LETTER TWO by Tony Nardi
August 28, 2009
Neil Boyce
The MIRROR
Theatre this week
Activists and accusations
English theatre gets serious with Speak Truth to Power and Letter Two/Lettre nº2
ROASTING THE STAGE
?“If we took a match to theatre in Canada, if we burned it down, I don’t think people in this country would miss it.”?
But tell me what you really think, Tony Nardi, don’t hold back...
An actor, writer and producer, Nardi has been nominated for and won both Genie and Dora award. But it’s his newest work, Letter Two/Lettre nº2, that’s generating the most ink. In a developing series entitled Two Letters… And Counting!, Nardi’s the angry man shaking his fist at the Canadian artistic community, saying no to everything that smacks of theatrical cliché. There’s no stage, no costumes, no character, no director, no stage manager, no makeup and no curtain call afterward.
?“It’s just basically me there with a laptop doing the piece,” says Nardi.
Created from some incendiary letters Nardi wrote to a TV producer and two theatre critics in which he attacked the “complacency, mediocrity and inauthenticity” of the Canadian stage and screen, it evolved into a series of public readings, finding, he says, its dramatic template and central theme: a lily-livered-ness about speaking out in this country for fear of harm to ones job and reputation.
Nardi’s already upset many who thought they were off the record when they shared their unguarded thoughts with him, but he’s defiant about it: “Look, if I burned a bridge, then that bridge was not worth taking.”
