a Treatise on making Canadian Theatre more like Hockey

In a hockey game, viewers get a glimpse of the action behind the play: they watch the players on the bench – eagerly awaiting their next shift; they see and hear the coach screaming obscenities at refs, at players, at other coaches; they watch pre-game skates and post-game interviews. Die-hard fans even immerse themselves in statistics and analysis to better understand the depth and complexity of the game. Quite simply, the culture of hockey extends beyond the ice-surface. Could we see this effect in the world of Canadian Theatre if we put our minds to it, implementing the league structure we’ve talked about? Could our Theatre League spawn a new generation of bloggers and ‘armchair directors’ like the dedicated analysts covering our cousins across the rink? In this segment we’ll discuss why developing a culture of accountability is key to instilling in theatre fans the sort of zealous passion we recognize in fans of the NHL. Be it through the write-ups of critics and League Reviewers or a theatre company itself holding its members to a standard of excellence, we must ensure our artists are made accountable to their patrons if we want to ensure their dedication to the home team.

An NHL coach decides whom to put on the ice, and when. He scratches players when they’re underperforming, and promotes players from the team’s minor-league affiliate when they’ve shown themselves worthy of playing in the big show. In essence, built within the very structure of the game is the knowledge that, if you’re not working hard & doing good work, you soon won’t be playing at all. Accountability. It doesn’t stop on the ice, either; the average tenure of an NHL coach is a mere 2.4 years, meaning that if the team is failing to create a compelling (winning) on-ice product, the coach will more than likely feel the wrath of this culture of accountability himself.

Part of the reason we don’t see parity with this particular phenomenon within the Theatre industry is that results are far less easily quantifiable: it’s easy to know when a Hockey team is losing, not necessarily so with Theatre. A director could be responsible for a dozen sub-par shows in a row but may never get the axe because audiences still (somehow) keep coming out, or because management is uncertain which party is to blame for an unsatisfactory performance: be it the actors, the directors, the design. It’s easy to see why such a practice results in the propagation of lazy, uninspired, re-hashed, bad theatre. But, in such a subjective medium, how could we as a budding new League Theatre Company hope to hold ourselves to a higher standard?

This process starts with the Director. Like a coach in the NHL, a Theatre Director’s responsibility is to ‘ice the best lineup’ with the means he or she has available. This means they need the freedom from management to make artistic decisions in regards to casting and design without fear of needing to accommodate other less artistic concerns. A Director’s responsibility is to build a hard-working, tight-knit, professional team. This means that they must be free to demote and replace an actor who’s being a diva or refusing to be a team-player, or who only selectively follows direction. Such influences are as poisonous to a theatre troupe as they would be to any team sport, and must be removed if we are to expect a professional-calibre on-stage product – this is why forging relationships and affiliations with other theatres and educational institutions is so important: to be able to replace cast and crew at an instant, and as a result, keep our company’s artists pressured to achieve excellence lest they lose their chance. By the same token, a Director whose decisions did not result in an excellent production shouldn’t be given endless opportunities before being deposed and replaced: like with a Hockey coach, sometimes old directions and styles get stale, requiring a new approach. New Theatre companies mustn’t let a fear of change prevent them from insisting upon the best.

Part of this rampant lack of accountability in theatre comes from an apparent shortage in good critical discourse about indie Theatre. While I understand the desire for reviewers to give small independent companies the benefit of the doubt, we mustn’t be scared of doling out truly bad reviews for truly bad productions. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in Canada’s Fringe Festival circuit. While touring a production to three different Fringes across Canada, I saw my fair share of very bad theatre – but where were the bad reviews? Everything was “hilarious”, “engaging”, “a must-see.” Even the reviews that weren’t so unerringly positive were at the least luke-warm. What good is a review, then, if it helps you pick between 30 Fringe shows, all of them “great”? The sad reality is that just giving out good reviews indiscriminately does nothing to help our industry grow and improve – instead it mires us in what is essentially a sea of meaningless ‘participation’ ribbons; granting all of us validation robs reviews of any meaning when the derivative re-hashed comedy receives the same accolades in print as a truly innovative and exciting piece.

While we as a single company can’t overturn this troubling culture of babying on its own, we can refuse to tolerate the attitude that propagates it within our own ranks. We can make our own cast and crew learn from their mistakes and continually hone their craft, even if outside forces often fail to publicly acknowledge the distinction between good and bad art. We can send our Director out on-stage for a talk-back after every show, like a coach’s post-game press-conference, and encourage all feedback (the good and the bad.) Only then will we get a true sense of our own successes and failures and learn to correct our artistic practices accordingly.

The League structure itself is aimed precisely at bringing some objectivity to the Theatre industry by instituting competition, such that a performance’s failure or success will be as evident as a hockey club’s win or loss. A successful production will be one that wins the accolades of audiences and League Reviewers, and which will ultimately be rewarded with victory within our League structure. Before we can expect those on the outside to hold us accountable to our potential, however, we must first take on the responsibility of holding ourselves and our peers to higher standards.