LARRY MCDONALD
This article proposes a critical model for the writing of theatre history that explores the relationship between the way a company is designed to produce theatre and its cultural politics and aesthetic objectives. Until there is a more developed and widespread awareness of the range and importance of different production models, the standard model will go on reproducing itself unself-critically.
Cet article propose un modèle critique pour l'élaboration d'une histoire du théâtre qui examinerait les rapports entre, d'une part, la façon dont la production scénique est conçue pour une compagnie theâtrale et, de l'autre, les politiques culturelles et les visées esthétiques de cette compagnie. En attendant qu'on se rende mieux compte des périmètres et de l'importance relative de diffiérents modèles de production, le modèle traditionnel continuera sans doute, selon l'auteur, de se reproduire sans examen critique.
Let us suppose for the moment that as critics and historians of Canadian theatre we are analogous to doctors. Some of us are high-priced surgeons who wield a wicked scalpel; some work in teaching hospitals or do theoretical research; some are psychoanalysts who shed light on sublimated ideologies in the sub-text; too many of us, alas, are pathologists with no lack of corpses to autopsy.
But imagine if you will a medical profession that practised its art with little concrete knowledge of how the human body actually produces and sustains life: a profession vaguely aware that there is such a thing as a pituitary gland, but totally unsuspecting that it has anything to do with stunted growth; a profession able to recognize the symptoms of hysteria, paranoia, and narcissism, but so uninformed about the chemical and neurological properties of the brain or the psychic features of consciousness that such disorders can only be attributed to some mysterious agent such as 'humours.' To imagine a medical profession ignorant of rudimentary physiology is to conjure up a practice of medicine that can only treat and speak of visible symptoms with no knowledge of their causes.
To the extent that the writing of theatre history remains indifferent to the physiology of the body theatrical, to material processes that govern its production of art, our profession might be seen as analogous to the practice of medicine at a less sophisticated stage of its development. In expressing this concern about a deficiency in the writing of theatre history, I have in mind primarily the excellent work that has been done in the area of researching and recording the histories of individual theatre companies. These invaluable profiles are the necessary foundation stones for general histories and synthesizing analyses, and I mean it as no sign of disrespect when I lament that they tend to follow a critical pattern which limits their documentation to matters touching on the selection of plays, the shifts in high profile personnel, the critical reception of the company's work, perceived shifts in mandate or theatrical style, and, sometimes, the efficiency of the company's administration. As a general rule, these histories do not see it as one of their functions to investigate a company's means of production, or to look to this area when seeking to explain changes in a company's achievements or fortunes. One significant weakness of present critical theory, then, is its failure to take into account, and to put under rigorous scrutiny, the actual means by which theatre is produced.
The features that distinguish theatre's means of production, the material processes that generate its character and quality, are many and various -- theatre being not only a collaborative endeavour that requires many skilled professionals but also an art form that is immediately determined by its involvement with technology, bureaucracy and capital. More specifically, and with the aim of encouraging a methodology to guide inquiries, one might group the assumptions and practices that produce theatre into the following categories: the ideology that energizes a theatre company's initial and ongoing conception of its cultural objectives; the structures of power put in place by its act of incorporation, constitution and by-laws; the procedures for production that it adopts; the daily working relationships of its theatre workers; and the pressures exerted upon these internal arrangements by external relationships with granting agencies, audiences and sources of private funding. Taken together, these features of a theatre company's intentions, structures and practices constitute its model for production.
Just how profoundly a knowledge of these mundane matters affects the writing of theatre history can be seen in the recent controversial exchange between Christopher Innes and Peter Hay.1 Over and above any disagreement about the facts of the case (the rejection of Ryga's Captives of the Faceless Drummer and the firing of David Gardner by Vancouver Playhouse's board of directors), the dispute between Innes and Hay is as much about critical methodology as it is about conspiracies and culpabilities. Innes studies 'ends' or results, and works essentially from archival sources. Hay, who was a participant in the controversy, studies 'means' or the procedures of power, and directs attention to the way decisions were produced at the Playhouse in terms of its organizational structures and working relationships, including the connections among the Playhouse's board of directors, the Canada Council, the provincial government and the administrator of its Cultural Fund. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but Hay's detailed knowledge of how the Playhouse was constituted to produce theatre does result in an account of the affair that contradicts such history as can be reconstituted from a narrow range of paper records.
The current state of our knowledge about the configurations and consequences of various models of production is neither very detailed nor useful. As a first step towards developing a critical methodology that hopes to address this deficiency, it would be helpful to outline two diametrically opposed models for theatre production. The first, or what might be termed 'standard model,' is made up of a hierarchically organized work force under the power of an Artistic Director, who answers only to a corporate board whose members are selected on the basis of their access to the community's centres of social and economic power. The second, or 'collective model,' is characterized by a horizontally organized work force whose members share authority equally and answer to no board of directors. Few if any companies, of course, produce theatre wholly in terms of the one model or the other. And it goes without saying that both models have their strengths and weaknesses-which is not to say that at any given moment in the history of a theatrical culture the two models are equally effective, appropriate or evolved. At the present moment I believe that both theatre workers and historians should commit themselves to the investigation of the horizontal, co-operative model. This bias is an expression of the conviction that a healthy theatre (and criticism) must be adversarial; that is, in addition to its legitimate function of mirroring and celebrating our culture, theatre must also question and challenge it. If in what follows I occasionally seem as concerned to encourage self-conscious experimentation with actual models for the production of theatre as I do with urging theatre historians to investigate such matters, that is because I see the critic-historian's function as in part a practical one that can affect current practice for good or ill. In this case, the accumulation of data about various means of producing theatre should allow for some informed discussion about the appropriateness of different models to the achievement of different cultural objectives by a range of theatre companies. Perhaps the hypothesis which informs this essay is that in the absence of alternative means of producing theatre we are not likely, for long, to have a theatre that embodies or enacts an alternative cultural vision.
The working relationships in the standard model of theatre production follow mostly from a structure that has evolved to support the self-expression of an individual, an Artistic Director. The AD usually enjoys almost complete authority over an organization whose principal function is to serve the propagation of a personal, though not usually singular, artistic vision. The levels of authority in this model (board over AD over staff over contract employees), the division of labour (actors versus technicians versus administrators), and the craven dependency of most theatre workers on the AD's power, all result in a model that produces theatre in ways indistinguishable from the means by which our culture produces food and newspapers-which rarely challenge dominant tastes or ways of thinking. The Artistic Director's position inside the company is analogous to the power and economic preferment enjoyed outside the theatre by the largely upper-class audience-and by members of the board of directors.
It would be foolish indeed to expect this structure to produce theatre that called into question such comfortable, privileged arrangements. Toronto Workshop Productions, under the leadership of George Luscombe, might come to mind as a possible exception. The company's socialist politics, however, were largely confined to the stage; there was little that was socialist (or, perhaps, egalitarian?) about the company's working conditions-a contradiction that has not gone unremarked by theatre workers, too few of whom were inspired to replicate Luscombe's alternative theatrical vision.2 Furthermore, where no alternative model for producing theatre is securely established (that is, a model whose means of production are ideologically consistent with the company's cultural objectives), what happens to those objectives when a Luscombe-or a Paul Thompson, or a James Reaney departs?
Until there is a more developed and widespread awareness of the range and importance of different production models, the standard model will go on reproducing itself endlessly. It is taken for granted that, in building a new theatre company, an Artistic Director, at the same time as he (very occasionally, she) is putting his artistic and administrative team in place, must go in search of a board of directors, into whose hands he should cheerfully deliver the economic fate of the company. The theory is that this board, in keeping with the wisdom of past practice, should be composed of one doctor, one lawyer, one chartered accountant, a few men of the world, and a few women of the arts. Despite the obvious contradictions in this (how can the AD enjoy artistic freedom when his budget is controlled by a board that may fire him at will?), despite the homogenizing ideological pressures that such a board tends to exert on the alternative character of the company, and despite the fact that such boards have a truly dismal record of raising money for real alternative companies (whose work often questions the power or legitimacy of the major sources of outside funding), many granting bureaucracies continue to make it a rigid and unimaginative pre-requisite for public subsidies that exactly this type of board be established.
Of course there have been some theatre companies that stubbornly rejected this preferred structure. They organized themselves according to a collective model in which there was no hierarchy, no division of labour, and no board of directors. To speak of these experiments today is to speak in mingled tones of nostalgia and anger: nostalgia because, for the most part, they have not survived as models to be imitated or developed; anger because their disappearance was due as much to the Canada Council's calculated policy of choking them to death as it was to problems inherent in the naivety of their organizational frameworks and procedures.
Chris Brookes, in a draft version of his book on the history of the Mummers Troupe, records how the Canada Council decided to remove all collectively organized companies from the list of groups that had earned the right to automatically renewed funding, and make them apply each year for one-time project grants. The Council's rationale was that collectives were by nature unstable organizations that demanded yearly revaluation. Brookes suspects that the true motivation was that collectives tended to produce a disruptive, more explicitly political theatre than traditionally structured companies.
There were, nonetheless, very real problems with the Mummer's production model that the Council's financial and psychological pressures merely brought to a head. Again, Brookes' history is instructive about the debilitating effects of constant wrangling over first principles with an ever-changing collective membership. In part, the tension in the Mummers' model for production derived from the fact that the company had not originally been founded (or at least consciously organized) as a collective. Founding members Chris Brookes and Lynn Lunde constituted a continuing authority that maintained the company's mandate and did most of the administrative work between shows. Brookes writes:
It was difficult for new members to appreciate past company lessons without having experienced them first-hand, and Lynn and I were loathe to repeat already-learned mistakes time and again with each new production and each change in the collective status quo.3
At least as I read Brooke's memoir, there appears to have been a kind of degraded anarchism at work among some troupe members that was typical of attitudes that too many collectives were tempted to adopt. They assumed that the answer to structures which encouraged bourgeois production(s) was no structure at all; that the way to counter division of labour was to level distinctions of talent; and that the way to insulate oneself from contamination by ideologically reactionary boards of directors was to dispense altogether with this device for community involvement.
When indulging the endless lamentations of these times over the collapse of so many traditionally structured companies (and the increasingly pointless activities of so many others), we might do well to look beyond underfunding and accidents of talent to the matter of repressive and unstable organizational structures. And when some of us bemoan the impoverished legacy of all that radical cultural activity of the 70s, we ought to ponder the failure of the counter-culture to establish lasting alternative structures because of an anarchistic dismissal of all forms of authority.
If these abbreviated musings on the character and consequences of two diametrically opposed models for production seem gloomy, there is also reason to feel optimistic about the successful practice of a number of companies who have experimented with organizational structures uniquely tailored to the kind of alternative they constitute. I am thinking, to name a few, of companies like Catalyst Theatre and Theatre Network in Edmonton, the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, Nightwood in Toronto, Kam Lab in Thunder Bay, and Mulgrave Road in Nova Scotia. All seem to have achieved financial stability and administrative continuity while maintaining their alternative theatrical vision, and none, I think, is organized to produce work as either a pure collective or a traditionally structured company. I say 'I think,' because it is difficult to come by information about the organizational arrangements or working procedures of these companies. And they, in turn, know very little about each other, about the productive strategies devised to cope with problems common to them all.
Perhaps scholars of Canadian theatre should share in the blame for this general ignorance. As yet, little work has been done on the material practices that generate and sustain the scripts, productions and aesthetics of our theatre companies. At present, when young professionals set out to establish a new company, or seasoned veterans attempt to rebuild a failing company, or academics offer courses in theatre administration, either little thought is given to alternative organizational structures or the thinking proceeds without benefit of what might be learned from the successes and failures of recent practice. What is more, our own evaluative work would surely be richer and more accurate if, in writing profiles of various companies, accounts of representative productions, or analyses of scripts influenced by a playwright's association with a company, our writing were informed by material knowledge of how these theatre companies are structurally constituted to produce plays, to produce, in effect, themselves.
The critical methodology I am proposing is really no more than a matrix of questions that may be drawn upon to systematize a range of inquiries. Among the many questions one might ask at this stage of the investigation, the following are designed to reveal where power and control reside, how authority is effected. To attempt an explanation of the significance or implication of each and every one of the following questions would be to exhaust all patience; I must hope that the outline of the two extreme models for production-the standard model and the collective model-will suffice to give the questions some resonance.
Let us begin, then, with the board of directors. If, as is usually the case, there is such a board, are its constitutional powers limited to approving a budget and hiring an Artistic Director, or is it empowered to approve artistic plans, reject individual projects, and oversee other hirings? How often does it meet, and what matters find their way onto its agenda?
Particularly in cases where the board's power is extensive, we need to know as much as we can about its political and aesthetic character. How was it originally set up? Is there a typical profile for a board member? Is the board self-renewing; that is, does the board itself elect new members to fill vacancies, or do shareholders elect new members? Who is eligible to vote, and what, if anything, do these voters have in common? Once elected, is a board member, like a Canadian judge, preserved for life, or, in the manner of our American cousins, safe only until the next round of elections? The answers to such questions should tell us much about where the interplay between ideology and aesthetics is most significantly situated, and about the nature and productive consequences of this interplay.
One might inquire further to test for modifications of the standard model for boards of directors. Is there any constitutional provision for a specified number of seats on the board to be reserved for people who actually work for the theatre? And if provision has been made for worker participation, are there mechanisms in place that define actors, directors, designers and other contract employees as workers, or is worker representation restricted only to the full-time employees, the company's bureaucracy? Given that theatre is a collaborative endeavour, in other words, just who is constitutionally empowered to collaborate at the level where fundamental decisions are made about the company's aims, plays and personnel?
Different questions propose themselves for companies whose organizational bias is towards a board drawn only or primarily from those who work for the company. For instance, what alternative arrangements exist for ful filling some of the traditional functions of the standard board of directors: fundraising and access to key social formations or networks in the community; the resolution of conflicts of interest around matters like salary or internally generated scripts; and the treatment of personality clashes by an outside body to prevent divisive polarizations within the collective of workers? Finally, and at this historical moment most importantly, we should routinely inquire of all constitutional frameworks whether women are guaranteed fair, significant, or adequate representation in the decision-making arrangements.
Keeping in mind that the waters can sometimes get very muddy in companies where board and staff are not easily separated, we might now turn our attention to formalized working relationships in the company's bureaucracy, to what the constitution and by-laws tell us of the company's internal structures and procedures. Who is responsible for hiring, play selection, budget, and overall artistic policy? What control do individual workers have over their specialized work? Where conflicts arise or co-ordination is required, how are decisions arrived at? In many companies, the answers to most questions about the locus of power in daily operations lead inevitably to the Artistic Director. But there are variations; for instance, one might inquire into the procedures that define how authority is allotted between a guest director and the Artistic Director in matters that touch on the production of a play (casting, set designs, publicity). In many collectively organized companies, while Artistic Directors are likely to perform many of the traditional functions we associate with the position (general auditions, contacts with other theatres, reading scripts, liaison with arts bureaucracies, directing and acting), they derive their authority from the collective and often share power equally with its other members on major decisions regarding artistic policy, season, and hiring. At the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, for instance, workers not only have total control over their own work, but all draw the same salary, and there is no one person granted authority, or final approval, over the work of anyone else. The relevant questions in the case of this company would seek to uncover the methods by which decisions are arrived at and co-ordination effected. It does not necessarily follow, and one must grant that it is a problem to be solved, that authority disappears in the absence of a single authority figure. Ultimately, of course, what we need to know are the ideological implications, the artistic consequences, and the administrative effectiveness of different forms of authority for different kinds of theatre companies.
To be serious about addressing the oppression of women in theatre requires that one investigate the regulations, assumptions, and practices that govern their treatment. In the company that I just referred to, although it is not constitutionally enshrined--and it should be--there is a working agreement with the accumulated force of common law that there must be a rough balance on both the board of directors and the permanent staff between males and females. Such an agreement, given this company's way of organizing authority so that it is shared, works to guarantee that women playwrights, directors, designers, and technicians are given fair and equal treatment. In the absence of provisions that address the means of production by ensuring women strong representation on boards and production teams, the good intentions of enlightened males have not changed the status quo very much at all.4
Other questions about internal working processes might also be posed, among them the central question of the relationship between the permanent staff of a company and its contract workers-the actors, designers, carpenters, board operators, and costume builders. Are contract workers, especially those whose talents are frequently or regularly employed by a company, formally incorporated into decision-making processes? Where formal structures do not exist, as they do in the case of some collectively organized companies, are there informal working arrangements that somehow include the interests and expertise of contract employees in the short-term decisions and long-range planning?
My use of terms like 'working arrangements' and 'decision-making processes' should draw attention to the fact that the kinds of structural analysis involved in a study that begins with questions about constitutional configurations must be complemented by an anecdotal analysis of how members of the board, staff, and community of contract employees interact on a day to day basis. Some companies in fact have little in the way of a detailed constitution or by-laws; and in many companies the formal allotment of powers is modified by such contingent factors as the seniority of various staff or board members, the presence in the working mix of strong and weak personalities, the evolution of different consultative groupings that unite or divide different sectors of the company, and working arrangements that may modify the formal power of an Artistic Director in a hierarchically structured company or grant authority to one or two individuals in a collectively organized company. The study of how a company is structured must be complemented by information garnered from interviews and gossip about how authority is actually exercised within that structure, how decisions are actually arrived at and then effected in the workplace.
The methodology that I have outlined so far is but the foundation for the really interesting questions. The value of this methodology, which we might call an anecdotal elaboration of a structural analysis of theatre companies, is that it provides a detailed, material basis for speculative investigations of the following type. What needs to be emphasized is that speculation must be grounded in first order documentation rather than proceeding from second order generalization. Armed with specific details about the means of production, we can launch an informed inquiry into many critical problems:
-Which working models have proven most effective at resisting the homogenizing tendencies in our culture that work to transform genuinely alternative companies into mere alternate companies? What structural elements or unique working arrangements contributed to this success?
-In companies whose constitutions decentralize power, did the dispersal of authority affect the efficiency with which it was administered, or the stability of its artistic vision? If so, how? If not, was that because other, compensating arrangements were devised to ensure alternative configurations of authority?
-In models where authority is centralized, how did working arrangements address, if at all, potential alienation and conflicts engendered by a hierarchical structure? What were the effects on morale and staff turn-over?
-How successfully have individual production models equipped companies to survive the departure of key personnel?
Without too much difficulty we could probably find several instances where two or three roughly comparable companies faced similar artistic or financial crises and only one of the companies produced the energy and the tactical responses necessary to survive.5 What one badly needs to know is whether the difference between success, on the one hand, and financial-emotional-artistic bankruptcy on the other, had anything to do with the structures and working procedures of these companies? Generalizations that lay failure at the doorstep of poor administration, poor planning scheduling, or underfunding tell us precious little, really, about the operational processes responsible for alleged deficiencies of these kinds. We learn nothing except that companies should administer, plan and schedule well, and that they should strive to raise more funds. Most histories of theatre companies tell us even less about how the means of production developed by successful companies triumphed in these areas.
On the thorny question of fundraising, for instance, it would be very helpful to know whether different kinds of companies are poorly or effectively served by differently structured boards of directors. Is there a gap between the community from which the company draws its audience and the community from which the board members are drawn? Given realistic expectations of where money might be raised for alternative companies whose ideology favours plays that may be feminist or socialist, does one need a board good at organizing garage sales, auctions, and appeals to unions and non-governmental organizations, or a board with high profile community representatives who can tap corporate funds? What good are the corporate sponsorships so beloved of granting agencies and their consultants to theatre companies who produce George Ryga in Thunder Bay or dramatize local tory in Nova Scotia? Again, one needs to examine in material detail precisely how successful companies have developed alternative sources of private funding.
Our theatre histories might also take a greater interest in reporting on imaginative solutions that resolve or balance the tensions between the conflicting desires for an active board and one that does not wrest away control of the company from those who make the plays; we also need reports on how collectively organized companies that favour worker control over the standard board of directors have managed to free the workers to run the theatre rather than fundraising campaigns.
When it comes to developing an audience base, experience has shown hat energetic publicity around well produced plays is not in itself sufficient. One needs also to exploit networks, interest groups and existing social formations. This is particularly true of alternative theatres that need to build a different kind of audience. It would be instructive, then, to inquire into what provisions have been made, or need to be made, to incorporate personnel or conditions for production that appeal to this targeted audience. An allied question might be: to what extent are the company's structures of power and working arrangements themselves an enactment of the social vision that the plays proclaim-to what extent are they an image of the ideal social and economic relationships favoured by the majority of the targeted audience (or financial supporters). In other words, and as a kind of summary evaluation, how ideologically and functionally consistent are the company's means of production with the type of plays, audience, possibilities for fundraising, and community of theatrical workers that the company needs to produce if it is to realize its goals?
By way of concluding, I should like to underline the kind of contribution that this structural and anecdotal analysis of production models might make to our study of Canadian theatre history. As matters now stand, we can point to much general, second order treatment of how theatre art is affected by such practical considerations as the efficiency with which a company is administered, the tensions between an Artistic Director and the board of directors, the limitations imposed on play selection by budgets and the imperative of subscription seasons, the exclusion of women by a patriarchal network of associations and assumptions, the response of granting agencies to experimental and political theatre, and the need to devise strategies for fundraising and audience development. 6 I characterize the attention we have paid to these matters as largely second order conjecture because, for the most part, it is not supported by first order knowledge of the specific and concrete practices of a wide range of differently constituted theatre companies. Critical concerns have been generalized into problems that cannot give rise to working solutions so long as the diagnoses and prescriptions remain unmediated by attention to the specific models for production of individual theatre companies. Generalized problems cannot be generally solved, for each problem is differently mediated by different organizational frameworks and working arrangements. The corollary to this proposition is that a study of discrete models of production might be the best and most practical approach to devising a range of working solutions to common problems.
Beyond the critical motive to doctor the health of the body theatrical, I entertain other hopes for this methodology. We often assert that theatre (and the study of theatre) is central to the community's well being because, as the most socially contingent of the arts, it is the most immediately reflective or symptomatic cultural embodiment of our social health. These assertions of centrality are true, in a way; but it is also true that theatre and its study must constantly be defended against the tendency of our culture to marginalize them. One way to establish their rightful importance, it seems to me, is to develop critical methodologies that situate theatre in the context of general cultural determinants. We would be doing just that if we explored various forms of theatre production as characteristic of the assumptions, procedures, and sources of socially determined power that animate and shape our culture as a whole. Put another way, one of the objectives of this methodology's emphasis on structural arrangements and material processes is to relate the production of the body theatrical to the production of the body politic.
Larry McDonald
Carleton University
NOTES
1 CHRISTOPHER INNES, 'The Psychology of Politics,' THIC 6,1 (Spring 1985) and PETER HAY, 'The
Psychology of Distortion: A Rebuttal of Christopher Innes,' THIC 7,1 (Spring 1986)
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2 ALAN FILEWOD correctly notes that 'TWP prepared the way for the alternative theatre in Canada but had
little effect on its actual development' (Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada,
Toronto: Univ of Toronto Press 1987 p 51). Another useful source, which some bibliographies ES overlook, is
GORDON VOGT, 'The Politics of Entertainment: George Luscombe and TWP,' The Human Elements,
Second Series, ed David Helwig (Ottawa: Oberon Press 1981) pp 132-60
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3 Quoted in Collective Encounters p 116
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4 Canadian Theatre Review 43 (Summer 1985), a special issue on 'Feminism and Canadian Theatre,' provides
a useful overview of a shameful situation. Both ROBERT WALLACE and KATE LUSHINGTON call our
attention to 'The Status of Women in the Canadian Theatre,' a report for the Status of Women in Canada
prepared by RINA FRATICELLI in June 1982. Aside from some tables in the CTR issue and some extracts
in Fuse 6 (Sept 1982), the report remains unpublished
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5 The example with which I am most familiar is Ottawa's tale of three companies. Founded within a year or
two of each other, the Great Canadian Theatre Company, Penguin, and Theatre 2000 kept rough step in terms
of audience draw, success with granting agencies, the support of local critics, and the type of work they were
doing. At least the differences in these areas do not adequately explain why, when they reached a certain
stage of development that taxed their resources, only the GCTC was able to work through the challenges of
building its own theatre space, increasing grant support, raising funds to retire a deficit, and establishing a
subscription base. The crucial difference, in my view, proved to be the way GCTC had originally constituted
itself, the working arrangements it had put in place, and the integrity of its production model
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6 See, for a useful introduction, CTR 40 (Fall 1984), a special number on 'Theatre Management: Issues and
Directions'
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