Get the ball rolling
BY Arianne Robinson
Photography by Kristoff Steinruck
Ladies and gentlemen! For your viewing pleasure! An evening to engage your mind! Introducing The Wrecking Ball, political theatre in cabaret style! But consider yourselves warned: There will be no tanks filled with water, no pythons, and no naked girls trying their best to do balletic gestures.
The Wrecking Ball premieres at Toronto’s Factory Theatre on the eve of the US presidential election. The material, written by playwrights Jason Sherman, Judith Thompson and David Young the week before the event, responds to events in the news.
“We’re in such a conservative time in the arts, especially in theatre,” says Sherman, the project’s creator, and winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1995 for his play, Three in the Back, Two in the Head. With The Wrecking Ball, he wants to provide an opportunity for writers to develop radical works, and he hopes the pieces may one day become full-length plays. “Political theatre is just not happening, and it should be.” Canadian commercial venues prefer “safe” work with guaranteed seat sales to pieces that take chances, he says. “But the irony is, if you do a play that is controversial, you might actually find that your theatre is full.”
Other theatre centres have been watching politically minded shows bloom and succeed. The Wrecking Ball could develop into something like The Thalia Follies, which opened in New York on the eve of the Republican Convention, and closes on the night of the election. Tim Robbins’ Embedded, a comedy about the “Pentagon’s Prime Time War,” started out in Los Angeles and moved to New York and London. Guantanamo, a play based on spoken evidence from detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has played in London and New York. In fact, Sherman became so sick of reading the reviews from abroad that he began to write an article advocating for more political theatre to be produced in Canada. “And it got me thinking, ‘What’s another article going to do? Fuck it. Let’s do something about it.’”
