A man of many rants
Tony Nardi stages his tirades - Letters - on the state of
Canadian theatre
PAT DONNELLY
The Gazette
Saturday, March 01, 2008
The thing I love about cantankerous people is that you can get
them started on just about anything.
So when I called actor Tony Nardi in Toronto to talk about his
three controversial Letter plays, which decry the state of Canadian
theatre, television and cinema, I thought I'd test him on the
weather.
Sure enough, I got a tirade on the deplorable state of snow
removal in Toronto: "It's pathetic. They don't clean sidewalks.
When you think of the collateral damage. People break their
necks."
Nardi, whom one Toronto journalist recently described as a man
who could become our "most famous agitator outside of Don
Cherry," cannot resist a chance to express his opinion.
"Wherever I see comic opportunities, I'm in," he admitted.
Enough with the weather. Exactly what is his main beef?
"The first two letters were really specific reactions to
specific things," he said. The first was written in reaction
to a script for the TV series Rent-a-Goalie, set in Toronto's
Little Italy, sent to him for consideration. Nardi, who was
born in Italy and raised in Montreal, saw the Italian role he
was being offered as stereotypical and offensive.
It wasn't a first. He could have shrugged it off with an, "I'm
busy, no thanks, I'll pass," as he had often done before.
But this time (fresh in from Quebec after shooting an exciting
film about the Oka uprising, Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis),
he couldn't take it anymore. He turned warrior.
"Where do we take responsibility for the crap that we put
out there on TV?" he asked, rhetorically, over the phone.
"Because we put out crap. I mean, everybody agrees. Notwithstanding
the phenomenal talent, we strive for mediocrity."
Nardi, who began his professional acting career in Montreal
in 1978 in a searing play about Russian dissident Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, wrote a lengthy diatribe and mailed it off to
the Rent-a-Goalie producers. No reply. He started emailing it
to friends. Then he began performing it for them. Not everyone,
he discovered, agreed with him. He incorporated some of their
reactions into his script. "It became sort of a documentary,
not only of my original letter but also the process of trying
to create that letter," he said.
That was Letter One.
His next rant was set off by negative reviews of a commedia
dell'arte play, Carlo Goldoni's The Amorous Servant, presented
by Pleiades Theatre in Toronto. He now allows that the production,
directed by a friend, wasn't very good. But the reviews added
insult to injury, he said. His problem with critics: "They
pass off ignorance as knowledge of the art form."
So he wrote a "mammoth" essay addressed to two Toronto
theatre critics, Kamal
Al-Solaylee of the Globe and Mail and Richard Ouzounian of the
the Toronto Star. Besides setting out to "educate"
these critics on the true nature of commedia dell'arte, Nardi
attempted to throw light on the issue of ethnic stereotyping
or"how we perceive and present and represent 'other cultures'
in this Canadian landscape."
The problem isn't only the Italian, or French communities in
Toronto, or the English one in Montreal, he said. "It's
everybody. I don't think that English Canada in English Canada
gets an authentic representation of itself. Nobody does."
The essay became Letter Two, his take on the Canadian theatre
industry. And once again, as with television, the label was
mediocre, with gutless and irrelevant thrown in.
According to Nardi, Canadian actors have been reduced to props,
not allowed to develop their own voices. Quebec, he acknowledges,
is another story, with more authentic voices. "But it's
pretty well a very French, pure laine milieu," he said.
Which is why most anglo and allophone actors, like Nardi, tend
to head for Toronto.
Nardi described his third play "... And Counting!"
as largely a post-mortem of the two previous ones, with emphasis
on the issue of cultural funding.
In Montreal, for the first time, he'll be performing all three
on consecutive evenings,
beginning with Letter One on Thursday at UQAM, followed by Letter
Two at McGill, on Friday, and the third one on Saturday.
If Nardi, 49, last seen at Centaur Theatre as Sky Masterson
in Guys and Dolls in 1988, were not an established actor with
a couple of Genie awards (best actor for La Déroute in
1999 and My Father's Angel in 2001) to his name, his letters
might have become career suicide notes. Instead, they have raised
his profile and won him admiration.
Toronto Star columnist Joe Fiorito wrote: "Nardi uses dramatic
acid to burn the rust off truth, and to blister complacency
until it turns into awareness. He takes no prisoners."
Nardi breaks all the rules of performance, too. He doesn't memorize
his lines and he doesn't rehearse. "I read it off the computer,"
he said. "I stand at a podium with my laptop and read."
There's no admission charge for the Letter plays. And after
the show, members of the audience get a chance to tell him off.
Theatre critics, too. Here's the catch: anything you say may
end up in the next version of his script.
Tony Nardi's Letter One, will be presented Thursday at 6 p.m
at UQAM's Studio-d'essai Claude-Gauvreau, Pavillon Judith-Jasmin,
second floor, 405 Ste. Catherine St. E. Letter Two, on Friday
at 5 p.m. at McGill's Moyse Hall, in the Arts Building, 853
Sherbrooke St. W. Letter Three, "... And Counting!",
on Saturday, March 8, at 7 p.m. at McGill's Redpath Museum Auditorium,
859 Sherbrooke. St. W. Free. Visit www.twoletters.ca.
pdonnell@thegazette.canwest.com
