John Lazarus

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Mom Art

Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s.
Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s.

 

I’ve long held that the creative process is essentially the same, no matter what art form you’re working in. I think I learned this from my mother. Mom was an artist – a painter, printmaker, and quilter – and, without knowing it at the time, I learned a lot about my own favourite art form, playwriting, by watching her paint.

Mom enjoyed modest but reasonable success. She studied with Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer, and she exhibited her work every year in the Montreal Museum of Art Spring Show. One year she had a one-woman exhibition in L.A. On another occasion the Montreal Star ran an article about her, and my teacher, Mrs. Levitsky, put the clipping up on the blackboard, making Mom, briefly, a celebrity among my classmates. 

Her painting studio was in the basement of our house. She would work from found photographs or still lifes, or she’d photograph landscapes, take the photos home and create paintings based on them. I sometimes hung out in the basement while she worked, and she’d explain to me what she was doing. She never talked about emotional content, or what the paintings meant to her. She discussed technique. And years later, when I began to write plays, I found myself applying to them some principles she had taught me about painting. (Shameless plug: there’s more about this in my book, Two Ways About It, described elsewhere on this website.) 

She told me of other students who would be perfecting the leaves on the tree in a corner of the painting, without sketching in the rest of the landscape; later, the entire landscape would have to be revised, and all that detail work would be lost. Her solution was to make sure that all areas of the work were at roughly the same stage of development at a given time. I learned from that to “sketch in” my plot outlines and then go over them in increasing detail, before spending too much time on particular dialogue. I was also intrigued to see her occasionally pause in her work, turn the painting upside-down and look at it in the mirror. My playwright’s version of that has been to think of my plot in terms of what might happen if the characters make choices that are opposite to the ones I’ve chosen for them. 

And I learned from her – and, unintentionally, from my father – that sometimes even the people who love you the most don’t get what you’re doing. Dad was a shrewd and successful businessman, a kind and affectionate husband and father, and an excellent writer; but he did not understand my mother’s art, or art in general. He loved her, and if painting made her happy, then it was fine with him. But he was by his own description a proud philistine. He believed that Abstract Expressionism was a fraud and a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public. So I grew up in the middle of a stimulating debate. 

Visits to art galleries with my parents could be an adventure. Dad was one of those guys who go around art galleries saying, “My nine-year-old son can paint better than this,” to which I would exclaim, “No I can’t!” – terrified that I might be called on to prove it. My mother would admire the paintings while my father grumbled about the price tags. Mom would say, “What are you kvetching about, you’re not paying for it,” and he would answer, “You’re damn right I’m not.” 

One year an American gallery revealed that a painting of theirs by a renowned Abstract Expressionist had been, unbeknownst to them, hanging upside-down for decades. My father argued that this proved that abstract painting was a load of crap. My mother said it proved only that good work is good work, whether right-side-up, upside-down or sideways. My father said, “And even better if it’s turned around facing the wall.” 

On one occasion, though, when he said, of a work by one of my mother’s favourite abstractionists, “I could paint better than that,” she said, “Prove it.” She gave him a brief lesson, stood him in front of a canvas, handed him her paints and brushes, and said, “Go ahead.”  

The result was one of the ugliest paintings I’ve ever seen in my life: a sort of muddy grey-brown swirl, utterly without charm or meaning. One of my father’s beefs with abstract art was their non-committal titles: “Composition 14,” that sort of thing. (He said it would help if the title at least gave you some hint of what the painting was “supposed to be.” My mother would say, “It’s supposed to be a painting!”) So in tribute to these unhelpful titles, my father proudly called his own masterpiece “Vortex Number One.” I said, “‘Number One’? Does that mean there’s gonna be more of these?” “Not with my brushes,” said Mom. 

This argument always took place in a spirit of good humour, but there may be a sad side to this story. My mother never tried abstraction. It wasn’t until after they’d both died that I realized that this might have been because the argument with my father was difficult enough when it was about other artists’ work: she didn’t want to bring it home and make it personal. 

But towards the end of her life, she took up quilting. She was a skillful seamstress, but quilting struck me as old-fashioned and a little foreign to our urban, Jewish, middle-class, 20th-century world. However, she loved it, and wished she had discovered this medium earlier. Again, it wasn’t until a few years ago that it occurred to me that this might have been her way of exploring abstraction without exacerbating the argument with my dad. An abstract painting was avant-garde and kooky, but an abstract quilt was just a traditional quilt. 

One more lesson was in the fact that we never know how our work will affect people, or what it will mean. Around 1974, I went to see a theatre piece, went backstage afterwards, met the one member of the company I didn’t already know – an actress named Lin Bennett – and came home with a copy of the show’s “poster”: actually a postcard, with a picture of the five cast members. 

Then my friend Anne Levitsky (mentioned above as my Grade Five teacher, and my friend to this day) visited our Vancouver home as part of a cross-country trip from Montreal, took some pictures of me and my daughter, and went home and showed her photographs to my parents. Later, during a phone call, my mother asked about the postcard, visible on the wall in one of the photos. I peeled it off the wall, put it in an envelope and mailed it to her, and she copied the image of those five actors as part of a print, which she called “The Old Bunch”. 

By the time that actress and I got married, some 28 years later, Mom had died, and she and Lin never met. But that print by my mother, featuring the image of my wife, hung proudly in our home for years, next to the original postcard, now in its own frame. 

****

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Welcome to Earth! Let’s Go See a Play!

In honour of the start of the new theatre season, let’s engage in a thought experiment. Let’s pretend you’re an intelligent, friendly extraterrestrial, visiting Earth from another planet, in order to study humans. 

We, your human hosts, are proud to introduce you to various human activities and accomplishments. You’ve found our math, sciences and engineering interesting and respectable, but it hasn’t knocked your 17 alien socks off: after all, you’ve already got to our planet while we’re still taking shots at our moon. You’re more curious about those human activities that are known as, well, the humanities: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, politics, law, history – and especially those peculiar pursuits called “art” and “culture.” You’ve sampled music, painting and sculpture; and now, we’re taking you to a building called a “theatre” to witness a human activity called a “play.” This will be your first introduction to human fiction. 

Wait, what? Why not start with written stories, novels, comics, movies, TV, streamed video? Because we want to hit you with the full magical weirdness of the most direct kind of fiction we have, unmediated by distracting technology. Just as this was the first form that fiction ever took among humans, let it be the first form you experience. We’ll go see something in IMAX and three-D next week. For now, welcome to the live theatre. 

You come with your hosts into a large room divided into two parts. The larger part contains numerous humans facing the smaller part, which is designed to replicate a human environment: perhaps the interior of a home, perhaps an outdoor Earth landscape. You and your hosts find your empty seats. Soon the lighting in the larger part of the room goes dark while that in the smaller part gets brighter, and then a few more humans come into this brightly-lit area, where they proceed to behave rather strangely, even for humans. 

They stand, sit, walk across the well-lit space, pick up and put down objects, and talk more loudly and clearly than humans normally talk, evidently to make sure we can all hear what they have to say. Some of them may not seem quite real. (“O, there be players that… have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well.” – Hamlet.) The larger group around you sits quietly, except for occasionally emitting that weird sound called laughter, and sometimes slapping their hands together to make a sustained percussive noise. 

After a while the humans in the brightly-lit area seem to become upset about their circumstances. Then they get more distressed, until everything either gets better or turns truly awful, perhaps involving violent death. Then they get up from the pools of fake blood they’ve been lying in, and take a bow. 

Partly thanks to your hosts’ prepping you beforehand, you do have some understanding of what’s going on. You know that the brightly-lit humans are pretending to be humans who they are not. The situation they’re talking about is not real. Nor is their apparent emotional distress, nor the deaths. 

I don’t know whether your species can lie. In the history of science fiction, there have been alien species depicted as incapable of lying, and alien species who are as good at it as we are, or better. But in any case, you have already learned that humans sometimes say things that aren’t true, to deceive other humans. However, here, in this strange space called a theatre, the large group in the dark know perfectly well that the small group are lying, and the small group are completely aware that they’re not fooling the large group. And yet the brightly-lit humans enjoy telling these lies – and the other humans, for some reason, enjoy watching them do it. In fact, they enjoy it so much that they pay human money, sometimes in significant amounts, for the privilege of witnessing these elaborate falsehoods. And this practice was invented independently by human societies all over the world. What strange creatures! 

Your hosts explain later that the point of all this is to let us exercise our emotions in a safe space, by showing us non-real humans going through non-real circumstances, and thus to purge us of bad feelings; and that we also get enjoyment out of watching the talent and skill of the artists who created and are performing this hoax. You admit to your hosts that it still seems surpassingly weird. Then they baffle you further by confessing that they think it’s kind of weird too. 

We humans are lucky that respected artists have blazed a trail for us that goes back thousands of years. If we lived in a world without theatre or fiction, and a group of us suddenly decided to make up a complicated two-hour-long fib about a bunch of nonexistent people, and to pretend to be those people, and to expect other people to pay money to watch us do this, we would likely be ignored, committed, or beaten up. 

So let’s be grateful to all the theatre workers who have gone before us, and given this peculiar human pastime an air of respectability, thanks to its long history, which goes all the way back to the era when – at the same time that your ancestors, dear alien, were already designing the systems that got you to our Earth – our ancestors were sitting around the fire, celebrating the hunting, killing, cooking and eating of a wild boar. At that moment, somebody said, “So we surrounded the boar, and – Hey, no, wait, Cyril, you put on the skin and stick the tusks in your mouth, and Phyllis, you be the dog, and Estelle and Gareth and I will be ourselves, and we’ll get up and show you how it happened!” – and theatre was born. 

And with that, I wish all my fellow humans, as well as any aliens who may be reading this, a great theatre season. 

*****

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Satch

Every year at this season I honour the birthday, on August 4, 1901, of a personal hero of mine. His origins were unpromising. He was born Black in a racist society, in an urban neighbourhood justifiably called the Battlefield, to a 16-year-old sex-trade worker and washerwoman, and a father who abandoned them after impregnating her with a second child. He left school in Grade Six, and at 11 was arrested for firing a gun with blanks on New Year’s Eve, and sentenced to the New Orleans Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, where he served two years.

From these humble beginnings rose a man whom the music critic Gary Giddens has seriously compared to Dante, Shakespeare and Bach; whom the great jazz and classical trumpet player Wynton Marsalis calls, uncategorically, “the greatest musician in the world”; and of whom the singer Tony Bennett said, “You judge a country by what it gives to the world. And what America gave to the world was Louis Armstrong.”

Armstrong revolutionized trumpet playing and jazz singing. He played so loud and high that other musicians would examine his trumpet for technological gimmicks. (There weren’t any. It was him.) The jazz solo, with each musician taking a turn playing a verse or chorus, is such a staple of the form that it seems to have been there from the beginning. It wasn’t. Armstrong invented it.

As a singer, he was famous for the gravelly quality of his voice (though there are some beautiful recordings, such as “West End Blues,” where he sings without it). Other jazz singers would catch cold deliberately, to sound like him. And experts say you can hear Armstrong’s influential phrasings in the singing of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, and dozens of others.

He was also the first to record scat singing, in which the singer improvises without lyrics: you can hear the moment when he did it, on the song “Heebie Jeebies.” While recording, Armstrong accidentally dropped the lyric sheet on the floor. If he reached down to get it, he would go out of microphone range. If he stopped, they’d have to start over, which was expensive. So he made up his own nonsense syllables (as they sometimes did in rehearsal), they put out the recording, and scat singing became famous.

He invented language. He originated the ‘50s slang terms “cats,” meaning men, and “chops,” meaning technical skill. And he was famous for his own nicknames for himself: “Satch,” “Satchmo,” “Dippermouth,” “Gates,” “Pops,” etc.

He was a funny, amiable, and hugely popular onstage presence. By the 1950s he was a living American icon and cultural ambassador. In 1964, his cover of “Hello, Dolly” went to Number 1 and stayed on the Hit Parade for 22 weeks. He was, at 62, the oldest person ever to have a Number 1 hit, and it knocked The Beatles off that position, which they had occupied for 14 consecutive weeks. (He said, “I like The Beatles. They got that beat!”) He won two Grammys and was posthumously inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame.

He had his personal flaws. He was a serial adulterer and womanizer: he married three times, and appears to have cheated on all three wives. (He once wrote an article for Ebony Magazine called “Why I Like Dark Women.”) He was obsessed with his bowels, and seemed not to understand that we don’t discuss such matters in polite society: he once handed out packets of his favourite laxative to highly-amused members of the British Royal Family, while Tony Bennett sat by, mortified. He was also addicted to marijuana, and got high almost every day of his adult life.

His record on racial politics is mixed. On the one hand, he cheerfully indulged in some appalling racial stereotypes. On the other, he displayed attitudes ahead of his time. His bass player, Arvell Shaw, said, “In those days, if one Black man called another man ‘Black,’ that was fightin’ words, you know. But Louis, he was the first man I heard say, ‘You Black. Be proud of it.’ […] He was saying that when it was so very unpopular, you know.”

During the desegregation of southern public schools in 1957, Armstrong wrote an open letter to President Eisenhower, inviting him to come to Little Rock and walk with him alongside the Black children who were daring to enter the school. The White House declined to respond, and such other celebrities as Sammy Davis, Jr. criticized him for rushing the process.

My favourite story involving Armstrong is about a white boy named Charlie Black, who grew up in Texas in the 1920s, believing that coloured people were all very well in their place, which was in service to white people. Then, in 1931, at age 16, Charlie attended a Friday night dance at Austin’s Hotel Driscoll, featuring a “Negro orchestra.” As Charlie and his buddies entered the ballroom, there were the musicians, and in front of them a young man playing the trumpet.

Black later recalled: “He played mostly with his eyes closed, letting flow from that inner space of music things that had never before existed. […] Steamwhistle power, lyric grace, alternated at will, even blended. He was the first genius I had ever seen. […] It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a Black person.” The trumpeter “opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ [But] what was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprang?”

In 1954, Charlie Black, by then Prof. Charles L. Black Jr., a distinguished teacher of constitutional law, volunteered for the team of lawyers, Black and white, who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court that the racial segregation of schoolchildren was unconstitutional. And he always said he did it because, at 16, he heard Louis Armstrong play the trumpet.

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How to Save Our Theatres

In the June 8 Globe and Mail, there appeared an excellent wakeup call of an article by culture reporter Josh O’Kane, called “Squeezed Out: The State of the Canadian Arts.” The sub-heading read, “Costs are rising, audiences are hesitant and funding is shaky […] It’s a make-or-break year for the country’s cultural sector.” 

Sad but true – and the result of a perfect storm of causes, including the continuing psychological impact of the pandemic; competing technology that keeps people at home; and rising costs for everything, including evenings out. Live theatre is taking an especially big hit. O’Kane writes, “This past March, [the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres] published a startling number […] Theatre attendance was down 46 per cent from 2019 across the country.” 

Well, take heart, because I am now going to solve this. I’ve been compiling a list of the things wrong with theatre today, and how to fix them. Admittedly, these are small factors, but they may have some sort of cumulative effect. 

Let’s begin where the theatregoer often begins: at the websites. It’s astonishing how uninformative and un-navigable are many theatre websites, and not just because I’m old. Staffers construct them from inside the company, where everybody knows who’s who and what’s going on. They seem not to consider the average theatregoer who’s new to all this. 

So I suggest that every theatre pay an outsider, who has attended none of the meetings and knows nothing about the upcoming season, to visit the site and try to find out how to buy tickets to shows. Some companies might be surprised to learn how frustrating it is for mere civilians to find their way around. 

Next: this is elementary, but notably missing from both websites and programs is information about the show’s history and the artists, including what they’ve done before. My wife Lin Bennett, former actor, publicist and critic, wrote recently on Facebook: “If companies want to increase the chances of my attendance at a show (or spreading the word), then they can give me simple, readable, factual information in advance that helps me to know what’s genuinely special about the show: i.e., who is doing it? Who wrote it? And briefly, ‘Why choose this piece / Why now?’” 

Related to this: bring back paper programs. Some audience members seem happy with the QR codes on the posters in the lobby, but many of us miss those little sheafs of slick paper that we could sneak glances at, during the show, to see who that new actor is. I grant that it’s easy enough to download the program with the QR reader, and there are reasonable arguments for the QR programs: one is environmental, and another is the cost. Well, paper is recyclable. Print half, or fewer, of the programs you used to, and let the rest of them have their QR codes. 

Next: Please stop thanking audiences, in publicity and pre-show speeches, for “supporting” the theatre by attending. I don’t buy tickets to support your theatre. I support the theatre by contributing time or money, and voting for candidates who’ll fund the arts, but I buy tickets in the hopes of a good time. Calling our ticket purchases “support” reduces the theatre to a charity case. 

The last and largest of these issues relates back, again, to both the websites and the programs, chiefly the artists’ bios. I have mixed feelings about a current trend towards identity-politics-related publicity and bios. 

On the one hand, it seems a particular shame that audiences are dwindling just as Canadian playwriting is going through one of its most interesting phases, as we white folks are finally stepping aside, and playwrights of different ethnicities, queernesses and abilities are taking over our stages and telling their own, or their own people’s, stories, to exciting effect. And, refreshingly, the plays themselves are often set in a world in which it’s assumed, by both characters and audience, that we’ve moved past old bigotries. 

But on the other hand, when it comes to the publicity and programs, even this heartening development is occasionally contaminated with a tinge of self-righteousness, which seems to tout the plays as good for our moral development, or as compliments on how far we’ve come. 

Michael Paulson, in a piece recently published in the The New York Times, quotes an avid theatregoer as saying, “There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun.” (My thanks to website designer Claire Grady-Smith for this paragraph.)

In their bios especially, some well-meaning artists seem eager to promote themselves more by their ethnicities and orientations than by what work they’ve done, as if their identities prove their credibility. And it doesn’t help when their interests and areas of discipline are described in fashionable critical-theory jargon. 

Recently, a prominent playwrights’ organization invited its members to update their bios, and offered a new (and optional) set of categories: “demographic-like data,” including those ethnicities, genders, orientations and abilities. I do see that there’s a legitimate point to this. They make it clear that their purpose is to help users identify “playwrights whose social positioning serves as an inspiration to them, their community, and many more.” 

But it still seems a bit self-congratulatory, or flattering to the audience: almost like a present-day version of the old approach of presenting live theatre as an art form for superior people. This used to mean people with more money or “class.” I remember a long-ago ad in a theatre program which informed us that our presence at the theatre proved that we were of the exceptional taste required to appreciate their luxury automobiles. Nowadays it’s more about subtly flattering us that we are a cut above those racist, sexist homophobes out there watching vulgar movies.

(However, there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. These proud bios do reflect a real and heartening fact, which is that more and more theatre artists are not straight, white folks – and that, in response, there are also more non-straight and non-white fans in the house than there used to be.) 

In any case, there you have it: my strategies to save our theatres! Or if not, to at least make their death throes a little more entertaining for everybody.

*****

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Return to Vancouver, Part 2: Elysium, The Gilded Cage, The Belly of the Beast

(This is Part Two of my story of moving to Vancouver, from Kingston, for at least the next few months. For Part One, read previous blog.)

I’d foreseen having an emotional letdown on arrival, but not how devastating or long-lasting it would be. For the first couple of weeks I remained more or less depressed. A few days after my arrival, I performed a symbolic ritual that I’d looked forward to: I walked around Stanley Park, smoking a little cannabis, like in the old days. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, so this is the famous park, this is the famous weed, so what?” 

Back in Kingston, whenever I’d seen Vancouver on TV, I’d sighed a little. But now the actual Vancouver scenery looked like a TV screen in Kingston. On previous visits to Vancouver, I’d reminded myself that I was just as much here as I would be if I were living here. Now that I was living here, I felt just as much not here as if I were visiting. In Kingston I’d been in exile from Vancouver; suddenly I felt homesick for Kingston. I began wondering what’s wrong with me. Could I never be happy? 

At least visiting the family has worked as I’d hoped: it’s been a great pleasure to hang out with the kids, without needing to cram lots of information, conversation and feelings into a brief stay. There’s a nice everyday quality to these visits. And when I’ve gone into one of my emotional tailspins while hanging out with my daughters, they’ve been very patient and supportive. 

But I didn’t see my old friends very much at first. I felt uncharacteristically shy, withdrawn and socially anxious. That has improved. I’m having a weekly lunch with a group of longtime pals, and coffee and visits with others. And going to the theatre has also helped. Things picked up when I realized I just needed to get out more.

I also had work awaiting me here: adjudicating one high-school drama festival and teaching a playwriting workshop at another. At both festivals I ran into old friends, met some new friends, and sold some copies of my book. And the teenagers were terrific, and I felt grounded, useful and at home. 

The problem is this here newfangled city. Of course, what I really want to do is to go back to the Vancouver of 1972, and to be 24 again: the mustachioed hippie on this website’s “About” page. But I’m not going back there, and neither is Vancouver. PAL, where I’m living, is in a beautiful setting, but to get just about anywhere else in town, one must go through the downtown core. And in the downtown core I become an elderly, open-mouthed, small-town yokel. 

The downtown core is the belly of the corporate beast. It’s the gilded cage. It’s one of those futuristic sci-fi movies shot on location in present-day cities – like Elysium (2013), set in the 22nd century, when the wealthy live on a green, flowery, opulently designed space station which forms a ring around our planet, which is a dusty, muddy, overpopulated slum whose remaining resources the enslaved poor must gather and send up to Elysium. The scenes on the Earth’s grubby surface were shot in a Mexico City slum. The scenes on beautiful Elysium were shot in, yes, Vancouver. 

The downtown core (the real one, in 2024) is all glass, steel, plastic and electronics. We humans, moving in swarms through the environment, are extensions of the technology, components in the circuitry. The internet owns the businesses; the businesses own us; and, of course, everything’s insanely expensive. The buses are covered in photos of beautiful, smiling people selling real estate; the subway stations are full of ads for colleges that will make you rich. The models in advertising photos are multiracial, youthful, hip, and dressed and groomed with meticulous informality. They either laugh with excruciating joy, or don’t need even to smile to indicate that they’re still better off than you, baby. And whether they’re in convulsions of bliss or staring you down, the subtext is clear: you must become like them, and the only way to do that is by giving them your money. 

None of this – the expensiveness or the imagery – is news to Vancouverites, who seem to take it all for granted and accept it, resignedly, as the new normal. And it’s not like I haven’t seen this coming either: on our frequent previous visits, we’ve seen the changes happening. Nevertheless, to spend a month getting a really good look, especially after soft-sell, old-fashioned Kingston, is a true hit of what Alvin Toffler called “future shock.” 

And yet, there are still familiar buildings; some entire neighbourhoods, like dear old Commercial Drive, seem largely unchanged; and the parks, beaches and mountains endure. There are also new surprises, like the murals and outdoor sculptures, that feel right to me, although (or because?) so many of the sculptures seem like giant children’s toys. I especially like the droll creepiness of Yue Minjun’s statues at English Bay, of a dozen huge, identical men laughing hysterically. A signboard nearby reads, “the artist has given several hints that his own smiling face in these sculptures may not be what it seems… Is this laughter joyful or cynical?” That feels very Vancouver, somehow. 

So for the last week or so, I’ve been overcoming my fear that this has been a terrible, expensive mistake and I don’t know what I’m doing here. Expensive, yes, but it’s not a mistake: it’s a fascinating learning experience. And I do know what I’m doing here: whatever I happen to be doing, but it happens to be here. Lin and the dog will have joined me here by the time this blog goes online. And we’re going to stay a while and see how it goes. 

 

(P.S.: Since posting this month’s blog, I’ve worried that it may sound insufficiently appreciative of PAL, the Performing Arts Lodge. It’s a beautiful building, in a spectacular setting, based on a magnificent concept: providing affordable homes for people who have contributed to society through the arts. Our little apartment is listed as “near-market suite,” costing a little less than a regular apartment of this size in this neighbourhood. The rental revenue from these apartments helps subsidize other apartments for lower-income residents. I got on the elevator the other day, and another guy got on with me, we introduced ourselves, I asked him how he was doing, and he said, “So grateful to be here!” Nobody has asked me to add this paragraph.)

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Return to Vancouver, Part 1: What to Leave In, What to Leave Out

In March, after a dull day in Kingston, Lin said, “If PAL Vancouver calls tomorrow, tell them we’ll take it.” I laughed. We’d been on their waiting list for 14 years, and had never heard from them. The next day, PAL called: an apartment was available.

PAL is a Performing Arts Lodge: an apartment building with subsidized rents, mostly for older folks who’d wasted their lives in the arts and never made much money. Because we’d wasted half our lives in the arts and spent half making modest amounts as a publicist (Lin) and teacher (me), we qualified for a less subsidized but manageable rent – and in the most beautiful real estate in the world: at the entrance to Stanley Park.

But when PAL did call, the first thing we said was, “We’re not doing this, are we?” “Nope.” It was too much work, exchanging our big, four-bedroom Kingston house, crammed with decades’ worth of stuff, for a one-bedroom flat without enough space for the two of us.

But then we talked all afternoon about it. Were we being lazy? Cowardly? We’d both complained that our lives in retirement weren’t interesting enough. We’d contemplated different scenarios, including other PALs in Toronto and New Westminster. And we’d budgeted for a Vancouver vacation this year. So if we said no to this, we might forever regret chickening out.

Vancouver was where, for 30 years, I’d had the time of my life, working in theatre, TV, radio and film, and mostly hippie style: on my own terms and my own hours, self-employed, freelance and part-time. I got married twice, had a third relationship common-law, and raised two kids. Then, in 2000, Queen’s offered me a job and we moved to Kingston.

I loved the Queen’s job, and we’ve made some dear friends in Kingston, but our annual return visits to Vancouver were heartbreaking. This was our home! Ontario was exile! Over the years, that feeling subsided a little as the city grew bigger, glossier and more expensive, but it, and family and friends, continued to exert a pull.

So, the day PAL called, we finally changed our minds: we’d give it a try after all. Their rental agreement called for only 30 days’ notice to move out. So we could stay for at least several months. Lin started budgeting. I would go in April; she would join me in May. In our 70s, we were embarking on an unpredictable adventure.

Alas, we had no clue! We were so young and naïve, way back in March! The sudden stress was enormous. Each day, one or both of us would say, “Forget it, this isn’t worth it.” Even after we signed the rental agreement, we still considered kissing good-bye to a month’s rent, the plane fare, and what we were spending on furniture. Sometimes the challenges brought us together more, and we appreciated each other anew: after all, this was something we had to do together, or it wouldn’t happen. At other times, the project seriously threatened our relationship and our health.

There were the legalities and finances: renting out the house and arranging insurance, plane fares, furniture purchases, utilities and internet. We listed the house for rental on a website. We bought a new hot-water heater. We upgraded our insurance – a surprisingly huge hassle. Photographing our cleaned-up, freshly-staged rooms, and writing a listing describing the place in glowing terms, we wondered why we were leaving our beautiful home. We replaced our old nostalgia for Vancouver with a new nostalgia for Kingston.

There was the physical job: disposing of decades’ worth of stuff, storing our more precious belongings in the attic and basement, staging the house. Lin turned her home office into a bedroom, for the website photos. Against every instinct, I gave away large amounts of books. We put out extra garbage bags every week and frequented the recycling centre and Value Village.

And there was the dog. At 17, he seems too old and tired to subject to the ordeal of a plane flight and unfamiliar new surroundings, but not old and tired enough for euthanasia. We finally decided to leave him in Kingstown with our lovely dog-sitters, at least for now.

One task which stands out for me as a symbol is the Emptying of the Filing Cabinet. For years it collected material I didn’t want to deal with: bank statements, investment reports, insurance papers – stuff I would open and glance over cursorily and then file and forget, thinking that when I retired I would decide which of those papers to keep and which to toss.

That never happened. Suddenly we were throwing these important-looking documents from serious institutions, barely glanced at, into garbage bags, which I then took up to the recycling centre and dumped forever. All the paper I had carefully hoarded, to pass on to my more mature, more financially-responsible self, had instead come to this.

And there are the writings, dating from my childhood to today, which still sit in Kingston, waiting for me to decide whether to offer it to Queen’s archives or to leave it for my kids to sort through. And Lin has huge bins full of photos, negatives and contact sheets to deal with, courtesy of her deceased ex-husband, a professional photographer.

We realized we were summing up our lives to this point: taking stock of all we had done or left unfinished, and facing the big existential questions: what, after all, matters? What remains? Can we throw out those books I always thought I would read or re-read? What about my cringe-making teenage writings, or my 1980s critical reviews of plays nobody remembers any more? Will anybody ever read them? Will they affect how posterity thinks of me – if it does? Does anybody care? Do I care?

But then, rather suddenly – with the work unfinished and those questions unanswered, as yet and perhaps forever – I packed my bags, left Lin with her 100 pages of remaining to-do lists – and headed for the airport.

(To be continued next month, in “Return to Vancouver, Part 2: Elysium, the Gilded Cage, the Belly of the Beast.”)

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What Goes On in Those College Classrooms

“We all know what goes on in those college classrooms,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford once, on the basis of having attended college for two months. He was referring to the popular stereotype that our colleges are hotbeds of leftist professors surreptitiously indoctrinating innocent students with our ideology. Okay, look. I was a leftist college professor for 31 years. Here’s how this works.

First of all, it’s the world’s greatest job, and I’m not complaining, but nobody ever said it was not difficult and time-consuming. I earned my salary, spending thousands of hours on the job, inside and outside the classroom, teaching playwriting and related theatre topics. I can’t imagine taking on that whole other, unpaid job of brainwashing them with my leftist politics, on top of all the official, paid-for stuff. It would be a massive task to perform on a volunteer basis.

And the main reason it would be a massive task is because I have no idea how one might go about doing it. My students were not children. They were savvy, curious, skeptical young adults, with efficient built-in ideology detectors, which it was our job to help them refine further. I cannot fathom how I could possibly slip my socialistic agenda into their well-oiled brains without their being immediately aware of it.

But let’s say I did figure out some fiendish strategy. What would be the payoff? Let’s say that out of a couple of hundred students per three-month term, I managed to convert – well, 20 seems like wishful thinking. But if I turned 20 conservatives into leftists, then the Liberals, N.D.P. or Greens would benefit to the tune of 20 more votes in the next federal election. Again: an awful lot of work for precious little benefit.

So for this plan to have any appreciable effect, I couldn’t do it alone. I would have to work in concert with an extended secret network of leftist professors around the globe. And, in fact, that is the stereotype: all us professors working on this project in tandem, and in unanimous agreement about both goals and tactics. Yeah, right. Unanimous agreement. Gentle reader, have you ever attended a meeting of professors?

And finally, the stereotype of college professors being universally small-l liberal is, frankly, absurd – and even for us, a great many of the students are to the left of us to begin with.

There is another argument against the stereotype of the Propagandizing Progressive Profs, which makes me slightly uneasy. It has been popping up in the form of memes on social media lately. It is that, far from brainwashing our students, we give them the tools of critical thinking and objective analysis, with which the students independently conclude that it’s just plain better over here on the left.

Though I share that view, I find the argument suspiciously ideological in its assumption. However, it does seem persuasive, as leftists appear to be forever questioning and re-examining our own principles, while the right-wing crowd seems quite content to fall in line unquestioningly behind their leaders. Ironically, this may contribute to their strength: the right wing can form prompt phalanxes undistracted by doubts, while the left bickers and reevaluates and organizes circular firing squads. I’ve often been struck by the way Trump’s audiences cheer enthusiastically – or, of course, jeer us libtards – whenever he announces a blatant lie that would be instantly exposed if they would just take a second to fact-check him on their phones. But, of course, they don’t. So it’s hard not to infer that they’re perfectly happy to let him do all the thinking for them. No wonder he shouted, at a rally in Nevada in February, 2016, “I love the poorly educated!” (And, once again, they cheered.)

However, in fairness, let’s explore the opposite argument. (Notice what I just did there? Hey, I’m a professor.) I admit that I have encountered some profs who do assume that their students agree with their own politics: who make, for example, snarky jokes about those dumb rednecks, or dumb commies, and expect their students to laugh along. And many of the students do laugh – either because they sincerely share the prof’s politics and find the joke funny, or because they want to curry favour and get good grades – while others sit in silence, wondering if this is the right classroom for them. Though this hardly amounts to a massive program to indoctrinate the students, it’s definitely unprofessional behavior.

So I’ll tell you what I would do, when partisan politics found its way into our discussions of playwriting or theatre. Usually I would proclaim my political bias to the students. I would say that I am not one of those professors who expect their students to agree with their politics. And I would announce that conservative students were welcome in my classroom: that the course was not called (for example) Introduction to Playwriting for Leftists, but Introduction to Playwriting.

By now there would usually be a suspicious silence in the room, so I would then add, “I draw the line at fascism.” And that would usually get a relieved laugh. And, dear reader, if you think that my drawing the line at fascism constitutes stuffing the students’ heads with my socialistic beliefs, well, you go write your own blog, and maybe Doug Ford will give you a speechwriting job, because now you know what goes on in those college classrooms.

*****

P.S.: In February, I posted a blog, which you can find on this website, disputing the letters of protest that had contributed to the cancellation of productions of Christopher Morris’ play The Runner in Victoria and Vancouver. I noted that the letters ask us to imagine Canadian or South African plays depicting the experiences of indigenous people through the eyes of white settlers, and suggest that such a play would inevitably be racist. I wrote, “Some such plays do exist – Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose, an acclaimed Canadian play about a white nurse living among First Nations people, comes to mind” – and argued that in fact it’s an anti-racist play which, like The Runner, shows a white character getting a hard education in rethinking old assumptions. Well, whaddaya know: yet another play has been cancelled in Victoria because it commits the crime of “centring” characters who belong to the dominant culture – it’s called Sisters, and is about white nuns regretting their treatment of First Nations children in a residential school – and hey, it was written by Wendy Lill, the same playwright I cited in my blog! Of course I don’t for a moment believe that my mention of Heather Rose set the self-appointed watchdogs on the prowl for other suspicious material by the same writer; but it’s a disturbing coincidence, within what seems to be a disturbing, and continuing, trend.

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How I Stopped Struggling to Try to Learn to Draw

Page 5 from “Leon Plays a Grandpa,” an eight-page comic book copyright © 2023 John Lazarus

On my retirement from teaching at Queen’s, I decided to learn to draw. I had tried fitfully, a few times over the years, to master this craft, but had repeatedly given up. This time I decided to stick with it until I either became satisfied with my drawing, quit because it would never be any good, or died: whichever came first. I worked from two excellent, very different books – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards and Making Comics by Lynda Barry – and from classes with some fine teachers at the Kingston Seniors’ Centre. And it all made me miserable.

In the long term, I had no style, context, or ideas about what to do with my drawings once I learned how to draw them. And in the short term, proportion and perspective in particular defeated me. My childishly distorted limbs and skewed horizons filled me with shame and anger. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do it right – or why it mattered so much. This began to take the shape of an existential crisis, exacerbated by the irony that I had just spent 31 years teaching playwriting students how to overcome exactly this kind of frustration: to stop worrying about quality, to ignore those demonic inner voices, to feel free to write badly. Now, looking at my deformed drawings, I thought about what Professor Lazarus would advise – to keep doing it badly until it got better – but I couldn’t follow my own advice.

Last fall, I was on the point of quitting forever, when I learned of a new course at the Kingston School of Art called (coincidentally like Lynda Barry’s book) “Making Comics.” I decided to give myself one last chance, and I registered. The instructor, a local cartoonist named Colton Fox, turned out to be 45 years younger than me – teaching for the first time in his life – and exactly what I needed.

For our first activity in our first class, he pointed out the pencil and sheet of paper in front of each of us, announced that we had 15 minutes in which to draw a six-panel cartoon about our day, held up a stopwatch, and said, “Go.” As my classmates, all Colton’s age or younger (including a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old), sketched happily, I stared numbly at the blank paper. He wasn’t going to teach us to draw. Maybe he assumed we could already draw. He was going to teach us to make comics. But here I was after two years of classes, still unable to draw so much as a simple cartoon of myself raking leaves. I weighed the humiliation of leaving (and sacrificing the tuition money and admitting that I was a coward) against the humiliation of drawing terribly. I reluctantly chose the latter humiliation. And, as I began drawing terribly, I had an insight.

I have long held that if two problems arise together, they are sometimes each other’s solutions in disguise. And here I had two problems. One: I couldn’t draw. Two: I didn’t have a style, and didn’t know how to develop one. But that evening, drawing my crappy stick figures, I realized that my lack of ability to draw was my style. Your ineptitude is your style. At that moment, after two years of struggling to try to grasp how to draw, I stopped struggling, trying and grasping, and started drawing. And Colton turned out to be encouraging about my sloppy drawings of myself, for, as it turned out, he did not assume that we could already draw; he just found the question irrelevant.

That same first evening, he gave us our course assignment: over the ensuing three months, each student was to write and draw an eight-page comic book (12 pages, including the two covers), under his guidance. The younger students were naturally influenced by X-Men, Avengers, anime and so on. This old guy over here chose the tradition of 1960s “underground comix”: Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, R. Crumb’s Mister Natural and Fritz the Cat, that sort of thing.

So my character is a guy from that world, now grown elderly: “Leon Schmacter, the Old Hippie Actor,” a Jewish-Canadian theatre and film performer barely scraping by in present-day Vancouver. The eight-pager, “Leon Plays a Grandpa,” was about his getting cast in a new play by progressive young liberals, only to be stereotyped as an intolerant old conservative – inspired by an anecdote I recounted in my January blog, “Old People Are So Bigoted.”

As I worked, I began to see some potential charm in the contrast between my slovenly drawing and the more experienced competence of my dialogue and plotting. It actually kind of works to have articulate social satire coming out of the mouths of these awkwardly scrawled sketches. I finished the eight-pager, gave some copies to friends, and have decided to continue working on these comics – because, most importantly, I’ve begun to enjoy the process. I’ve changed his name to Sherman Schmacter, which has more of an alliterative kick, and am busy with a 32-pager, for possible eventual publication.

It’s still a struggle. I still get discouraged. Every new drawing – of the interior of a bar, of some old people lying on Wreck Beach, of Sherman’s agent’s office – requires me to learn a new set of skills. I’ve become addicted to a huge archive on the Internet, “Drawing References,” from which I print other people’s sketches, which I then copy slavishly (and shamelessly). And, of course, I hope my cartooning will continue to improve with experience. But I’m also determined never to stop reframing my ineptitude as my style.

*****

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HOW TO CANCEL A PLAY:OPEN LETTERS, CLOSED MINDS

By now you may be fed up with the controversy over Christopher Morris’ play The Runner. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Morris himself were pretty tired of it all. But it’s an important issue – a valuable Canadian play is under attack here – so I hope to add one more bit of info to the discussion: a look at the two open letters written by those who campaigned successfully to cancel two planned productions of the play.

It’s too late to do anything about those cancellations now, but it might be of interest, or of use, to look at how those letters misinterpreted the play and helped censor a valuable work of art. The play itself is too strong to be defeated by these two cancellations: further productions are slated for the future, in other venues. But those letters remain on the public record, and deserve to be refuted.

First, if you’re not acquainted with the story, here’s the background info. If you’re my Facebook friend, some of this will look familiar. And although at the suggestion of website designer Claire Grady-Smith, I’ve been limiting myself to around 750 words per blog, this one is considerably longer. I think the topic deserves it.

Facts About The Runner: The Runner is a 2018 play for one actor, written by Canadian Christopher Morris, who himself is not an Israeli, a Palestinian, an Arab or a Jew, but did spend many months in Israel and the Occupied Territories researching his subject. The play tells the story of Jacob, an Israeli Orthodox Jew whose job, as an employee of the non-governmental organization Z.A.K.A., is to gather up the body parts of dead Jews, but who pauses in his work to help a wounded Palestinian teenage girl, and gets into trouble for his decision.

Lin and I saw The Runner at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque, Ont., in November, and have now purchased a copy and read it. Since then, groups which identify as supporting the Palestinian cause have campaigned successfully to cancel productions of the play at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre and Vancouver’s PuSh Festival. Reportedly, there were a number of factors contributing to these cancellations – the PuSh Festival hung on until Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa threatened to withdraw his installation from the Festival if they did not cancel The Runner – but the open letters certainly paved the way and set the tone.

My Position on Israel and Gaza: I’m what we call a secular Jew: one who does not believe in the religion, but identifies as Jewish in terms of my culture and ethnicity. Born in 1947, the same year as the State of Israel, I grew up believing that we Jews had one moral edge on most non-Jewish peoples: we had never oppressed, or made war on, any other people. I also believed that the post-Holocaust slogan “Never again” applied to all people: that we Jews would be vigilant in making sure not only that such oppression never happened again to us, but never happened to anyone.

However, subsequent events in and around Israel have indicated that, now that we’ve had our own country, our own military, and a couple of generations in which to get used to the idea, we can prove ourselves to be not all that different from the goyim after all. (“Goyim,” popularly – and not disrespectfully – used to mean “non-Jews,” is actually a Hebrew word meaning “nations.” Originally, they were different from us because, before 1947, we were not a nation.)

So, watching recent footage of both Hamas fanatics joyfully killing Jews, and Israeli soldiers who, astonishingly to me, behave no better than soldiers everywhere else – i.e., harassing and beating peaceful Palestinians, even before October 7 – I despair at both Hamas and the current Israeli government and military. My position is not pro- or anti- Israel or Palestine; it is pro-peace and anti-war. In my ideal world, the warmongers from both sides would be given a remote island and all the weapons they want, and sent off to play together until they’re all dead, leaving the peace-loving Israelis and Palestinians to get on with their lives.

It’s ironic that I find myself in opposition to people who purport to represent the Palestinian cause. Please understand that I dispute them, not as a Jewish anti-Palestinian Zionist, which I’m not, but as a playwright interested in free expression and honest criticism. And, of course, it’s a given that the horrific events of this war greatly overshadow the importance of a controversy over a Canadian play. But Canadian plays matter to me, and these letters make me angry, so here we go.

My Position on The Runner: I love it. I think it’s a beautiful work: an eloquent cry for peace and understanding. The Israeli hero (and only onstage character), Jacob, makes a decision which pits himself against the values of his family and co-workers. The play is, like the conflict itself, nuanced and complicated, and if it comes down on one side or another, it is arguably more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli, as the hero’s moment of compassion opens his eyes to the attitudes of his associates.

The Open Letters: The first letter was read aloud at a couple of open-house meetings with the Belfry Theatre in December, after which the Belfry cancelled their production. (The theatre was also vandalized.) The second letter was sent to the PuSh Festival, late in December or early in January.

Both letters are anonymous, in that neither letter is attributed specifically to any one person or group of people as its author or authors. However, the PuSh letter is signed (electronically, on line) by at least 388 people, last time I looked. The authors write, “We spent a great deal of time engaging with the work directly, from a thorough reading of the script to extensive conversations,” but also boast that “376 signatures (and counting) were collected in just over 24 hours.” If anyone can send me signed affidavits, or other proof, that all the 388 signatories actually saw or read The Runner even once – let alone spent time on thorough readings and extensive conversations – I will send you $388.00 of my own money. (Of course, even if they had all seen or read it, cancelling the production would still have been an inappropriate response, as I will argue below. But they might have had a little more credibility – or, I strongly suspect, fewer of them would have signed.)

These letters have had an emotional impact on me. In my youth, in the 1970s, I briefly belonged to a couple of groups of Vancouver socialists, some of whose rhetoric I soon came to perceive as extremist, inflammatory, ideologically bound and not particularly interested in the truth, so – though I’ve continued to identify as a leftist – I quit those groups. My memories of those days have been “triggered,” as they say, by reading these two letters.

They have much in common with the writings of those 1970s zealots, including tendencies
to stretch, shrink, or just plain ignore the truth; to go on at length about issues only marginally relevant to the discussion at hand; to criticize the object of their criticism for not saying or doing things that it was never intended to say or do; and to split microscopic hairs – all delivered with (in my opinion) an aggrieved, superior tone, and the implied assumption that nobody else truly understands the issues and the letter-writers alone are operating from a position of moral integrity, while those who disagree with them are dishonest and self-serving, or, at best, kidding themselves.

(The two letters also contain similarities to each other, which is fair enough, as the authors of the PuSh letter acknowledge that “some of the content of this letter is in fact borrowed, with consent, from the work of our cultural and political comrades in Victoria whose thoughtful and diligent labour resulted in the Belfry’s decision [to cancel the production].”)

So, now, point by point – and please note that for the most part, examples that I cite here of the letter’s flaws are selected from larger numbers of potential examples:

The letters contain outright misstatements and distortions of the truth. The PuSh letter claims that “we are … experiencing a virulent chilling of public discourse on Palestine, and erasure of the catastrophic facts on the ground from public record.” There is little or no evidence of this. A few days before writing this blog, I attended a screening of the American documentary Israelism, which chronicles in detail the oppression of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, the attempts by many Jews to expose this oppression, and the unsuccessful attempts by other Jews to suppress that exposure. The film is being watched at multiple screenings all over the world. And the CBC National News and other reputable news outlets offer regular, extensive and balanced coverage of the war and the history behind it.

Ironically, the PuSh letter continues: “countless educators and artists around the world and here on Turtle Island are being reprimanded and/or removed from their positions for voicing criticism and concern. Numerous cultural and educational events in support of Palestine have been cancelled due to venues and presenters fearing and receiving backlash.” This, in a letter calling for the cancellation of a cultural event for voicing criticism and concern – and succeeding due to venues and presenters fearing and receiving backlash.

The Belfry letter states flatly that “Morris gives no indication that he ever sought out a single Palestinian over 9 years of work.” False. In the acknowledgements included in the published version of his play, he thanks, among others, Robert Massoud, Palestinian-Canadian entrepreneur and author of Advocating for Palestine in Canada. The inclusion of Massoud’s name alone gives the lie to this allegation, but in fact, in the course of writing the play, Morris made over 20 trips into the Occupied Territories, where he spoke with a great many Palestinians, including a Fatah terrorist who had just been released from prison for murder and (on two occasions) the Al-Akhras family, whose 16-year-old daughter had blown herself up in Jerusalem. This is not mentioned in the published play, but really, all the letter-writers had to do was ask.

The letters criticize the play for allegedly saying things that, in fact, it does not say. The Belfry letter claims that “several of the violent acts by the Arab characters are described in detail (such as the gratuitous stabbing scene).” The “gratuitous stabbing scene” does not exist. On the contrary, Jacob says, “I don’t know, it was never proven, they couldn’t prove it, I don’t know if she stabbed that soldier” – to make the point that her subsequent incarceration by the Israeli authorities may have been unjust.

The Belfry letter also accuses the play of not saying things that, in fact, it says. It complains that the play “neglects to critique Zionism and its inherent overarching violence,” and that “the whole context of a brutal decades-long occupation is left out of the narrative.” If this were true, it might go under my category of their complaints that this is not the play they think he should have written; but it is false. For one example, one passage in the play reads, in part, “It’s not normal to live like this… Nobody wants us here, all this violence, all the humiliation we inflict to carve out this tiny strip of land, to push back all of our neighbours who want to annihilate us, it’s not normal.” Another passage in the play reads, “Z.A.K.A.’s official line is that they collect the remains of terrorists to give them back to their families, but we don’t give them back to their families we give them to the Israeli authorities to be buried in shallow graves with no religious rites, no dignity, to be dug up later and used as barter in exchanges like these – it’s inhumane what we’re doing, it’s not Jewish!”

The letters contain historical and current details which, however compelling, are irrelevant to the question of whether to produce the play. This is an old trick. Much ink is spent on admittedly heartbreaking facts of the oppression of the Palestinian people by Israeli governments and military leaderships. These facts may understandably feed the anger felt by the authors and signatories of the letters, but they are not Christopher Morris’ fault, and have little to do with whether the play should be seen, except insofar as the play condemns such deeds.

Both letters also, rather oddly, invite us to imagine Canadian and South African plays which would depict the experiences of indigenous people in those countries from the points of view of the white settlers. Some such plays do exist – Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose, an acclaimed Canadian play about a white nurse living among First Nations people, comes to mind – but the letter-writers describe their made-up examples as committing the multiple sins of which they accuse The Runner, and then ask if we can imagine such plays being produced. No, I can’t. But nor can I imagine a version of The Runner being produced if it actually did commit the sins of which they accuse it.

The letters criticize the artist for not creating some other artwork which the critics would have preferred. This is another common critical fallacy: both letters wish he had written a different play, and criticize him for not doing so.

Z.A.K.A., the organization that protagonist Jacob works for, gathering the body parts of dead Israelis, is accused in the PuSh letter of having a “central role in propagating…disinformation” about alleged atrocities committed against children by Palestinian soldiers during this war. And, in fact, Z.A.K.A. leaders have acknowledged that individual errors have sometimes been made. The letter-writers seem to think that therefore Morris was under some obligation to include those false allegations in his play so that Z.A.K.A. would look even more compromised than they do. But of course he wrote the play in 2018, some years before the war began, and even Morris can’t predict the future.

The PuSh letter protests the omission of other stuff that Morris has not written: “no mentions of missile strikes, chemical weapons, indefinite imprisonment or the use of torture… The context of a brutal decades-long occupation is completely left out…There is no mention of the brutal events which enabled the founding of the state of Israel,” etc. No, that’s quite true: this hour-long play does not spend an extra hour on a lecture covering the last 77 years of Israeli-Palestinian history. The only possible response to this complaint is to invite the letter-writers to write their own play.

The letters split some very tiny hairs. Given that so many of the signatories identify themselves as artists, writers and theatre creators, it is surprising to find them making so many mistakes common to people who don’t read enough fiction – including seeming, or pretending, to think that every opinion expressed by every character in the play is a directly expressed opinion of the author. But the play is about the traumatic education of an Israeli who, raised in ignorance and mistrust of Palestinians, comes to understand that they are human too; so it shows us the racist attitudes he starts out with, in order to show us the change that comes over him.

It is true that, as the letters complain, the word “Arab” is used repeatedly and the word “Palestinian” only once. That’s the point. This is a bewildered young man brought up in a world with no meaningful contact with Palestinians. In a moving passage describing his confused, mixed feelings, Jacob repeats opinions he has learned from his community, mingled with his own evolving beliefs: “I don’t dislike Arabs… I just don’t know any outside of work, okay I won’t say ‘Arabs,’ Arabs, Arabs, they’re Arabs I can’t won’t call them Palestinians, they’re stateless they don’t have a country, it’s not bad to call them Arabs, they’re ‘Arabs’ – okay okay okay I won’t say it, I won’t call them that anymore, I won’t. I won’t do it. I won’t do it.” Yes, this is contradictory (and, deliberately, ungrammatical). It is the desperate mental churning of a confused, traumatized, disoriented young man living in a nightmare. (By the way, I agree with the letter-writers that the correct term would be “Palestinian girl,” but the name of the character in the play is “the Arab girl,” so in this blog I’m going with that.)

Both letters complain that the Palestinian characters do not get to speak much, do not have names, and are less fully fleshed-out than the Israeli characters. Yes, and the Israeli characters are less fleshed-out than Jacob. Some Israelis do get to speak a bit, but those are Jacob’s relatives and co-workers, while the Palestinians are strangers to him: again, that’s the point. So it’s true that some characters are less fully fleshed-out than others. I can’t think of a play in which that’s not the case. Francisco, a soldier who appears in the first minutes of Hamlet and then exits, never to be seen again, is less fleshed-out than Prince Hamlet. That’s show biz.

The Belfry letter, in its shaky analogy to their imaginary play set in South Africa, describes the indigenous characters as “described in lascivious terms that exoticize and Other them.” The PuSh letter complains that “the work is rife with astonishing Orientalization, sexualization and othering of Palestinians.” “Orientalization” means the frequently erotic stereotyping of “exotic” Easterners (of all kinds, including middle-Eastern Jews) by Europeans in the 19th century, and simply doesn’t apply here. “Othering” may make some kind of sense, but only in that the language and culture of the Palestinians is foreign to Jacob himself. It is true that the Arab girl does not have a name, but that’s because Jacob never gets to find out her name. One more time: that’s the point. But there are also pages of text in the play describing his feelings of deep compassion for this suffering fellow-human.

And “sexualization”? Okay, let’s go there: in reference to the Arab girl, the Belfry letter remarks that “the sexualizing… of Palestinians is astonishing.” Yes, it is, because it exists only in the minds of the letter-writers. In fact, Jacob is gay. At one point in the play he goes clubbing in Tel Aviv and gets involved in all-male (and, presumably, all-Jewish) group sex. There is not a syllable in this play that suggests that he has any sexual interest in any women whatsoever, including the Arab girl.

The PuSh letter does acknowledge a scene where the Arab girl shows kindness to Jacob, when he goes to find her, months after the incident. That scene is made all the more theatrically powerful by its brevity and uniqueness, but the letter-writers don’t get that: they’re too busy counting the number of words the characters speak, to make the point that the Arab girl speaks only a few. But those few words are very telling. Jacob has fallen to his knees, weeping, at seeing her alive, healthy, and fully human. Seeing his tears, and not recognizing him as the man who saved her life – seeing only that he is a Jew, her enemy – she nevertheless puts her hand on his shoulder and says, “Are you all right?” Reflecting on this later, he says, “Her hand on my shoulder. Are you all right. That’s all that matters. Kindness. An act of kindness.”

But the writers of both letters are instead preoccupied with counting up and comparing their tallies of repetitions of words, as if the more frequently a word is spoken, the more important that word becomes in the text. If that were the case, the word “the” would leap out at us from the stage with ferocious emotional power.

Sometimes the parsing simply defies truth and logic: “The protagonist is questioned for saving her life. His only justification is ‘we swore an oath to do no harm.’ It is notable that her life is framed in this way, and not because of any inherent value she may have as a human being.” Firstly, the quote is taken out of context: what Jacob actually says is, “The only thing that came to mind…was that we swore an oath,” etc. Secondly, earlier in the play, he says, “What was I supposed to do? She was a person, a teenager, a girl.” The letter-writers seem to be complaining that Jacob is not a calm, even-handed historical authority. Well, he’s not. Again: he’s a young guy in a nightmare, whose values have been turned upside-down, and he’s desperately trying to sort it all out.

If you’re still with me, thank you for hanging in, and you’ll be glad to know that I’m about to wrap up. Writing this blog has been difficult. As you can tell, I’ve found myself getting angry. I may have fallen into a couple of the traps of which I accuse the letter-writers: getting excessively punctilious and picking apart sentences and phrases point by point. But I hope I’ve avoided twisting the truth.

However, allow me one more point: let’s pretend, for a moment, that every accusation made in these letters is accurate. If Christopher Morris’s play were truly guilty of the offenses of which it accused, then his punishment should have been the traditional punishment meted out to bad plays: negative reviews, small houses, and few, or zero, future productions – not because of political pressure, but because nobody’d want to see it. (For the record, it has received several productions so far – with rave reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences – and several awards, including the 2019 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play.)

God knows, I’ve seen and read plenty of material that I’ve found offensive and/or that has contradicted my political and moral beliefs. My reaction has been to write and talk about them more. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now, as a reaction to these letters. My response to being offended by them is not to demand that they be suppressed; it is to expose them even more fully, so that you can make up your own mind.

So: here are the links to the two letters, and to the publisher of The Runner, who will be happy to sell you your own copy. (The fact that that publisher is J. Gordon Shillingford, who have also put out my new book, is a coincidence. Or maybe not: maybe it’s just that Shillingford enjoys publishing sane writing by grown-up Canadians.)

So don’t take my word for it. Read these documents yourself. Make up your own mind – as we’re all supposed to be able to do in a free and enlightened society. And thanks again for reading this.

*****

Letter to the Belfry Theatre: https://sumud1948.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-belfry-on-december?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

Letter to the PuSh Festival: https://bcartists4pal.substack.com/p/e27ae58f-059b-48be-957d-00b44d0e93b3

The Runner, by Christopher Morris: https://www.jgshillingford.com/product/the-runner/

*****

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OLD PEOPLE ARE SO BIGOTED

We went to see a new play, written by a young woman and featuring a mostly-young cast, plus two actor friends of ours in their 80s. One is a long-time hippie who has enjoyed an adventurous personal life, and the other is a lesbian and anti-racism activist. They are also both notably physically fit, for a pair of octogenarians. However, in the play, they had to hobble about (she, on a walker) as conservative grandparents, baffled and horrified by their grandson’s coming out as gay. You know: old people.

We attended an evening of standup comedy by performers who were all under 35. We two were the oldest people in the room by a couple of decades. It was a celebration of diversity: multiple genders, orientations, ethnicities and physical abilities. They had all come together to laugh; to celebrate their differences and similarities; and to make fun of their elders. From these intelligent, educated, progressive young talents, firmly opposed to prejudice of all kinds, the hits just kept on coming: ancient geezers wanting to have sex with young women, crabby crones not wanting anybody to have sex with anybody, and senior citizens of all genders displaying hilarious ineptitude with these darn newfangled computin’ machines. You know: old people.

I’m not angry. I’m mildly annoyed, amused, and puzzled. Compared to most people, I have nothing to complain about. I’m a member of the most privileged demographic in our society: straight, old, white, male, and with enough money to get by on. I don’t have to worry about getting shot by a cop for being a young African-American, or getting raped for being a woman, or getting beaten up for being gay – etcetera. The offenses I experience are tiny annoyances, fashionably called “micro-aggressions.” But what those micro-aggressions do bring to the table is irony.

Sorry to hammer away at this, but I have met people who simply don’t get it, so, just in case, one more time: these are sexually and ethnically diverse artists – fiercely opposed to making assumptions about people’s character based on their age, orientation and/or ethnicity – except for the assumption that old, straight, white people make assumptions about the character of people based on their age, sexual orientation and/or ethnicity.

We do seem to be the one demographic category that it’s still considered okay to mock. As you’d expect, Facebook in particular seems a hotbed of jokes and cartoons about old people: our alleged stupidity, hearing loss, unattractiveness, sexual impotence, and cluelessness about today’s world. Besides the jokes, there are also plenty of concerned, indignant anecdotes about grandfathers who don’t respect the bodily autonomy of their grandchildren, or elders of both genders who, like the characters in that play, can’t deal with young people’s queerness.

There are games offered on line, in which you’re given an imaginary mental age of 80, 90, or 100, and with every correct answer you enter, you get smarter – i.e., your mental age goes down, thank God, to the age level where people are still fairly intelligent, before the inevitable dementia sets in. If you get a perfect score, do you attain the I.Q. of an embryo? And by the way, can you imagine the public response to an online game in which you start out as a character of colour, and get whiter, i.e., smarter, with every correct answer?

As I write this, I’m troubled by the sense that I’m an overprivileged citizen who’s trying to jump on the bandwagon of aggrieved minorities. And I should add that of course there are real live old people who actually are like those mocked at that evening of standup. God knows, I’ve spent enough time at dinner parties listening to old folks my age complaining about Kids Today. Sometimes I want to say to them, “Did you actually smoke so much weed that you don’t remember?”

And yes, there are grandparents who are homophobic, and old women who do disapprove of sexual fun, and old men who don’t understand boundaries. I recently spent some time in a local hospital, where the 83-year-old guy in the next bed kept graphically complimenting the nurses on their bodies. In response to one young woman’s expert remonstrance, he said merely, “I’m a bad boy.” I later said to her, “You handled that very well,” and she said, “Plenty of practice.” So, okay. There are always people in any demographic who are willing to live down to their stereotypes. But that doesn’t justify reinforcing the stereotype, dammit! Or am I just being an old curmudgeon about this?