I had to take a bit of a hiatus from this playreading adventure. Despite my best efforts, when you work at a theatre and part of your job is reading plays, it can be difficult to read additional plays on top of that without real motivation. (Read: this motivation is even harder to come by when you live on the beach and the sun sets through your front window.) But this post is actually connected to the reading that I’ve been doing for work, as well as the reading I’ve been doing for pleasure.
I’ve been reading a great diversity of plays over the last month—musicals, comedies, farces, and a lot of Canadian work. As a country, we’re awfully sad. I don’t mean sad as in pathetic, or sad as in desperate; I mean sad. Like we lean into sad things. As a playwright, I’m definitely guilty of this. My musical The Way Back To Thursday ends with the main character (and everyone else in the audience) sobbing over a decision made early in the piece that he now regrets. But here’s the discovery: as a country, we’re all guilty of this. Save the Fringe (and the occasional piece in SummerWorks), we write a lot of sad plays.
Some of them are just a little sad, but mostly funny or light. We pretend that they’re happy by calling them “dark comedies” or “dramedies”. We pretend that they’re accessible to anyone because they use common vernaculars or because they are set in small towns. We even pretend that they’re perfect for a “general” audience despite their inclusion of social injustices, political commentaries, or international atrocities. And then we try to define a “general” audience, which I’m pretty sure isn’t a definitive thing.
I’m not arguing that these plays shouldn’t be written—quite the opposite. As I’ve been reading these Canadian plays, many have been hauntingly poignant, and have often moved me to tears. They are beautiful pieces of art, stirring emotions purely through the creation and maintenance of crafted language. They are poetry as much as they are drama, literature of the highest order. But they don’t often make me laugh. Not never, just not as often as they make me cry
And as audience members, I’d argue that we love a good ol’-fashioned comedy. I write this as I’m listening to a rollicking audience responding loudly to the final scene of Blind Date, here at the Thousand Islands Playhouse. I wonder why we tend to play into that “tortured artist” stereotype when we’re creating new work in Canada. Are we all so beaten up and downtrodden that we have nothing nice or fun to share? Again, I’m not condemning thoughtful and meaningful drama (at all), but it’ just a discovery I’ve been accepting over the past few weeks. And I think for my next play, I’m going to try to lighten up.