting this passage in my first history of Mulgrave Road, I was of course misreading it, taking it out of its context in a grant application that involved a very interested revisioning of the Council's concept of community support. When McKenna invited me to present my history of the company at a policy-shaping Annual General meeting, the wheel came full circle: a retrospective narrative history constructed to serve certain interests, drawing selectively on similarly interested documents, was silently (and probably unconsciously) used directly to shape the company's future history, as of course the investments of all histories and all readings (uses) of history are always in the present and future.
Mulgrave Road, then, is discursively constructed in different ways in different social and cultural contexts to serve a variety of different interests, and its files might best be viewed by the theatre historian as a site of struggle of de- and re-contextualized documents contesting for discursive sovereignty.
The Canada Council, for example, funds artists, and early on responded to a Mulgrave Road grant application by asking whether the company's commitment was to its art or its community, commitments which the Council read as conflicting, and one of which was outside of its mandate (or narrative frame). Subsequent grant applications, of course, stressed artistic credentials and integrity, and later came indirectly to influence hiring practice: it became more common to hire artists from outside the region in an attempt to attract 'the best,' a strategy that of course privileges the dominant culture and hegemonic status quo, in this case central Canada.
On another occasion, however, representative except in its oddity, the company was awarded a grant from the federal social services to produce a social-intervention show about literacy, on the condition that they hire only functionally illiterate actors-which in practice clearly means non-professionals. (Prospective performers had to take a literacy test and fail, in order to be eligible for the job-a job which involved collectively 'writing' the script.)
Provincial arts funding is minimally available to the company itself, except through local tour sponsors to bring Co-op productions to their communities, which means the construction of a multiplicity of different and differently interested narratives about the co-op's role in each sponsor's particular community.
In its applications for municipal support-which in financial terms is negligible except insofar as it serves as evidence of community support to other granting agencies-the company has to stress its service to the community, primarily as an employer, and the aspect of their mandate that stresses contributing to the socio-economic development of the region comes to the fore.
In press releases and in other public discourse, a different kind of strategy dictates that the work of the company be sold to prospective audiences and corporate sponsors as populist, entertaining, and 'excellent.' This often translates into an uncomfortable blending of appeals to local and regional sensibilities with 'proofs' of 'universal' 'artistic quality' in the form of evidence-usually out-of-region reviews--of national and international success and recognition. It can also directly shape how the company's productions mean: for example, the first draft of my recent play for Mulgrave Road, From Fogarty's Cove, included serious criticism of the closing and reopening of the Canso fish plant, Guysborough county's only industry. In the next draft that material was cut, fortunately, as it turned out, because on my arrival for rehearsals I found that the previously-attacked fish packing company that had purchased the plant from the provincial government had become the show's major corporate sponsor. Show programmes (themselves provided by a duMaurier foundation grant, and sporting the familiar cigarette-package design) featured 'Seafreez Foods' logos and ads, as did posters, flyers, and even T-shirts, and the presentation given by the company's artistic director, Jenny Munday, to the Seafreez executives was with minor alterations featured in the programme (a major 'documentary source') as a 'Message from the Artistic Director.' If you think these things don't shape the way people 'read' the production, the way the show means, the relationship between the theatre company and the community, and finally the histories of the company, think again. In this case, what interest will accrue from both companies' investments in the programme and the showMulgrave Road's and Seafreez Foods'--depends upon the (vested) interests of, or the interest invested by, audiences, critics, and theatre historians, and the cultural contexts within which they are operating.
The documentary examples I've used so far have to do primarily with carrying out company policies and practices, but of course the construction of those policies is also discursive, and is partially recoverable only through documents with their own (partial) discursive characteristics. Minutes of meetings, and correspondence among members clearly reflect struggles to negotiate among different interests, among different discourses, and among the different social and cultural roles the company has played in its different communities. Even recorded policy decisions often reflect compromises,resistance to ranking different parts of the mandate in a disputed order of priorities, and a generally fluid construction of the company's identity, which has shifted with the ability of members to attend meetings, with Artistic Directors, with the constitution of the Theatre Society executive, and with the social and political climate at any given time. It is also true that, since the policies of the co-op are carried out by the general manager and/or artistic director, usually in isolation from the majority of the membership, there has always been a fissure between policy and practice at the Co-op, deriving from immediate needs, changing circumstances, and interpretations of policy that are not unlike the interpretations made by critics and theatre historians. To view company policy, practice, or identity as remotely monolithic, unified, or stable-to 'get a line on it'-is, of course and always, to misread it, and to misrepresent the contentiousness of an ongoing discursive and cultural struggle.
The discourse of the company is most publicly constructed through the shows, and the most primary of documentary materials for the historian derive from the shows: scripts, photographs, video tapes, and designs. The instability of these types of material is well known to the readers of this journal. Photographs, for example, are taken for publicity purposes at Mulgrave Road, long before the shows open, and before sets and costumes are complete; and yet the just-released Canada on Stage, 1986-883 would have misidentified a photograph of Chris Heide's The Promised Land had I not happened to be in the office when it arrived at Guelph and recognized it as a rehearsal shot. Similarly, the first act of the archival video of From Fogarty's Cove in 1991 was shot near the end of the run in the cavernous high-school gym in Canso in September, while the second act was shot in the tiny Guysborough Masonic Hall in opening week in July-and of course is full of dropped lines, stumbles, and improvisations.
Also significant are the always unusual conditions under which the shows, and therefore the company's histories, are produced in the first place. My first show with Mulgrave Road, for example, K. C. Superstar, contained throughout the rehearsal period two central monologues lifted more or less verbatim from interviews with area residents. Both were liberally laced with obscenities. When Chris Heide, then the artistic director of the company, attended the final dress rehearsal, he called a meeting of the company for the next morning-the day of the opening-at which he asked that the monologues be cut. We replaced them with material that had been edited out earlier, and arranged for audience surveys to be handed out asking about the appropriateness of doing this. The survey prompted CBC radio to propose a piece on the show within the narrative framework of censorship. I refused to comply because my investment at the time was in the show, not censorship-but the show was covered anyway, on 'Morningside,' this time because the host of 'Morningside,' Peter Gzowski, had an interest in producing a show, not about the play or the theatre company, but about the play's subject, K. C. Irving.
In any case, when the results of the censorship survey came in, I read them as overwhelmingly opposed to cutting the material; however Chris Heide, 'reading' the same documents but with a different interest, felt the response was about evenly mixed. But my central point here is that those monologues (because they were included throughout the rehearsal process), the way in which they were replaced, the actors' response to the procedure, all these seemingly unusual and (until now) unrecorded conditions of production, indirectly and unconsciously shaped the acting of the play and therefore left traces that shaped audience response. They shaped, in other words, the ways in which the show meant, and they did so in ways that theatre historians can only hope to reproduce, even assuming that it is in their interests to do so. The whole controversy, moreover, changed the relationship between the company and its various communities, including its own membership, in ways that directly shaped its histories. All conditions for production rehearsal halls and schedules, tour planning, pay scales, and so on-always do these things.
My next show with Mulgrave Road, From Fogarty's Cove, represents, to my mind, a particularly complex site of struggle, particularly useful for a paper on historiographic frames. The local context for the show was the closing of the fish plant in Canso the previous spring, while the national context was the fallout from the Meech Lake and Oka crises. For many in the company, the play was a strong regionalist statement, suspicious of central Canada, and primarily supportive of the local community in crisis. But the play's director, Terry Tweed, who has few Maritime connections-her programme bio said that 'Terry refuses to apologize for being an upper Canadian'-and whose background as an artist is the nationalist movement of the 70s, 'read' the script in a nationalist context, and wrote an explicitly nationalist programme note, saying that 'the last couple of years have been bad for our poor country,' wondering 'how do all [the] regions maintain their balance and autonomy within this country as a whole?' and concluding that 'it's time to fight back. It's time to celebrate all we have been, are and can be. We haven't lost. We just haven't won yet.' (The closing socialist/nationalist intertext-Tweed was a member of the company that produced 1837-will be familiar to readers of this journal as the closing lines of that early Passe Muraille collective creation.) There is no question, in any case, that Tweed's programme note and bio were part of what shaped audiences' and reviewers' reproductions of the show, as were the 'regionalist' readings of many other members of the company and similar predilections among many in the audience. Finally, however, the play was and is, among other things, a site of struggle among the contentious discourses of nationalism, regionalism, and other community-forming narrative constructs.4 How the show would be reproduced by critics and theatre historians would depend on their particular interests and on the frames they brought to bear on their analyses. I admit to some concerns, however, in the context of the otherwise very welcome reformulations of regionalism currently being undertaken by Robert Wallace, Alan Filewod and others,5 in which landscape and geography are being replaced by other organizing frames, that rural areas outside of central Canada will once more, if differently, be shuffled to the margins.
In 1987 Mulgrave Road undertook a project that reproduced the company's own history in a way that is the most directly and interestingly problematic of any of their productions (or any of their histories). Ten Years After, a collective creation directed by Jan Kudelka about the changing relationship between the company and its community over its brief history, was a commedia-style show that metatheatrically problematized its own project in ways that are significant to any writer of theatre history. One sequence parodied an Annual General Meeting in which members were given in turn two minutes to propose ideas for new shows, after which a bell would ring, cutting them off. Included in the show's version of the meeting was a proposal to do a 'retrospective introspective navel-gazing show about the history of the co-op,' a line which incorporated Ed McKenna's major objections to the production of Ten Years After itself. Also included was a parodic rendering of the idealistic founding of the company and of some of the more romanticised constructions of its identity. Three characters from the original Mulgrave Road Show arrived metatheatrically in town determined through theatre to 'hold a mirror in front of the community,' as they put it. 'They'll come in, see themselves, and they'll pay us to do it.' When asked by a member of the community, 'what are you going to see in this mirror?' they reply, 'we're not going to see anything. We're going to be standing behind it, holding it up.'
But I've told these stories before, in a Canadian Theatre Review report interested in celebrating the company's survival for a decade 'while continuing to scrutinize itself carefully and renew its energies with ... rigour and integrity. 6 I didn't mention there that the general manager declined to attend the production, or that there were major battles within the company about casting two actors from Toronto in the show. It wasn't in my interests at that time to do so. For my present interests, however, Ten Years After is an excellent illustration of the complexity of an historical 'event'7 that is at once a part of, a representation of, and an interrogation of the company's history, a site of struggle taking part in, shifting among, and contributing variously to several discourses.
The second way in which a theatre company's history is produced, of course, is through reviews and criticism, both of which, again, are directly shaped by the interests and investments of their writers. This is particularly true in a region where many newspapers have a policy against publishing reviews, and journalists are forced to review productions in the context of feature articles or news stories about something else. While it isn't possible to go into this in detail in the context of a short essay, I'd like to quote from one interesting, interested example that brings together several of the things I've been talking about. Jim Lotz, in an Arts Atlantic article called 'Theatre and Regional Development,' constructed Mulgrave Road very much within the discourse of the Co-operative movement in Atlantic Canada, and focused, significantly for our present interests, on the Co-op's (sic) early plays about the history of its region. Lotz claimed that 'in proving the power of collective creativity in a region marked by divisions ... the players are not simply representing another reality-they are living it,' and concluded that 'the Mulgrave Road Co-op has not simply recaptured the past; it has shown everyone in Atlantic Canada how to get a firmer grip on the future.'8 But then this isn't very different from what we do as theatre historians-I quoted this passage for my own purposes in my first history of the company--except that it is of necessity more open about its engagement.
(Dis)Closure
When I first spoke to the Association for Canadian Theatre History about Mulgrave Road at the Learned Societies' meeting in Montreal in 1985 I gave a slide show, and I introduced my presentation as a cross between a travelogue and a fan letter. My talk was an early version of the first history I wrote of the company, and it was framed by an opening slide of the Mulgrave Road, with no buildings or people, just the rugged coast of Chedabucto Bay in the background. My opening sentence, accompanying the slide, was 'Guysborough County Nova Scotia seems at first glance an unlikely place to find professional theatre.' The audience laughed at the incongruity of finding professional theatre in such a landscape, and in my 'frame' of mind at the time I didn't quite understand why. That sentence, modified slightly, was lifted (unacknowledged) from my history by the authors of a high-school Maritime Studies textbook and used to introduce and frame a very different article, which focused on unemployment in the region, and on the company's production of a play on that subject called Occupational Hazards. The sentence next showed up (as far as I know), quoted from that textbook by Jenny Munday, the company's artistic director, in an article that she contributed to a Canadian Theatre Review issue that I have just edited on 'Interrogating Theatrical Practice.'9 Finally, it has surfaced yet again in an unauthorized reprinting of one version of my first history of the company, newly contextualized by the section heading 'Regionalism and Resistance.'10 What goes around comes apart.
My first talk on Mulgrave Road at the Learned Societies Conference was constructed by and through an empiricist/regionalist discourse and was addressed to an organization called the Association for Canadian Theatre History. It was published in three different forms in three places: a collection of essays on small town life in the Maritimes; a small rural Marxist newspaper; and Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien.11 And of course it was next (and most clearly) misused by the authors of the Maritime Studies textbook, and the editors of the unauthorized reprinting to which I have referred (I don't say this with any rancour-all use is misuse, and all reading misreading). I have since drawn on and reconstructed the material for and from that talk a number of times to write about Mulgrave Road, including one article which, through the discourse of play theory, constructed the company as an example of an ideal relationship between a theatre and its community; another in which deconstructionist discourse conspires with me to compare the organization of the co-op to Marx's description of the Paris Commune; and another occasion on which the discourses of materialist-feminist theory served to shape a paper about 'Women's Dramaturgy and the Circulation of Cultural Values at Mulgrave Road' at a conference on Maritime Women. 12 The paper which you are now reading draws on much of the same 'material' as did my first talk, including its much-used opening sentence; it is shaped by contemporary historiography and the discourses of cultural materialism; it was addressed in the Spring of 1992 to the newly reconstituted Association for Canadian Theatre Research; and it is appearing here in the newly reconstituted journal of the Association, Theatre Research in Canada. I do not know how you will receive and reproduce this paper, what you will make of it, or what your particular interest in it might be.
NOTES
STORIES OF INTEREST: SOME PARTIAL HISTORIES OF MULGRAVE ROAD GROPING TOWARDS A METHOD
RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES
1 Unless otherwise acknowledged, quotations from and references to productions or archival
material from the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre are from the company's files, housed at their
offices on Main Street, Guysborough, N.S. 'Interest' and 'partial,' in my title are intended to
invoke all of their usual resonances
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2 'Guysborough, Mulgrave, and the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre Company,' in LARRY
McCANN ed People and Place: Studies of Small Town Life in the Maritimes (Fredericton:
Acadiensis Press 1987) pp 226-244
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3 ed HARRY LANE (Toronto: PACT 1992)
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4 See RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES 'Rogers and Me: The Making of From Fogarty's Cove.'
Canadian Theatre Review 72 (Fall 1992) 25-30, for this particular version, constructed within the
context of an issue on musical theatre
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5 See ROBERT WALLACE Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada
(Saskatoon: Fifth Street House 1990) especially pp 151-164; and ALAN FILEWOD 'Regionalism
After Meech Lake: The Unmapping of Canadian Theatre' in the 'Regionalism and Theory' issue of
Journal of Canadian Politics 9 (1991) ed JONATHAN RITTENHOUSE and CURTIS G ROSE pp
2-24
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6 'Guysborough, N.S.: Mulgrave Road Ten Years After' Canadian Theatre Review 56 (Fall 1988)pp 76-78
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7 I use 'event' in the sense outlined by THOMAS POSTLEWAIT`E in 'Historiography and the
Theatrical Event: A Primer with 12 Cruxes' Theatre Journal 43 (1991) pp 159-161
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8 Arts Atlantic (Winter/Spring 1980)
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9 'Guysborough, N.S.: The View from Inside the Electrolux' Canadian Theatre Review 71
(Summer 1992)p 88
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10 IAN MCKAY and SCOT MELSOM ed Towards a New Maritimes (Charlottetown:
Ragweed, 1992)pp 329-335
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11 MCCANN ed op cit; New Maritimes 3, # 10 (August 1985) pp 4-6; and Canadian Theatre
Review/L'Art dramatique canadien 12, # 1 (1986)) pp 18-32
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12 'Homo Ludens: Canadian Theatre, Canadian Football, Shakespeare, and the NHL' Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien 10, # 1 (1984) pp 65-74; 'Voices (off): Deconstructing the Modem English-Canadian Dramatic Canon' in ROBERT LECKER ed Canadian Canons:
Essays in Literary Value (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1991) pp 91-111; and 'Another
Story: Women's Dramaturgy and the Circulation of Cultural Values at Mulgrave Road,'
presented at the 'Maritime Women: A Place of Their Own' conference at Acadia University, 25-27 September 1992, and forthcoming in the published proceedings, ed DONNA SMYTH
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