Crossing the border into Canada can be a trying experience, enjoying the abundant cultural life of Toronto is not. Toronto is a city of dramatic contrasts. A multiple people’s town, where an endless variety of human beings criss-cross the streets, leap over snow banks, punch in numbers on their cell phones, even in freezing weather, and talk back and forth with a mix and match of accented conversations. A home for 148 nationalties, the city is honeycombed with wayfarers crossing  boundries from one neighborhood into the next: Cabbage Town, Greek Town, Corktown, Korea Town , and a host of  other communities from the Near and Far East, Africa, Europe, South America, the Carribean, Australia, -  you name it - its all here. All adjuncts to the First Nation peoples and the original English and French settlers and fur traders, the city has an indigenous and international vitality. It also has its share of the homeless and pan handlers and people desperate for jobs. 

Toronto has become a refuge for subjugated peoples, including those from the United States, where Pakistanis, attempting to escape the long arm of the INS and J Edgar Ashcroft, struggle for political refugee status in Canada. In the early morning, when the bright sunlight breaks through the lake effect of brooding clouds, the expectation of Spring is on everyone’s mind. The Statue of Liberty would look good standing tall on the Toronto waterfront.  Our Lady of the Harbor would recognize the clear fresh air immediately.  If the Home Security Division and the F.B.I. locks up U.S. civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism, automatically racially profiling familiar and unfamilar faces, it might be a good idea to ship over the Statue of Liberty to the Toronto harbour front for safe keeping.

In Toronto there is always an abundance of theatre, dance, and mixed media events to satisfy a round table of tastes and keep the communal theatrical spirit going.  Here are a few quick and tidy reviews: 

The Hudson Bay Boy

Stuck in a Snowbank Theatre, founded in 1996, develops the stories of the cirumpolar Canadian North, whether it be oral tradition or prose history. The Hudson Bay Boy is their latest production. Author John Seagrave’s reminiscences of fur traders who “spent their lives working in Canada’s founding business” was brought into sharp, humerous relief by Director/co-Playwright Ben Nind and a band of five versatile performers. Its hard to separate Keith Schoolar, Murray Utas, Joel Benson, Sid Bobb and musician Chic Callas; their intertwining team efforts highlight the range of skills necessary to survive in the circumpolar north with buoyancy, laughter and quicksilver character work. The performances are rooted in the necessity of survival, and that’s the point. Trapping, fishing, trading furs and working for the Hudson Bay Company are highlighted with sharp, well chosen detail and easy going flippancy. And the ancillary skills of survival in the bitterly cold winters and sticky black fly summers are explored from one rapid fire sequence to the next.

The Hudson Bay Company was founded in 1670, when Prince Rubert and his “associates” were granted by Royal Charter “the sole right for trade and commercies in all the lands draining into Hudson’s Bay”. The company  supplied financial support for the production, as well as some stunning blankets and flamboyant men’s wear. Although the Hudson Bay Company  historically has a cheap skate reputation of ripping off First Nation’s fur traders, who exchanged pelts for every day essentials and supplies, and usually got the short end of the stick, today’s firm is to be congratulated for not covering up its history in this production. There is not even a whiff of censorship.

The story line is epic, the twirl of events punctuated with bouts of singing, carousing, and drinking; a free wheeling comic take off from historical events. Every thing is turned around topsy turvy, even the acronym for the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) wheels in as a sprightly Gilbert and Sullivan satirical routine titled Here Before Christ. What could have been a lament turns into a comic revue.  Everything from rubber necking – the feat of pulling off  “a thousand hot water  bottles a day for thirty years”- to stacking four hundred thousand pounds of sugar in a warehouse -  to fishing guide sequences, stick shift toilets stuffed with whatever happened to be around, walrus sausages and cigeratte filters, all thrown into the roue. Nothing remains sacred, high strung maybe, lubricated by laughter and occasional bouts of sadness and even tragedy, but sacred – no.  

In short, I enjoyed it immensely. Unlike most of the slick MFA stuff you see in regional theatres, this theatre event relates. It’s the real thing: a show. 

Heart Of A Dog
By Anne Nenarokoff
Based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov
Translated from Russian into French into English
A production of Pleiades Theatre in collaboration with Theatre Francais De Toronto

Early in his career author Mikhail Bulgakov was a medical doctor working in the dark Siberian night in the far off reaches of Russia. His manuscript “Journal of a Young Doctor” focused on his contact with “tma” or darkness;   the darkness of ignorance as well as the thickening gloom of the tundra. After his initial success, and the Russian revolution, Bulgakov found himself locked in by political repression,  professional jealousy and heavy censorship. He appealed to, of all people, Josef Stalin, the vicious Soviet dictator who makes Saddam Hussein look like pie in the sky. Bulgakov asked the Great Dictator that he be sent into exile to escape the pressures that writers were heir to in the brutal regime of Stalin’s Soviet “Union”. Stalin, strangely enough,  apparently admired Bulgakov’s early work, and probably, because the blunderbuss wanted to control the author, granted him the position of manager at the Moscow Art Theatre - where Stanislavsky was the jewel under wraps. Administrative duties effectively wore Bulgakov down. He continued to write surreptiously and his work was finally released by Mikhail Gorbachov in the late 1980’s.  I saw a preview performance of Heart Of A Dog at the Artword Theatre. Weather conditions surrounding the theatre added to the necessary frozen atmosphere in this wildly fornicating satire on bureaucratic inbreeding.

Professor Philip Philipovitch (William Webster) has successfully transformed, or cloned – is that the right word? -  a dog into an “almost” human being. Sharik (Rafal Marcin Sokolowski) plays the Dog/Human. “Sharik” is the Russian word for “little ball”. Sokolowski turns into a little ball, like a mutt, whenever he hits the floor, rolls over, and curls up around the Professor’s foot. When Sharik eventually stands up his evolutionary osmosis reveals an obsessive need for independence. I say obsessive because in these circumstances that is a no no. He drives every one up the wall with his refusal to toe the line, and the satire becomes My Left Foot with the collar removed.

Adding to the choked atmosphere of bureaucratic rigidity is Schwonder – I pronouce his name as Shhh Wonder  - the Executive Director of Assigned Housing and Space, played with tight sphincter fastidousness by Martin Albert. Schwonder’s job is to keep track of the “density” of the building. He   gradually removes the 7 rooms allocated to Professor Philipovitch’s psuedo-scientific experiments. There is also Zina (Patricia Mareau), a lab assistant, a tall frozen faced spy, who does her civic duty by humping another lock jawed bureaucrat (Eric Goulem) into smithereens on the twindling living room floor. The Professor now lives in a kennel of compounded political satire, with walls that move in on him, and a suffocating succumbing of space to authoritarian pressure.

It must be obvious by now that the play wags the tail of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, with allusions also to Ionesco’s “How To Get Rid Of It”, Mary Shelly’s  Frankenstein, the Golem, and other surreal masterpieces. “Heart of a Dog” has the potential for style, even the fast moving visual repartee of a French farce, its clandestine doors opening and closing, the walls moving, the red lights infusing the great unknown,  designed well by Rudy Braun. When I saw the play at the preview, the rapid fire comedy aspects of the production, the farcical timing, was not yet in place. Let’s hope that laughter had not been scissored out of this Stalinist era gem for the sake of a ponderous political weight. A preset addition of a stuffed dog on stage under a white light revealed its potential for farce – always the best form for satirical bite. 

  ©2003 Ned Bobkoff

For more commentary and articles by Ned Bobkoff, check the Archives.

Ned Bobkoff is a writer, director and teacher
who has trained performers from all walks of life
in a variety of community, cultural and professional settings.

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