Written and Performed by Tony Nardi
At various venues and times.

    Tony Nardi is a rare creature in Canadian theatre—one willing to stick his neck out to be chopped off by bureaucrats (non-artists, for the most part) who control the purse strings in the arts, directors, artistic directors, critics, academics, the media, cultural czars, politicians, and even certain community leaders (including his own ethnic Italian ones). A few years ago, he wiped out his own RRSP savings in order to create his passionate theatre polemics against the dullards, incompetents, and mediocrities who control the cultural wasteland in Canada, which I call a large country with a small mind. His critics consider him a chronic malcontent, even a posturing, self-promoting martyr to his cause, but the fact remains that Nardi is the sole voice in Canadian theatre with the courage and the convictions to sustain his vehement attack on members of his profession and representatives of Canadian culture.

   …And Counting is the third part of what may become a long serial J’accuse. Each of the three parts (taking the form of letters) has been provoked by personal experience: Letter One by a television producer who subscribed to invidious and insidious cultural stereotypes of Italians; Letter Two by two inept Toronto newspaper reviews of an inept professional production of Goldoni’s The Amorous Servant, which showed that the critics were as ignorant of commedia dell’arte as was the show’s director; and now Letter Three by the rejection of two of his theatre projects by various government grant-giving bodies, particularly the Ontario Arts Council whose buzz words are “impact” and “criteria,” provoking Nardi’s prickly rhetorical question: “Is it better to be an artist in Canada or to work for an arts council?”

   Using nothing other than a laptop computer with his “script” and his own dynamic resources as an actor, Nardi has volcanic force as he erupts in a fulsome attack on those he deems responsible for burying alive some of the very best potential of Canadian culture. Drawing a parallel (albeit a rather far-fetched one) between the High Renaissance custom of torture and Canadian culture’s “buried alive” syndrome, he points out that Dante (whose hell in his Divine Comedy was the reality in his homeland) had official funding—unlike so many worthy artists, I suspect, who are compelled to submit to bureaucratic arts councils led by those who shouldn’t really loiter near the arts. Having had personal experience with these councils, whose juries are often stacked by those with palpable ties to individuals and organizations to whom they award grants and honours (think the Doras, for instance, or the hilariously embarrassing decisions of the Canada Council, Toronto Arts Council, and OAC when it comes to theatre, multi-disciplinary projects, literature, and almost any genre, as a matter of fact). Applying for an arts grant to one of these bodies is (as Nardi puts it so eloquently) like submitting to a colonoscopy without lubricant. Competition is healthy, but I would prefer blind judging done by non-Canadians. Why not? I would rather trust the Pulitzer committees and the National Book Award judges than almost any Canadian jury. Not because we lack good judges or excellent critics, but because our council juries are usually laden with academics with vested interests, editors with favoured stables, and poets, actors, directors, and whatnot with long term or short term grudges. Or by a young generation with huge gaps in their cultural knowledge and who wouldn’t know a Jennifer Dale from a Claudia Moore—which is rather alike the comedians at the head of the CBC who run interference (and I mean major interference) in documentary film that they treat rather like a template for their own bland, grey, vapid sensibilities. The Gillers? A great night out at Jack Rabinovitch’s expense for a select few—selected, I suspect, by Jack. The awards themselves: well, how to account for the fact that Vassanji has won the same number of times as the great Alice Munro? And wasn’t the most recent competition evidence enough that the prize can be taken as a sympathy vote rather than a real literary honour for the best novel of the year? The GG’s? Don’t make me laugh. They overlooked Munro altogether one year when she had won just about every other major award. To accept the list of GG nominations in Drama, alone, is an exercise in ironic satire, and the comedy continues annually. The Griffin? Another instance of expensive glitter to camouflage some real poverty of taste, or, alternatively, an earnest attempt to seem au courant and cutting edge (which is to say, trendy). Of course, it is wonderful to have arts awards, but it would be better if the criteria and jurors had some real relationship to art and not to bureaucratic politics.

   Knowing that arts juries are crap-shoots where the crap often floats to the top, I well understand Nardi’s rage. He is a provocative artist who thunders against a nation that doesn’t promote its own culture. He generates side-splitting satire of theatre officers and ministers of culture. Though he goes on too long at times, repeating the same point at the same intense pitch, he takes no prisoners, in fact, comically exploding the grotesque excuses of businessmen, community leaders, government officials, academics, et cetera who would rather pass the buck than confront their own vapidities, and he makes a persuasive case for the self-reliance of the artist. He destroys the canard that for an artist to knock on many doors indicates a lack of quality. He argues that talent should have funding knocking at its door. He knows, as every genuine artist knows, that silence is the symptom of classic Canadian indifference. The typical Canadian, in Nardi’s view, is one who doesn’t hate things enough to kill them, but who doesn’t love them enough to let them live fully.

   What is wrong with taking the theatre or arts community to task?  Using his wide cultural references (to Shakespeare, Dante, St. Teresa, Nathan Cohen, Macchiavelli, Galileo, et al), he repeats Goethe’s belief that he who strives for perfection is saved. This makes him an optimist rather than a pessimist, though, of course, he also repeats the Calabrian proverb (being Calabrian-born himself): “Today you get fucked—and tomorrow again!”       

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