Over the past week, I’ve had the chance to see two brand new Indigenous plays, one in Vancouver and one here, opening this past week at the Belfry Theatre. The first show was Cliff Cardinal’s William Shakespeare’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal performed as part of the PuSH Festival. This play was originally titled The Land Acknowledgment which may tip you off to the fact (spoiler alert) that there was no Shakespeare seen or heard in this 90 minute monologue. The show premiered in September of last year at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre. About 10 minutes in, standing in front of the curtain, dressed casually in a bomber jacket and khaki pants, Cardinal tells the audience this fact, letting them know they can leave and get a refund at the box office if they are unhappy with the revelation. A couple near us in the balcony at the York Theatre did in fact get up and go, but everyone else stayed put, wisely. For Cardinal, who is a most appealing performer (I saw his previous one-man show Huff twice in Victoria and was blown away both times), walks his mostly white audience through the litany of issues facing Indigenous communities today; land claims, missing and murdered Indigenous women, residential schools and allyship. Throughout, he walks a delicate tightrope between humour and anger, making the audience laugh even when telling tough truths. There are moments when his emotions seem to get the best of him (although this could simply be good acting), as when he talks about having to walk his sister to the store to keep her safe, or when he talks about the pedophilic priests and nuns who caused so much suffering and death in residential schools. He ends the show with an encompassing call of “All my relations” reminding us how inextricably interconnected we all are, like it or not. And he mouths to the audience, while taking his second standing ovation curtain call, “Are we friends? Are we friends?” Yes, Cliff, I’d be proud to call you a friend, and will deepen my commitment to being a better ally to Indigenous peoples as result of seeing this show. As you like it, indeed.

This week saw the delayed opening of Kevin Loring’s Little Red Warrior and his Lawyer at the Belfry Theatre. Opening was delayed by a week due to the lead actor Sam Bob getting injured during a rehearsal. He is fine, and is now back on stage, but the company had to bring in an understudy, Gordon Patrick Price, who learned his role in less than a week and stepped on stage for the first time last Tuesday night, the night I managed to snag two of the very few remaining tickets left (the show is now sold out, but can be watched online). Price will perform the matinees for the remainder of the run.

Now to the play itself, directed by Loring in a co-production with Savage Society in Vancouver and the National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre (where Loring is Artistic Director). The production will go on to performances in Vancouver in March then to the NAC in future. The show will not be everyone’s cup of tea, that’s for sure. The comedy is very broad, at times physical, and although the satire is pointed in places, there is a lot here that felt to me like actors working extremely hard to not huge effect. The plot tells us that a housing development is being built on the traditional territory of Little Red Warrior, the last of his people. He teams up with a lawyer (Shekhar Paleja) who then fights his land claim case right up to the Supreme Court. Little Red moves in to Larry’s home for the duration, and is set upon by Larry’s wife Desdemona (Luisa Jojic) who seduces him into an affair. Kevin McNulty plays the narrator as a homeless man (why?) and multiple other roles with a quiet humour, and there is a surprise additional character who makes a splashy entrance late in the play. The ensemble works well together, but are asked to stretch the believability of their characters to the point that for me they felt flat rather than three dimensional. But there is a nice twist in the final moments of Loring’s comedy (spoiler alert) that reflects the reality that economic interests sometimes trump land protection, even in Indigenous communities.

The set design by John Doucet provides a backdrop of various sizes of bamboo poles, indicating both a forested mountain valley and perhaps a symbol of urban sprawl. But I found that it hemmed the actors in too much, reducing their playing space on the already small Belfry stage. Overall, Loring’s play offers some chuckles along the way, but does not compare with his Governor General’s Award winning play Where the Blood Mixes, or to either of Cardinal’s more pointed and powerful pieces.

It has deeply saddened me to see and hear the level of vitriol being exchanged, mostly on Facebook, in the wake of Langham Court Board of Directors’ decision to cancel the remainder of the 2021-2022 season. Citing a lack of COVID-19 safety protocols, and continuing harassment towards Board members, the announcement was made last week. You can read about it here and on earlier events here. I have acted in two Langham Court productions, in 2002 and again in 2017. The second show, Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay, was the cause of a human rights complaint against the director of the play Judy Treloar and the company. The complaint involved Treloar’s assertion that there were no Black women in Montreal in the 1960s (a patently false claim) and therefore she could not see a role for a Black actor in the production. You can read about that story here and here. The human rights tribunal complaint was resolved in an undisclosed settlement between the African-Canadian actor, Tenyjah McKenna, and the company. Sadly, Treloar passed away on November 29th.

In the wake of this painful episode–about which I knew while rehearsing the play but was not shared with the full cast and crew until the first preview performance–the company has fractured. Older Langham members are angry and hurt by what they view as a takeover of the Board by ‘woke’ social justice warriors whose aim can only be to destroy the company. The younger generation keep insisting their goal is to strengthen the company moving forward by ensuring that all kinds of harassment will no longer be tolerated. I have been shocked to read about allegations of both racist and sexist behaviour dating back many years, including sexual harassment and assault. If these allegations are proven to be true, the instigators should be arrested and charged. These are very serious charges and absolutely need to be addressed.

But here’s where I differ in my opinion with the Board’s decision to cancel the remainder of this season of three shows: I think it was the wrong call to make. I understand the felt need to take a pause and to do more work to heal the intergenerational divisions in the community. But the company has already lost more than a season to COVID-19 and I can see no upside to cancelling shows that people have been rehearsing and audiences have been looking forward to attending on the claim of a lack of safety protocols. In my view, the healthiest thing for the Langham community would be to move forward with these productions, while also engaging in the hard but necessary work of mending the rifts that have opened up.

Dick Newson, who managed the Langham box office (and has just been let go by the Board) says on Facebook that the company costs $4000 a month just to keep going. Even with reduced audiences under the PHO protocols, surely having half a house is better than none? These bills must be paid, and earning some ticket money, and honouring the hard work of the casts and crews who were ready to go, is the right decision at this moment in time. The company is in crisis; a new General Manager is a crucial hire that should begin immediately. The theatre needs a skilled GM who can tackle the many challenges ahead while keeping the doors open and the lights on. Part of this agenda should be a series of truth and reconciliation meetings amongst members, both older and younger, led by a skilled conflict resolution mediator. There is currently no listening going on in this debate; the lines have been drawn and the camps are Us versus Them. As I said at the beginning of this post, the current situation saddens me greatly. I hope that the members of the Board will reconsider their decision, which does nobody any good and only keeps the current situation going, and that the Langham community can find its way back to health, prosperity and most importantly, to making good theatre.

The Belfry Theatre reopened in November with its production of Serving Elizabeth by African-Canadian playwright Marcia Johnson, premiered at the Stratford Festival. It was wonderful to be back in the Belfry’s beautiful theatre space again after such a long time. And the play, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, offered some real charm in its story of a fictional encounter between Princess Elizabeth and a Kenyan chef hired to feed her and her entourage during a visit in 1954. As the play ends, we hear that her father, King George VI, has died and that she will soon be crowned Queen of England and the British Commonwealth. Local actor Amanda Lisman brings her usual warm presence to this role, along with a role set in the present as a film producer that contrasts nicely with her rendition of the young princess. The ensemble cast offers solid portrayals of the chef, Mercy (Lucinda Davis), her daughter Faith (Sia Foryoh), a chauffeur love interest for Faith, Montague (Nathan D. Simmons) and royal etiquette coach Talbot (Ryan Hollyman). The play offers some strong scenes, both past and present, as the characters wrestle with race issues in the historic past, in particular Kenya’s struggle for liberation from the British Empire, alongside a parallel storyline of a film about the events in Kenya and the production team working on the show. Both storylines culminate in what I would characterize as fantasy scenes in which Black characters read the riot act to White ones, schooling them on their ignorance and blindness around race issues. While these scenes are pleasant to watch, and offer audiences the thrill of alternate reality, they do not succeed as good drama. There is no way on earth that Princess Elizabeth would sit quietly to be berated by her Kenyan cook about her lack of knowledge of Kenya’s liberation struggle. And in the present timeline, why would a powerful and successful screenwriter listen to an unpaid African-British intern castigate him for his ignorance? These scenes are wish fulfilment exercises that fail to meet the bar as believable drama. I prefer my political drama to be more biting than this play offers. That said, the play does offer a majority Black cast, which is a rare thing, too rare, and a level of onstage diversity much needed in Victoria.

In contrast, I caught the final performance of Until the Flood in December. This was a co-production between Langham Court Theatre, Bema Productions and Attitude Theatre. The documentary theatre play by African-American playwright Dael Orlandersmith, directed by Tony Cain, examines the after effects of the Michael Brown police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Interestingly, this play was originally performed by the playwright as a one-woman show, while the Victoria co-production features a full cast of eight portraying the various characters interviewed by Orlandersmith. I would be drawn to see the one-person version of the play, for the acting challenge alone, even though the Victoria cast does a very good job in portraying Black and White characters with divergent opinions on the killing. Rosemary Jeffery has never been better than in her role here as an elderly retired school teacher. And the other younger African-Canadian actors do very effective work, in particular Dani Parkinson who brings a lot of charisma onstage and promises to be a young actor to watch. Ultimately, I was moved to tears by the blatant injustices shown in the play, as seen in the Black Lives Matter movement and protests in response. The play ended with a powerful video featuring hundreds of names of African-American young people killed by police, superimposed on Michael Brown’s face and accompanied by Nina Simone singing George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity”. I prefer my political theatre with a sharper edge, and this play certainly delivered this, along with another majority Black cast, something I can’t recall seeing before on stage here. Long overdue.

Sometimes a short post is all it takes to get your point across. Which is the point of this post.