Inexplicable?

The Ottawa Citizen published an article today comparing the myriad (read: three) variations of A Christmas Carol currently available to Ottawa audiences.  The comparison was light-hearted and fun — as any article that differentiates productions based on their use of fart jokes should be — but Citizen Arts Editor Peter Simpson made a comment or two about our version that got me to thinking.

Re: the NAC production, he wrote “scenes and characters are reinvented, sometimes inexplicably”. He goes on to ask “what’s with the Rasta?” and notes that he “kept expecting [the Ghost of Christmas Present] to take a bong hit from his smoking horn of plenty”.  I can state unequivocally that no scenes in our adaptation are invented or reinvented — they’re all straight from the novel, with the exception of one small tweak to the character of the Ghost of Christmas Past — so I can only conclude that Mr Simpson is basing his first statement on the decision to cast the Ghost of Christmas Present using a black actor.

I was annoyed, at first, but have moderated my view, because this is a golden opportunity to point out something amazing and terrific about the NAC’s new resident acting company: it’s pretty fecking diverse.  We have two black people, two mixed-race Japanese, one Métis, one Indian, several rampant homosexuals, two bisexuals, and one person with Down syndrome.  For Christmas Carol, we also have three children.  Fully one-third of the company members are visible minorities.  This is how a Canadian national theatre company should look.

A quiet battle on the issue of diversity has been raging on the Canadian theatre scene for many years now.  One notable and important debate arose from an open letter Andrew Moodie wrote to the Shaw Festival’s artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, in 2008.  There is no question that the face of theatre produced in this country still does not reflect the face of the population, and the debate over color-blind casting and representation of diversity on stage rages on.  This much is irrefutable, though: the 2006 census reports that a little more than 20% of Canadian citizens are foreign-born, and that more than 20% of Ottawa’s population are visible minorities. By 2017, 19-23% of ALL Canadians will be visible minorities.

Compare this statistic with a sampling of the current state of diversity on stage in Ottawa.  The Gladstone Theatre is running a play with a cast of five; admirably the production is almost entirely female (I’m not touching on gender inequality in this post; it IS a problem as well, and the NAC company can fairly be criticized on this point), but it’s completely white.  Ottawa Little Theatre is running a musical with a cast of four: all white. Review the past several months or even years of theatre in this city, and you see a cavalcade of glorious, pale whiteness.  I’m not picking on specific companies, here: it’s not just these examples, and it’s not just an Ottawa problem.

So: if theatre should reflect the community in which it is situated (and it should, oh reader; most vehemently I say it should!), where does Ottawa’s 20% non-white population — that’s 200,000 people, as a rough estimate — go to see themselves?  Where do the other 800,000 local residents go to see work that reflects the reality of the people in the streets around them?

I have an answer to that question. Obviously.

Charles Dickens never specified the race of any of the characters in his seminal novel; that leaves an awful lot open to interpretation, and in a pitch to stay relevant and engaged with our community, we have fiercely and proudly seized the opportunity to explore possibilities.  It’ll happen again next month, when we stage Mother Courage and Her Children (and unlike Christmas Carol, I’m quite sure we have the only cart-pulling war-profiteer play running in Ottawa in January).  Indeed, the question we should be asking ourselves more regularly, as theatre practitioners, is why we always assume characters should be white unless told otherwise.

I understand Peter Simpson’s choice of word.  To an upper-middle-class, middle-aged white man, embracing diversity in this way may feel inexplicable.  It may be foreign to him — pardon the pun — but I obviously can’t speak for him and the broad range of his life experience.  I understand that kind of discomfort, though, because I feel the same way about straight people.  However, I do think he went with the wrong word in his article.

The forward-thinking, visionary choice to explore the possibility of a non-white Ghost of Christmas past is not inexplicable; it’s inevitable.