Moderator: Sasha Kovacs

Location: Room 1175 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal

(Building 19 on the UdM Map)

In-Person Session

WP New Play Development: Embracing Counternarratives 

Founded in 1978 by Julia Miles, who recognized the urgent need for women artists to have a space of their own, the WP is the United States’ oldest and largest theatre company dedicated to developing, producing, and promoting the work of women+ at every stage of their careers. It’s mission is to pursue gender parity and to empower women artists, administrators, and audiences. In preparation for a book, A History of The WP Theater, this conference paper represents material from my project’s second chapter, “WP New Play Development: Embracing Counternarratives,” which addresses the significant, feminist new play development practices of the organization. In The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988), Jill Dolan argues that the feminist critic can be viewed as a “resistant reader,” who resists “manipulation.” A mode of resistant reading is one that serves as “political intervention in an effort toward cultural change” (2). WP’s writers, I assert are “resistant artists,” who create and produce work that embrace counternarratives and strive for progressive change. My analysis will headline the inception of WP’s new play development, with works that were collaboratively devised, such as A…My Name is Alice (1983) by Joan Micklin Silver & Julianne Boyd, early experimental endeavors, such as Abigdon Square (1987) by María Irene Fornés, to more contemporary, socio-political projects, such as Ironbound (2016) by Martyna Majok. Through the monograph and this paper, I will demonstrate how, by creating a platform for women+ artists, the WP has progressed and sustained its productions to intervene in and redress the gender inequalities of US theatre.

Kirsten Leahey, Boston University.

Leahey is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Her publications include articles in Theatre Topics, Theatre History Journal, Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and New England Theatre Journal, as well as essays in the anthologies Teaching Performance Practices, Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre, and the Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy Anthology. She is a recipient of a Fulbright, collaborating with the Ireland’s Abbey Theatre. 

The Most Consequential Scandal in Theatre History 

In 1961, a play by the historian Wu Han, about an episode in the life of the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty official Hai Rui, was produced in Beijing. The play was adjudged by some to be a thinly disguised attack on Chairman Mao Zedong. The furor ignited by those rumours led not only to the closure of the production and the punishment of the author and leading actor, but to a full decade of terror causing the deaths of an estimated 20 million people and the ruination of many millions of other lives, events from which China has yet to recover. That, at least, has been the most widely accepted account of the matter in both China and the West for over fifty years. It is rightly regarded as the most infamous episode in theatre history, and is plainly not redeemed by the way it also led to the creation of a new theatrical genre. But is it possible that the accusations against Wu Han’s play had been entirely concocted for malicious reasons? An apt story for our own age of conspiracy theories and mob retribution.

Craig Walker, Queen’s University

Craig Walker is a CATR Board Member, Professor at Queen’s University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications include The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition, The Broadview Anthology of Drama and the Broadview King Lear. He works in Canadian theatre as a director, playwright and actor.

Online ACTS of Justice: Reimagining Atlantic Theatre Digital Collections

How can digital archives and tools help decolonize Canadian theatre history? How might their materials and the early archival efforts that gathered them be valued without, as Roopika Risam warns, reinscribing colonial dynamics (Risam 2018)? And when these archives are held online, how do we transform their relationship to users in sustainable, flexible ways that reflect, as CATR 2024 prompts, justice as an “aspirational value for an equitable system and society”? 

ACTS (Atlantic Canadian Theatre Site) was developed in the 1990s and early 2000s by professors Ed Mullaly (UNB) and Patrick O’Neill (MSVU) before it went offline when its host, UNB’s Electronic Text Centre, reformed into the present-day Centre for Digital Scholarship. Though its early HTML coding has since been deemed a security risk, ACTS was ahead of its time in making available tens of thousands of listings, entries, articles, and plays from North America’s eastern seaboard and beyond, from the 1700s to the early 2000s, by way of selected “tags” and internal search engines. Mullaly and O’Neill’s early experiments in digital collections yield extensive performance calendars, playbills, theatre chronologies, a Canadian drama bibliography, and (curated by Anton Wagner) the collected fictional and critical works (many unpublished) of Herman Voaden and Patricia Joudry. Today, UNB has made ACTS available to a handful of scholars (including the two of us) with the aim of reforming its material for public availability within decolonial and intersectional contexts.

Robin C. Whittaker, St. Thomas University

Robin C. Whittaker is an associate professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton where he teaches dramatic literature. His current research focuses on nonprofessionalizing theatre practices, with articles in journals that include TRIC and CTR. He is editor of the play anthology Hot Thespian Action! Ten Premiere Plays from Walterdale Playhouse (AUP 2008), co-creator No White Picket Fence: A Verbatim Play about Young Women’s Resilience through Foster Care (Talonbooks 2019), and author of the forthcoming monograph Alumnae Theatre Company: Nonprofessionalizing Theatre in Canada (UTP 2024). He currently serves as President of CATR.

Kailin Wright, St. Francis Xavier University

Kailin Wright is an Associate Professor, Jules Léger Research Chair, and award-winning teacher at St. Francis Xavier University. She is the author of Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2020) as well as the critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods: A Canadian Play and articles in Theatre Journal, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Kailin is also Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and Fiction Editor at The Antigonish Review.