by Tony Nardi
At Artcore Gallery
Distillery District
March 13-14, 2007
and at various locations in Toronto
Consult www.twoletters.ca for details.

   I was banned for a year from one of the two major English-language theatres in Montreal for daring to write an article entitled “Why Is English Theatre in Canada becoming Politically Irrelevant?” Of course, that theatre had drawn some of my fire, so it was natural, I suppose, for its publicist to react the way all faux-liberals who cannot countenance truth react—by attempting to stifle criticism. It is much the same in the rest of Canada as far as English theatre or culture is concerned. Dare you attack the mediocrity of most of our directors, CBC hacks at the top or bottom, “sacred cows” at Shaw or Stratford, the Canadian Opera Company where the décor is frequently more interesting than are the performances, the National Ballet that still seems rather quaint at times, newspaper editors (well, one in particular!) who wouldn’t know the difference between “ludic” and “lucid,” publishers who should really be re-directing their “talents” with gossip tabloids or Heather’s picks, and parochial arts commissars the nation over, you may as well go off on your own to Guantanamo as an undeclared cultural “terrorist.” I have complained for years about the paucity of good directors and playwrights in this country—though the quality has improved slightly over the last twenty years since my initial published complaints—and my discontent is even greater when it comes to some independent Canadian publishers who would be much better employed working for corporations where cooking the books would be a definite asset. All this by way of prologue to Tony Nardi’s Two Letters, a stunningly powerful indictment of Canadian theatre and culture that is based on two actual circumstances from the actor’s experience.

  After a Roman holiday in 1994, Nardi received an offer from a television series in Quebec that was a celebration of French Canada’s fascination with the Italian Canadian mob. The series had an audience of over a million per episode, but Nardi declined the offer (three times) because it required him to enact clichés about Italians. The series’ French Canadian characters were fun to play. They had a reality that was lacking in the non-French ones. For Nardi, the Italian became the new Indian, the new savage in the New World. Forget Mario Puzo or Martin Scorsese. This was not even Sergio Leone Italian. Nardi knew that when a story becomes culture-based in a stereotypical way rather than character-based, it turns into “an imitation of a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile.” He was having none of this. None of the French Canadian series, none of the film director who once asked him to be more authentically Italian by scratching his balls, none of the late Norman Douglas’ rancid racism about Calabrians, none of modern Quebec’s phobia of immigrants. He would risk death literally. At the age of 21, he once had a gun aimed at his head and was warned not to appear again on stage in Quebec. So much for Quebec Libre!

   Nardi shares all this and much more in his first letter (that lasts two hours with a five-minute break). He stands at a small podium and reads the letter off a laptop computer, without a set, stage lighting, special effects, soundscape, makeup, blocking, stage manager, director, or curtain call. However, there is far more theatricality in his presentation than in many plays, because the actor knows exactly how to dramatize his material, offering episodes and anecdotes as he mimics voices, ratchets up his vocal range, and shows just how vital it is to feel for an idea, to live your life as if it depended on the expression of that idea. “Indignation is how I pray,” he claims at one point, and his presentation is a prayer of distress, an outcry that refuses to prioritize subsidiary ideas. Sometimes he rants and roars, often he embroiders his anecdotes extravagantly. He is inordinately fond of prologues—sometimes as a series—and he meanders or digresses, but always hits his targets hard and sharply.

   In the second letter (offered on a second evening and running to two hours fifteen minutes with a five-minute break), he takes on other “professional gargoyles” in the theatre:  awful directors, bad playwrights, sheepish actors, imperceptive critics, and half-bored or totally bored audiences. It isn’t just an actor’s litany of grievances. Its anger spirals and explodes, but it is an anger that is fully justified, for Nardi explains the motive and cue for his fulsome passion. On the surface, this letter seems to be only tangentially connected to the first one. However, the connection is muscular. The circumstantial cue came in the form of two newspaper reviews of a Toronto production of Goldoni’s The Amorous Servant. The reviews in two of Canada’s largest English language newspapers perpetuated a misunderstanding of a specific art (commedia dell’ arte) from a specific culture (that was already maligned by the television script). Instead of blaming the director for a shaky understanding of commedia, the critics blamed the cast—especially the one actress who actually gave the right sort of performance for the genre. This was what set Nardi off—this ignorance of craft and the defence of it!

   Nardi uses the artifice of “ghosts” by which to set his didactic letter in motion—Prophet ghost, PR ghost, Philosopher ghost, Godmother of Acting ghost, et cetera. His letter is an enactment of visitations by these phantoms that serves to fuel his daring attack on those whom he deems most responsible for a theatre that is rotting and for actors being in crisis. Not coincidentally, the performances I attended were marked by a notable lack of theatre directors or actors or producers in the sparse audiences. Are our so-called professional artists afraid of the truth? My question is rhetorical, of course, for I believe that theatre artists in this country—especially directors and artistic directors—suffer from a civil servant syndrome, something that is essentially bureaucratic in nature and hopelessly lacking in genuine vision. Too many are compelled to turn themselves into politicians or public relations spokesmen who know exactly how to draw corporate sponsors by giving them what they want. The sad reality of inadequate funding for the arts is, of course, responsible for much of this. However, the directors lack artistic humility. Unlike real specialists who know the extent of their limitations, our directors seem to think they can direct virtually anything in any style. The results, of course, usually prove them wrong. Our artistic directors seem to think that because they have theatres, they automatically have culture. Not true. What they have is a piece of property for the middle-class and mid-cult patrons.

   But I am getting ahead of Tony Nardi. He makes his own case with splendid vehemence. Being an actor, he, of course, is biased in favour of actors, but he has a very trenchant point. Nardi would like Canadian theatre to be actor-centred rather than director-centred but he knows that too many of his fellow actors lack the courage to speak out against directorial ineptitude. They need the job, after all, so why bite the hand that helps to feed you! Moreover, Canada is no place for thoughtful dissent because it doesn’t respect the mind enough. I agree. Where are our parades for our finest writers and artists? The only parades are for Stanley Cup or Grey Cup winners. Aren’t most of our daily newspapers in the country geared to the level of senior high school students? Where are the arts pages? Far along in the paper—way, way after the Sunshine Girl or Boy, the latest scandal, and Sports, and even at that, the arts receive cursory mention. Perhaps a thumbs up here or a thumbs down there--as in a consumer report. Again, that bureaucratic or civil servant mentality! Everything in its place, and some places are just not meant to be spacious—especially if they demand the expansion of certain borders.

   I digress—rather like Nardi himself, though he does it with much better colour, flair, and sinew. He could easily make the reading of a telephone directory a thing of passion and modulated wit. Instead, he saves his greatest wit for his actual demonstration of how commedia should be presented—as a living, breathing example of a marriage between form and substance and not as some grotesque exaggeration of an improperly understood convention. His demonstration takes the shape of an imaginary trial in which he plays the judge, Arlequino, and other commedia “types,” offering in the process—and at high speed and with versatile mimicry—a representation of what it means to be in the authentic present, something every actor needs to know. This is a stunning model of period acting, and it is created without fanfare, without absurd artifice, and with such convincing intensity that it absorbs us in its surging current.

   Instead of boring me as a malcontent’s malign rant, Two Letters spurred me into articulating certain things that have been percolating a long time in my mind. Each presentation ends with a lively audience discussion moderated by guests such as Nino Ricci, Brian Fawcett, John Fraser, Judith Thompson, et cetera. You wouldn’t get that at Stratford, Shaw, or even Soulpepper. In England, Italy, Germany, et cetera, Two Letters would be front-page news on the arts or culture page. Not so in Canada, of course. The grants-giving bodies are too busy evaluating artistic statements, the critics are saving themselves for “legit” theatre, directors and artistic directors are too busy pumping up their resumes with credits they hardly deserve, and the actors are busy playing spaniels at directors’ feet, in the hope of a few morsels that might come their way. The most courageous ones in this country usually suffer the time-honoured cruelty of national indifference.  

Poster painting by Hans Broek

Photo of Tony Nardi

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