TWO LETTERS by Tony Nardi
March 16, 2007
Keith Garebian
I was banned for a year from one of the two major English-language
theatres in Montreal for daring to write an article entitled
“Why Is English Theatre in Canada becoming Politically
Irrelevant?” Of course, that theatre had drawn some of
my fire, so it was natural, I suppose, for its publicist to
react the way all faux-liberals who cannot countenance truth
react—by attempting to stifle criticism. It is much the
same in the rest of Canada as far as English theatre or culture
is concerned. Dare you attack the mediocrity of most of our
directors, CBC hacks at the top or bottom, “sacred cows”
at Shaw or Stratford, the Canadian Opera Company where the décor
is frequently more interesting than are the performances, the
National Ballet that still seems rather quaint at times, newspaper
editors (well, one in particular!) who wouldn’t know the
difference between “ludic” and “lucid,”
publishers who should really be re-directing their “talents”
with gossip tabloids or Heather’s picks, and parochial
arts commissars the nation over, you may as well go off on your
own to Guantanamo as an undeclared cultural “terrorist.”
I have complained for years about the paucity of good directors
and playwrights in this country—though the quality has
improved slightly over the last twenty years since my initial
published complaints—and my discontent is even greater
when it comes to some independent Canadian publishers who would
be much better employed working for corporations where cooking
the books would be a definite asset. All this by way of prologue
to Tony Nardi’s Two Letters, a stunningly powerful indictment
of Canadian theatre and culture that is based on two actual
circumstances from the actor’s experience.
After a Roman holiday in 1994, Nardi received an offer from
a television series in Quebec that was a celebration of French
Canada’s fascination with the Italian Canadian mob. The
series had an audience of over a million per episode, but Nardi
declined the offer(three times) because it required him to enact
clichés about Italians. The series’ French Canadian
characters were fun to play. They had a reality that was lacking
in the non-French ones. For Nardi, the Italian became the new
Indian, the new savage in the New World. Forget Mario Puzo or
Martin Scorsese. This was not even Sergio Leone Italian. Nardi
knew that when a story becomes culture-based in a stereotypical
way rather than character-based, it turns into “an imitation
of a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile.” He was
having none of this. None of the French Canadian series, none
of the film director who once asked him to be more authentically
Italian by scratching his balls, none of the late Norman Douglas’
rancid racism about Calabrians, none of modern Quebec’s
phobia of immigrants. He would risk death literally. At the
age of 21, he once had a gun aimed at his head and was warned
not to appear again on stage in Quebec. So much for Quebec Libre!
Nardi shares all this and much more in his first letter (that
lasts two hours with a five-minute break). He stands at a small
podium and reads the letter off a laptop computer, without a
set, stage lighting, special effects, soundscape, makeup, blocking,
stage manager, director, or curtain call. However, there is
far more theatricality in his presentation than in many plays,
because the actor knows exactly how to dramatize his material,
offering episodes and anecdotes as he mimics voices, ratchets
up his vocal range, and shows just how vital it is to feel for
an idea, to live your life as if it depended on the expression
of that idea. “Indignation is how I pray,” he claims
at one point, and his presentation is a prayer of distress,
an outcry that refuses to prioritize subsidiary ideas. Sometimes
he rants and roars, often he embroiders his anecdotes extravagantly.
He is inordinately fond of prologues—sometimes as a series—and
he meanders or digresses, but always hits his targets hard and
sharply.
In the second letter (offered on a second evening and running
to two hours fifteen minutes with a five-minute break), he takes
on other “professional gargoyles” in the theatre:
awful directors, bad playwrights, sheepish actors, imperceptive
critics, and half-bored or totally bored audiences. It isn’t
just an actor’s litany of grievances. Its anger spirals
and explodes, but it is an anger that is fully justified, for
Nardi explains the motive and cue for his fulsome passion. On
the surface, this letter seems to be only tangentially connected
to the first one. However, the connection is muscular. The circumstantial
cue came in the form of two newspaper reviews of a Toronto production
of Goldoni’s The Amorous Servant. The reviews in two of
Canada’s largest English language newspapers perpetuated
a misunderstanding of a specific art (commedia dell’ arte)
from a specific culture (that was already maligned by the television
script). Instead of blaming the director for a shaky understanding
of commedia, the critics blamed the cast—especially the
one actress who actually gave the right sort of performance
for the genre. This was what set Nardi off—this ignorance
of craft and the defence of it!
Nardi uses the artifice of “ghosts” by which to
set his didactic letter in motion—Prophet ghost, PR ghost,
Philosopher ghost, Godmother of Acting ghost, et cetera. His
letter is an enactment of visitations by these phantoms that
serves to fuel his daring attack on those whom he deems most
responsible for a theatre that is rotting and for actors being
in crisis. Not coincidentally, the performances I attended were
marked by a notable lack of theatre directors or actors or producers
in the sparse audiences. Are our so-called professional artists
afraid of the truth? My question is rhetorical, of course, for
I believe that theatre artists in this country—especially
directors and artistic directors—suffer from a civil servant
syndrome, something that is essentially bureaucratic in nature
and hopelessly lacking in genuine vision. Too many are compelled
to turn themselves into politicians or public relations spokesmen
who know exactly how to draw corporate sponsors by giving them
what they want. The sad reality of inadequate funding for the
arts is, of course, responsible for much of this. However, the
directors lack artistic humility. Unlike real specialists who
know the extent of their limitations, our directors seem to
think they can direct virtually anything in any style. The results,
of course, usually prove them wrong. Our artistic directors
seem to think that because they have theatres, they automatically
have culture. Not true. What they have is a piece of property
for the middle-class and mid-cult patrons.
But I am getting ahead of Tony Nardi. He makes his own case
with splendid vehemence. Being an actor, he, of course, is biased
in favour of actors, but he has a very trenchant point. Nardi
would like Canadian theatre to be actor-centred rather than
director-centred but he knows that too many of his fellow actors
lack the courage to speak out against directorial ineptitude.
They need the job, after all, so why bite the hand that helps
to feed you! Moreover, Canada is no place for thoughtful dissent
because it doesn’t respect the mind enough. I agree. Where
are our parades for our finest writers and artists? The only
parades are for Stanley Cup or Grey Cup winners. Aren’t
most of our daily newspapers in the country geared to the level
of senior high school students? Where are the arts pages? Far
along in the paper—way, way after the Sunshine Girl or
Boy, the latest scandal, and Sports, and even at that, the arts
receive cursory mention. Perhaps a thumbs up here or a thumbs
down there--as in a consumer report. Again, that bureaucratic
or civil servant mentality! Everything in its place, and some
places are just not meant to be spacious—especially if
they demand the expansion of certain borders.
I digress—rather like Nardi himself, though he does it
with much better colour, flair, and sinew. He could easily make
the reading of a telephone directory a thing of passion and
modulated wit. Instead, he saves his greatest wit for his actual
demonstration of how commedia should be presented—as a
living, breathing example of a marriage between form and substance
and not as some grotesque exaggeration of an improperly understood
convention. His demonstration takes the shape of an imaginary
trial in which he plays the judge, Arlequino, and other commedia
“types,” offering in the process—and at high
speed and with versatile mimicry—a representation of what
it means to be in the authentic present, something every actor
needs to know. This is a stunning model of period acting, and
it is created without fanfare, without absurd artifice, and
with such convincing intensity that it absorbs us in its surging
current.
Instead of boring me as a malcontent’s malign rant, Two
Letters spurred me into articulating certain things that have
been percolating a long time in my mind. Each presentation ends
with a lively audience discussion moderated by guests such as
Nino Ricci, Brian Fawcett, John Fraser, Judith Thompson, et
cetera. You wouldn’t get that at Stratford, Shaw, or evenSoulpepper.
In England, Italy, Germany, et cetera, Two Letters would be
front-page news on the arts or culture page. Not so in Canada,
of course. The grants-giving bodies are too busy evaluating
artistic statements, the critics are saving themselves for “legit”
theatre, directors and artistic directors are too busy pumping
up their resumes with credits they hardly deserve, and the actors
are busy playing spaniels at directors’ feet, in the hope
of a few morsels that might come their way. The most courageous
ones in this country usually suffer the time-honoured cruelty
of national indifference.
