Jul. 13, 2011 - Issue #821: The Beer Issue

Prevue

Homegrown controversy

Edmonton joins in on Canada-wide readings of controversial play

Catherine Frid's Homegrown got its first taste of controversy before the curtain even rose.
At the 2010 SummerWorks festival in Toronto—known for presenting works on the artistic edge, both in theatre and music—Homegrown's somewhat sympathetic exploration of the playwright's true-life relationship with Shareef Abdelhaleem—one of the "Toronto 18" convicted of plotting to detonate bombs in Toronto and Ontario—ignited a maelstrom of discussion. After a few newspaper profiles drew attention to its content before the play had opened, Andrew MacDougal, speaking for the Prime Minister's Office, said, "We are extremely disappointed public money is going towards funding plays that glorify terrorism."

The head of SummerWorks, artistic producer Michael Rubenfeld, disagreed and defended the play, and after awhile (and a pretty lukewarm critical reception), the tumult calmed itself. But now it's resurfaced: in the weeks leading up to this year's SummerWorks, the company learned that its $48 000 federal grant, one it had been receiving from the Department of Canadian Heritage for five years, wasn't going to be renewed for the 2011 festival. That grant constituted about 20 percent of the total SummerWorks budget, and the fest was left looking for ways to scale back while scrambling for private donations before its August 4 opening.

The Heritage Minister's office has denied there's a connection between the festival's defunding and the PMO's criticism of Homegrown. But Canadian artists, in large numbers, have drawn the opposite conclusion, especially coming in a summer that's been filled with forboding news about arts and government funding, televised attacks on artists from right-wing media and, in particular, a statement from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty warning artists not to count on grants as they have in the past.

"One thing I'd say, and maybe it's different than it used to be, is we actually don't believe in festivals and cultural institutions assuming that year after year after year they'll receive government funding," Flaherty told CBC News on June 28.
In response to the funding cut, Frank Moher, artistic director of Western Edge theatre in Nanaimo, BC, announced a local reading of Homegrown, and the idea spread: Toronto playwright Michael Healey took it further, helping to organize staged readings of Homegrown across the country, including in Edmonton.

Our local production is being headed up by Garett Spelliscy, an independent artrist whose inquiries into whether or not anyone in Edmonton was going to put on a production led to him being given the reins.

"[Healey] directed me to Northern Light [Theatre], and Trevor Schmidt, who'd originally inquired about it," Spelliscy says. "And then I realized there was an ongoing discussion among the professional theatres about how to do this right.

"I don't run a professional theatre, and I don't have a board, and I wrote a letter to the people that were in that ongoing conversation, and I sort of came out guns blazing, because I'd read about everything going on."

The Edmonton reading of Homegrown—directed by Spelliscy and featuring locals Michele Brown, Michael Peng, Jamie Cavanagh and Jason Chinn—is set to be focused on discussion more than outright protest: while Homegrown and SummerWorks' funding seems to some like a cautionary warning of what could be in store for the arts in Canada, this reading is a chance for audiences to assess the work for themselves, instead of going by the buzz of hearsay and controversy.
"A lot of people feel that there's a culture war," Spelliscy notes. "I think it's better for everybody if we all get in the same room, and it's not about accusations, it's not about protesting anything. It's really about hearing the play and hearing what it's all about, from the horse's mouth."

It is, undeniably, a far more complicated issue than simple political dismissal of a play's content, but a larger one of funding—Spelliscy points out that Heritage Canada itself lost 45 million dollars in the most recent budget—and, as some see it, ideological difference. Canada wide, the artistic reception to SummerWorks' cut hasn't been mild. On the phone from Nanaimo, Moher notes that he took the finance minister's comments to be a somewhat grim statement to Canadian artists.
"I understand that to be intimidation," Moher says. "It's saying, 'And you be careful too. Don't you do anything we don't like, or we'll take away your funding as well.'

"My original notion was to say to the Conservative government, 'Look, any attempt to suppress a work of art will only cause it to spread more widely,'" he continues of his own decision to stage the play. "Like cutting back blackberry bushes, they only grow more widely. And that's what happened. So I think, as far as I'm concerned, that purpose has already been accomplished. However, I think it was important early in the tenure of this majority government to push back, as to whether we would sit back and take this political manipulation of arts funding. To which we have said, 'No, not so much.'"

Edmonton audiences, like those across the country, will get to make up their own minds on Friday.
"The play itself, in terms of its content, is controversial," Spelliscy says. "The Prime Minister's Office's comments, they raised questions and issues for people, the way the play was talked about in the media, and what happened at the Heritage Ministry, and the finance minister's comments about arts and culture funding, they're not all the same thing. They're part of a big controversy, and they're all contributing factors. But one thing doesn't necessarily lead to the next thing and to the next thing.
"And so people here, because I think we're a little bit more objective than the groups in Toronto, because it's not our town, it's not our festival, we think it's really worthwhile to read this play," he continues. "We think it's a public service to Edmontonians and Edmonton theatregoers, because they now have the opportunity to make up their own mind, and we wanted to focus the event on that."
 

Fri, Jul 15 (8 pm)
Homegrown
Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts
Free; donations to SummerWorks encouraged vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus