David French is quite possibly the most important Canadian playwright you’ve never heard of. In the 60s a wave of writers started to push against the staid, classical nature of Canadian theatre. Their desire was for playwrights to write about Canadian lives for Canadian audiences, and the most successful of these was a young man from Toronto named David French.
David Mamet is unquestionably one of the heavy-hitters of contemporary theatre, and perhaps even contemporary literature as a whole. Over the past 30 years his name has become synonymous with a kind of stylized writing that is carefully, artfully structured in order to seem natural. If you find that characterization contradictory, imagine him as the verbal and aural equivalent of Impressionist painting. If a friend describes something as “like Mamet,” he means that the characters speak in short, powerful bursts, each overlapping and interrupting each other to create a sort of haze of words from which slips every now and then a slash of beauty.
As much as theatre creates fictional human beings, basing the fiction of a play in the life of a real historical figure lends that story a lot of weight. It can never escape the gravity of that person’s heritage, the mystery of piecing together the emotions behind the actual events of a life.
Ottawa Little Theatre brings us a few new fall selections, starting with Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. This famous play tells the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial. The theatre then moves on to the dark thriller Dr. Cook’s Garden by famed writer Ira Levin, from October 18 to November 5. Their fall lineup concludes with the comedy I Hate Hamlet, from November 29 to December 17.
As director and actor David Bernstein describes it, Tim Crouch’s England is a play that exists on the border of theatre and the conscious exploration of what theatre is. It doesn’t enforce the idea of performance, but rather strips it away as much as possible. In between telling a very classical story, the script challenges our conception of “a show.”
As she tells it, Laurie Steven was sitting in Nate’s Deli 25 years ago this year when she decided to start a theatre company. Fresh from Toronto, the trained director was living through a round of “fairly massive budget cuts across the country.” With everything around her being slashed and burnt, Steven realized, “If I wanted to work in theatre, I’d have to found a company.”