Political Adaptation In Canadian Theatre

In Canada, adaptation is a national mode of survival, but it is also a way to create radical change. Throughout history, Canadians have been inheritors and adaptors: of political systems, stories, and customs from the old world and the new. More than updating popular narratives, adaptation informs understandings of culture, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as individual experiences. In Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre Kailin Wright investigates adaptations that retell popular stories with a political purpose and examines how they acknowledge diverse realities and transform our past. Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre explores adaptations of Canadian history, Shakespeare, Greek mythologies, and Indigenous history by playwrights who identify as English-Canadian, African-Canadian, French-Canadian, French, Kuna Rappahannock, and Delaware from the Six Nations. Along with new considerations of the activist potential of popular Canadian theatre, this book outlines eight strategies that adaptors employ to challenge conceptions of what it means to be Indigenous, Black, queer, or female. Recent cancellations of theatre productions whose creators borrowed elements from minority cultures demonstrate the need for a distinction between political adaptation and cultural appropriation. Wright builds on Linda Hutcheon's definition of adaptation as repetition with difference and applies identification theory to illustrate how political adaptation at once underlines and undermines its canonical source. An exciting intervention in adaptation studies, Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre unsettles the dynamics of popular and political theatre and rethinks the ways performance can contribute to how one country defines itself.

Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada --Book Jacket.

This acknowledgement of their dramatic origins has often led to criticism that these movies remain too rigidly anchored to the stage; too "stage-bound." Stage-Bound, the first extensive study of feature film adaptations of English Canadian and Québécois drama, challenges this reductive interpretation. André Loiselle demonstrates that theatricality is central to the meaning of these works. In the process, he reclaims these stage-bound films, which have generally been ignored by scholars.

Is there a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare? What is the status and function of Shakespeare in various locations within the nation: at Stratford, on CBC radio, in regional and university theatres, in Canadian drama and popular culture? Shakespeare in Canada brings insights from a little explored but extensive archive to contemporary debates about the cultural uses of Shakespeare and what it means to be Canadian. Canada's long history of Shakespeare productions and reception, including adaptations, literary reworkings, and parodies, is analysed and contextualized within the four sections of the book. A timely addition to the growing field that studies the transnational reach of Shakespeare across cultures, this collection examines the political and cultural agendas invoked not only by Shakespeare's plays, but also by his very name. In part a historical and regional survey of Shakespeare in performance, adaptation, and criticism, this is the first work to engage Shakespeare with distinctly Canadian debates addressing nationalism, separatism, cultural appropriation, cultural nationalism, feminism, and postcolonialism.

This book brings together essays on the Stratford Festival, on Shakespeare in Quebec, and on Canadian dramatic adaptations of Hamlet and Othello by Ric Knowles, one of Canada's leading drama and theatre scholars. The essays discuss such major figures as Robert Lepage, Ann Marie MacDonald, Djanet Sears, Michael O'Brien, Ken Gass, Robin Phillips, Marco Micone, and Martine Beaulne. Taken together they explore both the role that Canada has played in contemporary understandings of Shakespeare, and the role that Shakespeare has played in the constitution of postcolonial Canadian subjectivity and nationhood.

The Canadian public largely understands reconciliation as the harmonization of Indigenous–settler relations for the benefit of the nation. But is this really happening? The Theatre of Regret asks whether reconciliation politics will ultimately favour the state’s goals over those of Indigenous peoples. Interweaving literature and art throughout his analysis, David Gaertner questions the state-centred frameworks of reconciliation by exploring the critical roles that Indigenous and allied authors, artists, and thinkers play in defining, challenging, and refusing settler regret. Through close examination of core concepts in reconciliation theory – acknowledgement, apology, redress, and forgiveness – this study exposes the deeply embedded colonial ideologies at the root of reconciliation in Canada.

Thirty-five critics provide a unique overview of the contemporary performing arts and their cultural and economic impact in French and English Canada, in a province-by-province assessment of playwrighting, theatre production, opera and dance, radio and TV drama. Over 70 production photographs and an extensive bibliography and index make this one of the most important books on Canadian theatre in the last decade.