City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City 9781442684195

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C I T Y S TA G E S : T H E AT R E A N D U R B A N S PA C E I N A G L O B A L C IT Y

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MICHAEL MCKINNIE

City Stages Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9121-5

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McKinnie, Michael City stages : theatre and urban space in a global city / Michael McKinnie. (Cultural spaces) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9121-5 (bound) 1. Theater – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. 2. Theater and society – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. 3. Theaters – Social aspects – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. I. Title. II. Series. PN2306.T6M33 2007

792’.09713541

C2006-907011-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Material has been reprinted from the following articles written by the author: ‘Space Administration: Rereading the Material History of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (2000): 19–45; material reprinted with permission of the journal. ‘Urban National, Suburban Transnational.’ Theatre Journal 53, no. 2 (2001): 253–76. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Material reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

I sat one morning by the Moore, off to the west ten yards and saw though diffident my city nailed against the sky in ordinary glory It is not much to ask. A place, a making, two towers, a teeming, a genesis, a city. Dennis Lee, ‘Civil Elegies’

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Contents

Acknowledgments Nomenclature

ix

xi

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto

3

PART ONE: CIVIC DEVELOPMENT 1 Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the Urban Development of Toronto’s Downtowns 25 2 Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 48 PART TWO: THE EDIFICE COMPLEX 3 Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe Muraille 73 4 A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop Productions 91 5 Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography of Theatrical Legitimacy 116

viii Contents

Conclusion Notes

137

Works Cited Index

133

171

161

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of labour that is more than just my own. I am indebted to a large number of colleagues, friends, and organizations for their contributions to this project. These are too numerous to list in their entirety, but some deserve special mention. I was fortunate to learn from some exceptional teachers and scholars at the universities I attended while a student. At the University of Guelph, I am grateful to Alan Filewod and Ann Wilson, and particularly to Harry Lane (from whom I took my first class in Canadian theatre) and to Ric Knowles (from whom I first learned – and am still learning – about materialist approaches to theatre). At York University, I am particularly indebted to the late Norman Feltes, who was a leader in Marxist scholarship in Canada and political activist in Toronto, and who also became a friend and neighbour (I still vividly recall sweating through the rigours of Norman’s graduate seminars, an experience from which I continue to benefit enormously). At Northwestern University, Henry Binford and Bernie Beck generously offered their expertise in urban history and cultural sociology, respectively, and, as part of my doctoral thesis supervisory team, graciously extended their knowledge and sharp insight to a project that needed their specialist expertise. Tracy Davis was, and still is, my toughest critic. In her capacity as supervisor for the doctoral thesis that was the genesis of this book, she consistently challenged me to press my own thinking further, to ask harder and more precise questions, and to assume nothing. She still encourages me to do these things, and for this encouragement (past and present), I owe her an enormous debt. Present and former colleagues – from both universities and the theatre industry – have supported this book at key moments. I would like

x Acknowledgments

to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, along with Peter Glazer, David Grant, Jen Harvie, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Anthea Kraut, Lisa Sloniowski, Daniel Moser, Sophie Nield, Amy Partridge, Lionel Pilkington, Mark Phelan, Nicholas Ridout, and Joanne Tompkins. In the theatre world, Richard Rose provided me with a hugely valuable education in dramaturgy and new play development (upon which I continue to rely), and he helpfully clarified some of the historical events discussed in chapter 5. Sky Gilbert and Leslie Lester also provided important details, for which I thank them. A number of organizations, institutions, and publications have assisted the research on which this book is based. Research for City Stages was initially supported by doctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Northwestern University, the completion of the book was made possible by a Study Leave Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, and its publication was assisted by the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program of the Canadian Federation for the Social Sciences and Humanities. I am particularly indebted to the staff of the outstanding theatre archives at the University of Guelph and, equally, to those who work at the Toronto city archives. I am fortunate to have been permitted to develop some of the ideas found here in a variety of settings, to these ideas’ undoubted benefit: at the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, the American Society for Theatre Research, Roehampton University, the London Theatre Seminar, and in the pages of Canadian Theatre Review. Chapters 1 and 2 are developed from articles first published in Theatre Journal and Essays on Canadian Writing, and I thank these journals for their permission to elaborate upon those pieces further here. The comments of anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press have undoubtedly made this book better, and I am grateful to the editors at UTP for their patience, and for their skill in ushering this book through the publication process. In direct and indirect ways, my family has been hugely important through the initiation, development, and completion of this book. I cannot thank Bill, Sheilagh, and Meghan McKinnie enough for their support. Finally, Ruth Fletcher has been a part of this project from its inception, and it has benefited from her particular combination of tough-mindedness and curiosity in more ways than she can know, or I can articulate. City Stages is for her.

Nomenclature

A number of historical events in this project involve municipal bodies that have since been abolished. It is important to clarify that, in practice, there are several Torontos. There is the older, former City of Toronto, which was surrounded by five newer and smaller municipalities: North York, East York, York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough. Together this geographically conterminous urban area constituted Metropolitan Toronto until 1998. As of 1 January 1998 the city governments were amalgamated into a unified Toronto and the metropolitan level of government was eliminated. Throughout this text I have attempted to distinguish as clearly as possible between ‘Toronto’ in its present geographical boundaries and the former City of Toronto and other individual cities (and their governments) that existed prior to municipal amalgamation. I also refer throughout this book to ‘downtown’ Toronto. Downtown Toronto commonly refers to a large area in the core of the city that extends north from Lake Ontario to the CPR tracks near Dupont Street, and from Spadina Avenue east to the Don Valley. Downtown North York, which I discuss in chapter 1, stretches along Yonge Street from Sheppard Avenue north to Finch Avenue. (See figure 1.) All dollar figures cited throughout are in Canadian dollars.

xii

Nomenclature

1 Harbourfront complex 2 Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) 3 CN Tower 4 Factory Theatre 5 Princess of Wales Theatre 6 Royal Alexandra Theatre 7 Roy Thomson Hall 8 Hummingbird Centre 9 St Lawrence Centre 10 Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People 11 CanStage Berkeley St.

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Distillery District Theatre Passe Muraille Elgin and Wintergarden Theatres Canon Theatre Buddies in Bad Times Theatre / Toronto Workshop Productions (1967–1989) Panasonic Theatre Tarragon Theatre Toronto Centre for the Arts / Ford Centre Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts

Figure 1 Key performance and entertainment sites in downtown Toronto and North York

C I T Y S TA G E S : T H E AT R E A N D U R B A N S PA C E I N A G L O B A L C IT Y

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Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto

If it is true that theatre has become an important part of Toronto over the past four decades, it is equally true that Toronto has become an important part of theatre during this time. In fact, popular narratives of the city’s transformation and the theatre’s transformation since the late 1960s are remarkably similar: the story opens in a comfortable but parochial setting, the lead character grows restless with this staid environment and begins an awkward growth spurt, and, finally, a mature and vibrant mise-en-scène emerges. That this story does little justice to the historical complexities of both theatrical and urban development in Toronto almost goes without saying. But if Toronto’s urban and theatrical histories should not be reduced to the same simplistic narrative tropes, the connections between them should not be diminished either. These histories are intertwined in more ways than have previously been imagined or examined. The purpose of this book is to examine historically the urban conditions of contemporary theatrical production in Toronto. As is often the case with academic research, the genesis of this project was unexpected, and lies in an off-hand remark made by a colleague. For two years in the mid-1990s I worked for Necessary Angel Theatre Company in Toronto. As I will discuss further in chapter 5, Necessary Angel rose to prominence during the 1980s partly because of environmental productions like Tamara and Newhouse, both of which transformed non-theatrical buildings into performance spaces. Although Necessary Angel staged its productions predominantly in conventional theatre spaces, then artistic director Richard Rose still liked to maintain the option of mounting work outside existing theatre buildings, and so we toured a variety of former commercial premises

4 City Stages

throughout the central city. One building in the old port lands south of Eastern Avenue, just over the Don Valley at the base of the Riverdale neighbourhood, seemed promising initially. But after surveying the space Rose commented that he didn’t believe that a theatre audience would come there. A theatre audience might be drawn to such a space west of the Don Valley, he suggested, but theatre in Toronto – summer productions of outdoor Shakespeare aside – was difficult to sustain outside a downtown area. I do not doubt that Rose was correct in his analysis of the ‘local market,’ at least in that time and place. For me, however, his comment prompted a series of questions potentially larger and more significant than whether one show could be staged profitably in south Riverdale. Was the calculus of how theatre in Toronto could be staged informed by assumptions of where it could be staged? Did the particular urban geography of Toronto itself play a part in theatrical production in the city? And, inversely, did theatre play a part in the urban development of Toronto? I argue in this book that the answer to each of these questions is affirmative. I also argue, however, that while theatrical and urban development have intersected in Toronto over approximately the last four decades, the forms and consequences of that intersection have been many, and often unanticipated. As the case studies that follow illustrate, ‘theatre’ and the ‘city’ describe constantly changing social practices and artefacts. The terms of their intersection are different over time and space partly because the entities themselves are ambiguous, complex, and, at times, internally contradictory. Critical Concerns Nonetheless, there are a number of concepts and themes that recur throughout this investigation. These include the problematic relationship between space and place. Conceptualizing space and place can be difficult, not in the least because there is no consensus in the critical literature on the distinction between one and the other. Some critics, like geographer David Harvey, see place as referring to certain manifestations of space in time.1 In this way of thinking, places are formed in moments where distinct arrays of spatio-temporal relationships come into being (before, of course, they dissolve and new arrays emerge). Other critics, like cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, invert the conceptual pairing: space refers to the moment where a more fluid and elusive place becomes arrested.2 Like Harvey and de Certeau, I accept

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto 5

that space is not an independent, ahistorical entity – space does not simply exist but has to be made through social practice. But I employ Harvey’s framing of space as something that can only be known through the forms it takes over time. Those forms include ‘place’ in a broad sense – as a socio-spatial product created in difference – and, more precisely, the specific shapes that places assume. The case studies examined here reveal that the places negotiated by theatre in Toronto have been numerous and complex. Some places encountered are not surprising, because they take a shape that accords with vernacular, physical manifestations of space: parcels of land, built form like buildings and architectural features, and the networks of structures and areas that constitute what geographers call the built environment. Other places are created through familiar ideological constructions of physical space that enable capitalist economic transactions, such as private property and real estate. Still more places are defined, at least in part, through imagination, representation, ontology, and urban and civic ideology. These places may be more difficult to grasp initially, but have been no less consequential for theatre in Toronto. The corollary of this spatial concern is a temporal one. The places, people, and events discussed in this study are not only spatially but temporally placed. Indeed, their spatial and temporal inscriptions are inextricable; without a temporal register it is impossible to mark geographical transformation historically. Like all historical analyses, this inquiry chooses a point in time at which to begin: in the case of this study, that time is 1967. My investigation begins in 1967 because several historical events occurred in this year that are not usually considered to have much to do with each other, but are, in actuality, connected. This year is best known in Canada as the centennial year and the time of Expo 67 in Montreal. To commemorate the centennial, the federal government sponsored building projects across the country, extending the built form of the national welfare state by a substantial measure. One such project was the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto, the city’s first civic theatre building. Demolition for the St Lawrence Centre occurred in 1967, when part of an old block of wholesalers on Front Street East fell to the wrecking ball. That same year, however, campaigners ensured that the acceptability of knocking down old buildings at the behest of the local growth machine could no longer be assumed. A nascent urban reform movement won its first major victory by halting the planned demolition of Old City Hall, and thereby inaugurated an (admittedly anxious) coalition of downtown

6 City Stages

progressives and uptown Red Tories that would change the political and urban landscape of Toronto in the 1970s. Toronto Workshop Productions, the small not-for-profit theatre company that was the only consistent alternative to ‘high culture’ operations like the Crest Theatre in Toronto at the time, also moved into a 300-seat theatre space downtown, having outgrown its 100-seat basement in the old city’s working-class west end. This project begins in 1967, therefore, since that year marked, for the first time, a confluence between what the state could do economically in the urban sphere, the shape Toronto’s urban form should take, and where and how theatre could (and should) be practised in the city. Theatre History, Geography, and Political Economy Despite beginning in the centennial year, this investigation is concerned with theatre and its relationship to the state, more than to the nation. The nation and nationalism have tended to figure prominently in scholarship on English-language Canadian theatre. This is not surprising, since the historiography of contemporary English-language theatre has frequently hinged on the late 1960s and 1970s, when an expansion of the theatre industry coincided with a surge in cultural and political nationalism. Studies of contemporary theatre in Toronto have often used nationalism to explain this work’s origins, and have measured the analytical and social significance of this work by transposing its value to a national level. While not discounting the importance of the nation and nationalism in English-language Canadian theatre, this project argues that they only inform the urban geography of theatre in Toronto to a limited degree. Instead of using nationalism as an explanatory category, I attempt, in a limited way, to ‘bring the state back in’ (to quote the title of a well-known collection in political economy).3 Moreover, instead of employing an ill-defined ‘regionalism’ or ‘localism,’ this project attempts to account for the demands made on theatre practice that are specifically urban and specific to Toronto. While concerns about property and the built environment do not only arise in cities, the fact that they are mediated through cities circumscribes their negotiation. The forms that this urban negotiation has assumed in Toronto during the last four decades make it possible to speak of theatre as having contributed to the distinct urban geography of Toronto itself. One reason that such a geography exists lies in the particular urban

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto 7

political economy of Toronto. It is easy to forget that, for most of Canada’s existence, Montreal was the country’s most populous city and its largest economic motor. In a national context, the expansion of Toronto’s theatre industry through the 1970s coincides with a time when Toronto overtook Montreal as Canada’s largest city, both in terms of population and as a centre of finance and industry. Theatre in Toronto – as an industry – was, therefore, not only part of a cultural transformation taking place in the city, it was part of an economic one taking place nationally as well. Furthermore, in a North American context, downtown Toronto did not ‘hollow out’ in the way that the centres of many large American cities did. The suburban communities that constituted the majority of Metropolitan Toronto grew rapidly after the Second World War, but this was not accompanied by a depopulation or dereliction of the old city core.4 As a result, cultural institution building in Toronto has not had the imperative of urban rehabilitation to the same degree that it has had in American cities like New York or Chicago (in spite of the reclamatory narrative that advocates for Toronto’s Entertainment District have constructed to justify the enterprise, as I will discuss in chapter 2). Toronto’s changing place in the national and continental economy was also accompanied by a shifting role in the transnational economy. As both an urban and theatrical environment, Toronto was implicated in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist political economy that accelerated in the 1970s. In using the language of Fordism and postFordism I draw on a conceptual framework established by Marxist theorists of economic, urban, labour, and artistic transformation: the Regulation School of French economists, the urban geography of David Harvey, the labour sociology of Harry Braverman, and the cultural criticism of Fredric Jameson.5 Fordism, as its name implies, arrived when the assembly line became the dominant method of organizing a production process for the purposes of mass-producing standardized commodities. Fordism denotes a system of economic production organized on the basis of routinized, manufacturing labour, where international trade occurs largely between Western nation-states. In most Western countries, this period stretched from the 1920s to the late 1960s. Post-Fordism, or, to use David Harvey’s more precise term, ‘flexible accumulation,’ occurs when international capital floats freely across national borders, structuring production, labour, and trade according to the needs of transnational financial speculation.6 This shift is generally marked historically by the oil shocks and abandonment of the Bretton Woods system of international financial gover-

8 City Stages 80 70

Per cent

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1951

1961

1971 Service

1981

1991

2001

Manufacturing

Figure 2 Proportion of Canada’s national workforce in manufacturing and service industries. Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Historical Review, vol. 2004 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2005); Statistics Canada, Census and Household Statistics Branch, Highlights: 1981 Census of Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1984); ibid., Industry and Class of Worker: The Nation, 1991 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1991). Note: ‘Manufacturing’ means commodity manufacturing and construction. The three major service industries comprise trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; and community, business, and personal service.

nance in the early 1970s, after which the exchange rates for most tradable currencies floated freely.7 There is an extensive literature on this model as a representation of historical transformations in Western political economies, and a fierce debate about its merits.8 A comprehensive discussion of this literature would require a book in itself, so I can only say that I agree with the paradigm as a broad model of historical transition, while suggesting several ways in which Toronto’s urban and theatrical development are implicated in post-Fordist change. Statistically, labour-force surveys demonstrate that the proportion of the Canadian workforce engaged in manufacturing has slowly declined since the 1960s, and the proportion engaged in service-related industries has risen (see figure 2). Gunter Gad and David Nowlan both show that this trend away from manufacturing and towards the service industry has been even more pronounced in Toronto than nationally, and the growth of Toronto’s theatre industry is one part of that shift.9 In a purely quantitative sense, the present-day scale of Toronto’s theatre industry is of a completely different order than it was four decades ago, in both a national and an international context. Although the popular claim that

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto 9

Toronto is now the third-largest urban centre for English-language theatre in the world (after New York and London) is more often asserted than substantiated, there is little doubt that the city’s theatre industry has become a part of the local and, through its role in generating tourism, transnational service economy to a degree that it simply was not in the 1960s and 1970s. Insofar as any city can be thought a ‘world city,’ Toronto’s theatre industry provides one persuasive reason for including it in that category. Urban post-Fordism also became visible, in part, through the suburbanization of manufacturing and the abandonment of industrial sites in the older city core – this study demonstrates that suburbanization and theatre practice have become connected in Toronto over the past four decades. A post-Fordist political economy has also involved a greater concentration of private finance capital in the downtown core; theatre, in turn, has negotiated Toronto’s transformation from a city where regional and national firms had their headquarters to one where transnational companies participate in global capital flows. Still another feature of post-Fordism has been long-term property value inflation (and its counterpart, gentrification) on a scale that the city did not experience before the early 1970s. As I show, theatre in Toronto has been implicated in these phenomena as well. The political economy of Toronto, then, is both urban and cultural. But if the spatialization of these economies has been complicated, their theatricalization has proved no less complex. In large measure this is because theatre has both market and sentimental imperatives, and, at times, these may be in conflict with each other. Despite the fact that most of the theatre enterprises discussed in this study are not-for-profit corporations that derive some of their revenues from public funding, all of them operate through a market economy at some point. Their most persistent preoccupation in an urban context may have been with the local real estate market, but concerns about ticket sales, advertising, and increasing corporate revenues have arisen frequently. Those who produce theatre in Toronto have been, and remain, keenly aware of the market economy in which they operate. The vicissitudes of the property market and the box office do not, however, wholly explain the relationship between Toronto’s urban and theatrical economies. Theatre is not only a market activity but also a sentimental one, valued as a way to create social bonds between people and their environment. In this use of the term, ‘sentimental’ does not indicate the popular, affective use of the word. Instead, it refers to Adam Smith’s conception of the term in his Theory of Moral Sentiments,

10

City Stages

where he attempts to theorize how social bonds between people are created under capitalism.10 Smith’s analysis is a helpful corrective to the vulgar conception of capitalism that is sometimes deployed as shorthand within Left politics, in which the market is a rapacious machine that systematically feeds upon the resources and peoples of the planet. The reality is much more complicated, and far less efficient. Smith undertook his inquiry partly because he recognized that markets are inherently unstable. When Jean-Christophe Agnew contextualizes Smith’s theory of sentiment within the ‘social psychology of market society,’ he concisely points to the way that Smith naturalizes the preparatory work needed to make capitalist relations function: sentiment (or what Smith also calls ‘sympathy’) is what makes economic contracts possible.11 But there is a latent anxiety in Smith’s thinking – a fear that unsympathetic subjects will throw the system into crisis – and so some social logic must be created to help the market appear natural, or, at least, the ideal option. Marxist analyses often share a similar interest in the instability of markets. David Harvey argues that capitalism contains contradictions that always threaten its viability and demand that it continually be remade. Harvey identifies two points of conflict: first, the tension between individual action and collective action often overrides the ability of any ‘hidden hand’ to ‘correct’ the market; second, the disciplining of men and women into a constantly changing labour process (their submission as labour to capitalist-determined wages, time, and space) is a volatile ‘mix of repression, habituation, co-optation and cooperation, all of which have to be organized not only within the workplace but throughout society at large.’12 It is possible to say, then, that sentiment is a necessary concern of market-dominated societies because marketization is always clumsy and never entirely successful. Social subjects are frequently disobedient, the market consistently encounters social relations that do not exist because of and for itself, and economic crisis periodically results. To posit the implication of theatre practice in this process is to question the ideological and market work it performs within a capitalist social formation. One reason that theatre might play a sentimentally affirmative role in a market economy is that cultural institutions and objects may compensate for the upheavals of economic change, particularly when they appeal to ideals of timelessness and universality (effectively negating time and place in order to distract attention from the fact that these

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto

11

things are tendentious). That being said, theatre does not necessarily perform the cognitive work that the mode of production requires for its reproduction. In fact, theatre is so fascinatingly ambivalent because it often tries to do exactly the opposite: holding out the promise of social bonds outside or against a capitalist economy, and encouraging its participants to imagine ideals that they might otherwise have not. Theatre also provides a way to coordinate certain types of social relations and make these relations visible through the co-presence that the event usually involves. Marvin Carlson argues that a key feature of the theatre event is that it offers a particular time and physical space through which sentiment can be experienced through spectatorship. Carlson states that theatre-going is a ‘social occasion’ where ‘the pressure of audience response can coerce individual members to structure and interpret their experience in a way which might well not have occurred to them as solitary readers.’13 This argument can be extended further: it is not only the experience of theatre-going that can produce sentiment, but the existence of theatres as cultural institutions that can create sentiment in a city’s life. But because the theatrical activity considered in this study has an ambivalent relationship with the market, the sentimental relations encouraged can be a perplexing combination of the economically affirmative and subversive. I argue, however, that contemporary theatre in Toronto has affirmed the market economy more often than it has resisted it, though this affirmation has often been unintentional and unexpected. In part, this is because theatre in Toronto has become affiliated with sentiments of urban affluence. Affluence not only denotes a relative economic position or a quantity of accumulated capital, it also implies a state of ‘well being’ – indeed, a pleasure – that is associated with the market but that supersedes a strictly economistic explanation (such a sense of affluence may be important when trying to attract private capital to a city, for example, but securing it may involve actions based on ideals of public benefit that are not wholly market-based). An affluent city is different from a rich city; whereas the latter depends on a quantitative calculation of capital and the nature of the social subject’s relationship with the city is irrelevant, the former implies that the subject sees the city, and its place within it, in a more comforting and pleasurable way once a degree of economic security is reached. As I will discuss, theatre – whether as cultural institution, artistic practice, or ideology – has come to be seen in Toronto as a way to achieve this ideal of urban affluence.

12

City Stages

Critical Practices Accounting for such a variety of issues raises significant methodological challenges, and, as will become apparent at various points in this project, the critical inheritance of Canadian theatre studies, and of theatre studies writ large, only partly equips the analyst to confront them. As a response to this problem, my inquiry is both materialist and interdisciplinary. There is no more a single materialist analysis than there is a single feminist analysis or a single Canadian analysis. Nevertheless, there are certain assumptions and, more importantly, methods, that materialist analyses tend to share. The central premise informing all materialist analysis must surely be Karl Marx’s statement, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it ... under circumstances chosen by themselves.’14 Marx’s assertion is deceptively simple, but it implies some assumptions that are analytically fundamental to materialist analysis. The first assumption is that history, like place, is something that is ‘made,’ and, by extension, is always remade. Materialist analysis negotiates a tension between a theoretical need to define the object of inquiry and a desire to track how that object is constantly in formation and re-formation. An interdisciplinary approach assists this negotiation, since, even if theatre studies offers useful disciplinary methods, theatre practice itself is a composite object of inquiry, consisting of a range of activities whose significance extends beyond the artistic. Interdisciplinarity reminds the researcher that accounting for the full range of ‘borrowing and influence that occurs between practices and their theories’ may require epistemologies and methodologies from outside theatre studies.15 The second assumption of materialist analysis is that human subjects ‘make’ history, but, because they do not have the luxury of determining the circumstances under which they do so, ‘making history’ is always an untidy – but not random – process. A third assumption of materialist analysis is that human beings may be social agents, but their exercise of agency is always circumscribed by forces beyond themselves. As a result, theatre history is littered with unanticipated results that were not commensurate with agents’ intent, something that the case studies considered here demonstrate repeatedly. Materialist analysis should also not be reduced to a crude economism, though this project does not divorce artistic from economic (and geographical) questions. If cultural materialism has tended to insist on the political and economic inscription of cultural objects, this is not

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto

13

because it attempts a crude restoration of the economic ‘base’ to art’s ‘superstructure’ in the ‘last instance.’ This focus, rather, attempts to redress the aestheticism and cultural affirmation that still dominates criticism about art. As Imre Szeman comments, ‘If materialist criticism is ... often concerned with matter, the materiality of social and cultural forces, and with political economy, it is not just because it is “materialist” but also because these are the elements most commonly “left out” of typical examinations of cultural objects.’16 Moreover, an urban geography of theatre encourages the critic to observe the lessons of materialist geography in order to avoid the implication that these places are merely locations where theatre happens to occur (a fallacy that has its aesthetic counterpart in the use of history as a ‘backdrop’ to cultural artefacts). On the contrary: materialist geography suggests that space is not simply the pre-existing context for theatre practice (or its ‘geological container,’ to use Edward Soja’s term), but a series of places through which theatrical and spatial forms are mutually constituted.17 Szeman argues that cultural criticism in Canada remains largely uninformed by materialist analysis, and the same could be said, to some degree, about histories of theatre in what is euphemistically called ‘English-speaking Canada.’ There has been important and nuanced materialist analysis of English-language theatre in Canada, as the work of Ric Knowles, Ann Wilson, Robert Nunn, Jennifer Harvie, Alan Filewod, Robert Wallace, and Denis Salter illustrates. Of the work that may provisionally be called ‘theatre history,’ however, only Filewod’s and Salter’s work is in a materialist vein. English-Canadian theatre studies since the 1970s has instead been predominantly nationalist, federalist, and sometimes unsettlingly patriotic: as Anton Wagner’s introduction to Establishing Our Boundaries illustrates, analysts may position themselves – consciously or not – as the critical wing of a national unity campaign.18 Wallace argues that English-Canadian theatre studies has also tended to focus on the ‘good’ (read: dramaturgically familiar) work of ‘successful’ individual playwrights (or, by extension, of individual theatre companies that helped produce a body of dramatic literature).19 While there are welcome signs that this critical practice is changing to a limited degree (as the historicized dramaturgical analysis of a book like Knowles’s The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning indicates),20 I would argue that Wallace’s characterization remains predominantly true today, fifteen years after he offered it (as a book like Craig Stewart Walker’s The Buried Astrolabe indicates).21

14

City Stages

A further historiographic problem one encounters when writing about theatre practices that have occurred relatively recently is the role that the testimony of individual practitioners should be given in the historical narrative, and, as data, the weight that their views should be granted when undertaking critical analysis. A number of people who participated in the events discussed in this book are still alive, and it has been a relatively common practice in Canadian theatre history to use the views of individual participants as historical evidence of what went on at a given time, and to incorporate these perspectives into a calculus of historical significance. But readers of this book will likely observe that the terms on which individual testimony appears here are tightly bracketed, and that I give less ‘voice’ to individual participants than others might. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, in a materialist vein, the individual practitioner is only one agent in a much larger historical formation, and that individual is not always (or even predominantly) the best index by which to understand and critique the historical events I examine. Second, while there is nothing inherently problematic historiographically with using the testimony of individual participants, I have strong reservations about retrospectively gathering and employing it as evidence of past intention, aspiration, or explication when data related to these things already exist from the time of the events themselves. To be clear, I do employ individual testimony at many points in City Stages, often as a way to highlight the tension between the proclaimed intentions of participants and the actions that the conditions in which they worked ultimately allowed. But I usually consider these intentions as they were articulated at the time; to recuperate these significantly after the fact – say, through personal interviews in the present day – would run the risk of collating data that are temporally incommensurate within the context of this historical narrative. While such retrospective testimony may be interesting, it is more reliable evidence of participants’ views now, and less reliable evidence of their intentions and aspirations then. One of the goals of this investigation is to broaden the critical interests of Canadian theatre studies and bring new approaches to bear on the issues and historical artefacts examined. To a large degree, this involves bringing the ‘spatial turn’ in theatre studies to bear on Canadian, and particularly urban, case studies. But it also involves using those case studies to ‘talk back’ to the modes of spatiality predominantly employed within theatre studies, and in this sense it explores broader conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues arising from

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15

the intersection of theatrical and geographical inquiry. In theatre studies today, it seems, space is everywhere, and the evidence for a heightened interest in the broad problematic of theatre and space is easy to find. Since the mid-1990s there have been books by David Wiles, Gay McAuley, and Una Chaudhuri, among others.22 Theatre Journal published a special issue on theatre and the city in 2001 and, in 2004, Modern Drama published a special issue on what it called the ‘geographies of the theatre.’ Whether or not this interest constitutes anything more than a recent peak in the long waves of theatre scholarship is open to debate. More interesting, however, is whether the use of geographical categories of analysis by theatre studies actually changes what theatre scholars do, and how they do it. It is all too easy for theatre studies to fall into the cognateness trap: the (often unwitting) assumption that certain case studies are inherently more cognate than others for a spatial analysis emerging from theatre studies, and that certain geographical concepts and methods (primarily those of cultural geography) are more cognate to the analysis of these case studies than others. Theatre studies has tended to be most interested in spatial case studies when they appear to demand attention explicitly, as in the analysis of theatre architecture or environmental performance. It has also been uncertain about spatial thinking that clearly emerges from – and speaks primarily to – the social sciences. Theatre studies has often been unsure how to translate quantitative geographical findings into useful material for theatrical analysis; even when geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja are invoked, their citation tends to be of more conceptually reflective material, and not the quantitative analysis that buttresses such reflection – say, Soja’s examination of land use in Los Angeles in Postmodern Geographies. And in a final but related issue, theatre studies hasn’t seemed to know what to do with the strong streak of political economy informing much contemporary spatial analysis. It is difficult to ignore the importance of political economy in contemporary geography, but also difficult to find political economy in contemporary theatre studies. I cannot claim that this book successfully resolves all of these problems. Indeed, many of these issues are not problems at all – they are simply the logical result of the types of intellectual training that theatre scholars tend to receive, and of the critical practices that the discipline tends to valorize. But the case studies I examine here offer the opportunity to complicate this inheritance by bringing together data, concepts, and methods in distinct ways. Sometimes this involves reading extant

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materials against the grain: considering companies like Theatre Passe Muraille or Toronto Workshop Productions is hardly novel in the context of Canadian theatre studies, but spatializing their histories throws them into a different light than they have usually been viewed in, and helps us understand the complex conditions informing their actions. Other times this involves bringing together diverse empirical and theoretical materials to explore links between practices that are often not imagined to be related, whether in Canadian theatre studies, or in theatre and cultural studies in general: the relationships between political economy and programming, real estate and performance ideology, or urban development and theatrical legitimacy, to name a few. The result, I hope, makes the familiar strange, and the strange unexpectedly familiar. The Project This book examines a number of theatrical sites and enterprises, both large and small, and it does so within the context of investigating wider problems arising from the intersection of theatrical and urban space. These problems, then, inform the selection of the case studies discussed throughout; I do not attempt to survey a wide range of venues (or theatre companies or individuals associated with those venues), but, rather, explore how particular sites, enterprises, and practices elaborate the key concerns that feature in each part and in each chapter. As a result, the collection of case studies that I consider may, at first, look a little unusual: why the St Lawrence Centre but not Harbourfront? why Toronto Workshop Productions but not Tarragon? why mix not-for-profit and commercial theatres? and why discuss material that isn’t theatrical? As I will discuss below, however, my rationale for including (and excluding) certain case studies and historical data is tied to the particular theatrical and urban problems that these sites and enterprises elaborate in exemplary ways.23 Employing a geographical axis when writing theatre history may sometimes result in an unexpected arrangement of historical material and case studies, but, I hope, it also helps makes apparent connections between both performance and cultural practices that have been present, but not always visible. This being said, all of the case studies discussed in this project – and, arguably, most of the theatre sites in Toronto – are conditioned by a general physical, economic, and ideological topography of the city. I

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will address this issue in greater depth in chapter 5, but it is worth noting that the physical geography of theatre in Toronto has remained remarkably consistent over the past four decades. As figure 1 (p. xii) illustrates, most of the key theatre sites discussed in this book (along with other, related performance and entertainment venues) are located in downtown Toronto, within relatively well-defined boundaries: a four-kilometre-by-four-kilometre district bounded by Queen’s Quay to the south, Dupont Street to the north, Bathurst Street to the west, and the Don River to the east.24 This physical distribution of sites is only a snapshot of a larger picture; of the fifty-five performance venues in Toronto identified by the Toronto Theatre Alliance as either occupied by its members or suitable for its members’ productions, forty-five are located within the Queen’s Quay–Dupont–Bathurst–Don district (and several of the remainder, like the Theatre Centre, sit just on its edge). This is not entirely surprising, since the area is served by the city’s best public transportation links, and its density means that it can sustain the larger service economy (such as restaurants and bars) of which theatres are often a part. The extent to which performance and entertainment sites remain concentrated in the city core is still intriguing, though, given that much of Toronto’s population growth has been outside the older, central area, and that the majority of the city’s population lives in suburban areas some distance from this area. Moreover, the intensification of these sites within the central city has actually increased over time, and the links between sites and neighbourhoods – and sites and other sites – have deepened. Theatre companies like Theatre Passe Muraille, Buddies in Bad Times, and Tarragon have become embedded in their respective neighbourhoods, and their urban locations have often informed their self-presentation: a hip, slightly scruffy part of Queen Street (Passe Muraille), the vibrant gay and lesbian community at the intersection of Church and Wellesley Streets (Buddies), and the leafy, bourgeois domesticity of the Annex, adjacent to the University of Toronto (Tarragon). But the designation of urban zones like the Entertainment District, which crosses the southern portion of the city core, also proposes relationships between theatre and other sites that are equally persuasive and efficacious. Spatially, there is a vertical axis of affiliation and a horizontal one, and both have material effect. There are a number of complications arising from this spatial organization, however, and, at the risk of engaging in excess list-making, these become important at different points in this book. Some can be described succinctly. First, there has been little suburbanization of the-

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atre sites in Toronto, so when it has happened on any significant scale – as with the Ford Centre in North York – it is of historical interest. Second, if there has been little suburbanization of theatre sites, theatre has still been implicated in the process of suburbanization; indeed, a theatre site like that of Passe Muraille depended on suburbanization for its creation. Third, theatres are an effective index of civic self-fashioning in Toronto, and reflect cultural investments in the ‘downtown’ as a physical, ideological, and economic space. Fourth, theatre sites operate in a complex relationship with the downtown economy: at times their presence reflects dominant economic trends and models, but, at other times, their presence seems to defy market pressures in interesting ways. Other complications require more elaboration. Some performance sites have, historically, fit uneasily within Toronto’s urban environment. This requires acknowledgment, even if these sites do not feature as case studies within my project. The Harbourfront complex of theatres is a good example of such unease (as is the Hummingbird Centre, which I note in chapter 1). The Harbourfront theatres are located on Queen’s Quay, and, like the Harbourfront area itself, have had an awkward relationship with the theatrical geography of Toronto since the area’s construction started in the mid-1970s. One might suggest that the urban history of Harbourfront is actually a history of thirty years of trying to suture the area into the fabric of downtown, since it was conceived and (badly) planned entirely by the federal government, with little local involvement. The performance venues at Harbourfront are of high quality, but they have historically been expensive to rent and there has been a perception among theatre practitioners – right or wrong – that audiences are difficult to attract to the area (Soulpepper’s recent tenancy at Harbourfront may mitigate this perception somewhat, but even it has moved to new facilities elsewhere downtown). The fact that its longest-standing tenant is a biennial international theatre festival (the du Maurier World Stage) also suggests that Harbourfront has been more successful in representing itself as a transnational venue than a local one. Habourfront is undoubtedly an interesting story, since it illustrates how performance venues that reside within the urban core may still have difficulty becoming fully integrated into the theatrical geography of the city (since this relies on more than just physical location). But it should not distract attention from more modest, individual sites like the St Lawrence Centre, which helped establish the terms on which the contemporary theatrical geography of

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Toronto was founded in the first place, and which continue, subtly, to articulate changes in its shape. By extension, some local theatres, while hugely important to the history of theatre in Toronto, are not necessarily as exemplary in an urban context as one might first imagine. If one were employing a dramaturgical axis, Tarragon would be front and centre in any historiography of new play development in Toronto. But if one is investigating the way patterns of theatrical ownership have been established, legitimated, and negotiated, Tarragon is less exemplary than companies like Theatre Passe Muraille and, in a different way, Necessary Angel. This does not devalue Tarragon’s work, it simply illustrates the fact that any theatre company is more illustrative of certain historical processes than others. Finally, focusing on the urban environment offers a way to make links between the not-for-profit and commercial theatre sectors in Toronto visible. This is not to say that the distinction between these sectors no longer matters, whether in legal, economic, administrative, cultural, or aesthetic terms. But the urban geography of theatre in Toronto is dependent on the presence of both sectors, and increasingly encourages their affiliation. Canadian theatre scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the not-for-profit sector, but an urban analysis encourages us to think about ways in which, in an urban context, these sectors have become mutually constitutive and have interpenetrated. The chapters that follow, then, are organized into two parts. The first, ‘Civic Development,’ explores instances when theatre in Toronto has contributed to the city as a civic space since the late 1960s. Since the completion of the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts in 1970, civic theatre buildings have been linchpins of urban development in Toronto. Theatre has also provided a logic used metaphorically to describe, and practically to justify, certain types of economic consumption that are imagined to be civically affirmative. The case studies examined in part 1 – the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts, the Ford Centre for the Arts, and the Entertainment District – reveal that the dominant civic ideology of Toronto in the late 1960s was different from that of today, and that theatre has been implicated in this change. Put simply, at the time of the centennial, Toronto saw itself primarily as part of the nation. Today, Toronto sees itself primarily as part of the globe, and its civic self-fashioning has changed to reflect this fact. Theatre in Toronto is an effective index of the city’s attempts to adapt geographically and ideologically to economic forces over which it has had decreasing

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influence, while attempting to construct a plausible, if not always consistent, civic narrative. Part 2, ‘The Edifice Complex,’ suggests that if civic ideology in Toronto has come to be theatrically inflected, the urban environment has not been the preoccupation of large theatres alone. The title of this section is taken from a phrase used by John Juliani, who formed the experimental performance company Savage God in Vancouver and was a prominent nationalist advocate for Canadian theatre (he infamously challenged Robin Phillips to a duel upon Phillips’s appointment as artistic director of the Stratford Festival in 1975). Juliani witheringly described the Canadian high-culture industry of the 1960s and 1970s as suffering from an ‘edifice complex,’ in that the regional theatres and other major arts institutions appeared to be more concerned with the construction of grand buildings that testified to their own importance than with the vagaries of artistic development.25 But the case studies examined in this section illustrate that the edifice complex afflicted not only the regional theatre network, but also the small and mid-sized theatre industry that grew up alongside it. Fittingly, these case studies also illustrate that the condition has been rather more ‘complex’ than Juliani imagined. Companies like Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, Necessary Angel, and Buddies in Bad Times show that, in Toronto, the edifice complex has involved not simply a preoccupation with massive architecture but also a preoccupation with the difficult juncture between theatre space, built form, and property in a rapidly changing local real estate market. Part 1, then, focuses on urban performance networks, in which larger theatrical sites contribute to the greater organization, understanding, and presentation of Toronto itself. Part 2 inverts this focus: it examines smaller, individual theatrical enterprises, and asks how their sites are conditioned by the larger urban environment of which these sites are a part. Thus, theatre contributes to the city, and the city contributes to theatre. The through-line that links both parts, however, is the way in which the city comes to be conceived and represented as theatrical, while, at the same time, theatre comes to be conceived and represented as urban. As I indicated previously, each chapter is organized around particular problems arising from the intersection of theatre and the city. Chapter 1, ‘Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the Urban Development of Toronto’s Downtowns,’ examines the role of civic theatres in urban development, and, by extension, the way that

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this development has been part of the city’s adaptation to economic change. Chapter 2, ‘Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District,’ explores the way in which theatre functions as both physical and ideological linchpin in the creation of zones of urban consumption that are imagined to be civically virtuous. Chapter 3, ‘Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe Muraille,’ asks how a performance site – and its affiliated company – can serve as indices of a changing urban political economy. Chapter 4, ‘A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop Productions,’ considers how a theatrical enterprise can become a locus for competing systems of spatial value. Chapter 5, ‘Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography of Theatrical Legitimacy,’ investigates the way in which a spatial calculus has been incorporated into the determination of theatrical legitimacy in Toronto, and theorizes certain companies’ responses to a tightening real estate market. Theatre has long been practised in Toronto, but the past four decades are particularly interesting because they constitute the first period in which Toronto theatre has actively and consistently engaged its urban environment. Moreover, the city itself has come to see theatre as part of the civic enterprise in ways that it did not before 1967. As this book shows, the relationship between theatre and the city in Toronto has often been fraught and filled with unexpected twists, both great and small. These complications and surprises, however, are what make the geography of that relationship so intriguing.

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PART ONE Civic Development

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1 Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the Urban Development of Toronto’s Downtowns

After nearly two decades of continental economics and the recurring threat of federal dissolution, it is sometimes hard to imagine just how celebratory Canadian nationalism was in the late 1960s. Canada commemorated its one hundredth birthday in 1967, and the optimism embodied in projects like Expo 67 seemed to signal that the country had achieved national maturity and international stature. Centennial celebrations implied – indeed, shouted – that the Canadian federation was confident, modern, and secure, and that the able steward for the national project was a benevolent state. As in many Western countries in the late 1960s, Canada’s economic expansion was accompanied by legal liberalization, greater immigration, and an increasingly generous welfare state. In contrast to many Western countries in the late 1960s, however, the counter-cultural corollary to this modernization project did not seek to challenge significantly the supremacy of the national state. If anything, the centennial best illustrates how the ascendancy of Canadian cultural nationalism was secured by a kind of benevolent dirigisme. As one popular commentary observes: ‘The great Canadian Centennial love-in was definitely a top-down affair: an officially legislated, publicly-sponsored, impeccably choreographed national debutante ball. Compulsory attendance notwithstanding, we loved it anyway: it was probably the most fun the country ever had doing something it was told to do.’1 If that kind of national celebration seems unimaginable in Canada now (leaving aside the question of its desirability), everyday life in Canada remains equally unimaginable without the physical legacy of that time. Centennial projects married a familiar practice of pork-barrel beneficence with an Oedipal rationale for cultural institution-building:

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the country would throw off its colonial inheritance (seen as a kind of infantile disorder) by constructing ‘something for everyone, everywhere in Canada.’ Scores of public schools, ice arenas, and swimming pools built across the country would contribute to personal development, while ‘concert halls, museums, art galleries, libraries and cultural centres’ would, at the local level, redress a perceived lack of collective cultural development.2 Expo 67 may have been the grandest national symbol of the centennial, but the many smaller civic building projects funded in the name of the centenary remain the most enduring and useful local benefit of national patronage. The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts (SLC) was one of the centennial’s major cultural projects, and was built as Toronto’s first civic theatre facility on the eastern edge of the city’s Central Business District (CBD). The $5.2 million complex housed two performance spaces (an 830-seat auditorium and a 480-seat auditorium) and was the first theatre facility built in Toronto specifically for a resident company, one assembled by a not-for-profit, city-governed agency called the Toronto Arts Foundation. Construction began in 1967 after demolition of a row of nineteenth-century buildings on Front Street East, and the SLC finally opened in 1970 under the directorship of Mavor Moore, a longtime advocate for theatre in Canada and a prominent supporter of the SLC project. Four of the five plays staged that first season were Canadian, a nationalist programming practice for which many theatre practitioners had agitated, but which was only beginning to gain legitimacy among Toronto companies at the time.3 While the construction of the SLC marked the beginning of profound changes in theatrical production in Toronto, 1967 also heralded the first major victory for Toronto’s nascent urban reform movement. The Friends of Old City Hall helped prevent the sale and demolition of the former city hall, thereby inaugurating a powerful political constituency whose focus was the preservation and streetscape-sensitive development of downtown Toronto. Since 1967 a significant number of the most fractious political struggles in Toronto have been over what former mayor John Sewell calls ‘the shape of the city.’4 Well-organized political coalitions and their allies on city council have consistently ensured that city form in general, and the downtown in particular, are central preoccupations of Toronto’s local political imaginary. The intersection of these events – one theatrical and one urban – is more than just chronological. If 1967 is the year when urban development assumed a prominent position in Toronto’s political conscious-

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ness, the centennial also marks the last moment that the national state built cultural institutions in a systematic fashion (and here I mean ‘built’ both administratively and physically, in the sense of creating what geographers call a built environment). Though the SLC was a metonym of national cultural development, it was also an act of civic development, and its construction illustrates how a civic discourse may help cement a link between theatre-building and urban development after the nationalist impulse that first brought them together has faded. Furthermore, if the meaning of the civic in Toronto after 1967 often signified a struggle over the development of the city’s built environment, then it is worth asking if the SLC, as a civic theatre, played a role in that struggle. Does the ‘civic’ in ‘civic theatre’ signify a theatrical intervention in Toronto’s urban development? It is also worth asking if the other, more recently developed, civic theatre in Toronto played a role in the urban development of its neighbourhood, and, if so, how this civic theatre interprets the relationship between theatre and the city. The North York Performing Arts Centre (NYPAC) was completed in 1993 in downtown North York, a suburban city built after the Second World War north of the old city core. Like the City of Toronto, North York was an autonomous municipality within the Metropolitan Toronto federation until Metro’s constituent cities were amalgamated into a single city in 1998. NYPAC was built by North York at a cost of approximately $30 million, and was renamed the Ford Centre for the Arts when the Ford Motor Company purchased the right to name it soon after opening. North York built the Ford Centre as the artistic component of its downtown development scheme, through which the municipality attempted to create a city centre along a four-kilometre stretch of Yonge Street by building public facilities, shopping centres, condominiums, and commercial office blocks. The Ford Centre is a much larger facility than the SLC, and comprises a main theatre auditorium that seats 1800 spectators, a concert hall, an art gallery, and a small black-box theatre. Though owned by the City of North York, the Ford Centre was operated by the LivEntertainment Corporation (Livent) until Livent’s bankruptcy in 1998, and was the first home to productions of Sunset Boulevard, Ragtime, and Showboat that later transferred to Broadway. Confusingly, the facility was renamed again in 2000 as the Toronto Centre for the Arts (TCA). Unified Toronto, which assumed ownership of the complex after amalgamation, chose not to retain the Ford Centre name once Livent was no longer the resident producing company.5 The

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TCA is now marketed as a rental facility, though without a resident commercial producer it is dark many nights and incurs significant losses. The TCA may be a civic arts facility, but meeting its high operating costs was always predicated on its occupation by a major forprofit theatre producer, and without such a producer the complex has struggled to find firm economic and artistic footing. My analysis focuses primarily on the period when the complex functioned as the Ford Centre for the Arts, since it is in this guise that the facility best articulates the civic and urban aspirations of a transnational downtown (although its present situation is not without significance in this context either). ‘Civic theatre’ means different things at different historical moments, and comparing the SLC and the Ford Centre as urban developments reveals various materializations of the designation in Toronto since 1967. As the title of this chapter implies, the SLC is a form of national urban development and the Ford Centre a form of transnational suburban development. By this I mean that the SLC is a last gasp of cultural and urban planning by the Fordist nation-state. But the SLC is also a civic bridge to the transnational, post-Fordist understanding of the relationship between theatre and cities that the Ford Centre represents (somewhat ironically, given its name). These civic theatres, then, have helped mediate macro-economic transformation at the local level through the socially affirmative values they bear, and the built form they embody. Each centre is an index of how civic theatre-building can be used strategically as part of urban core development to soften the upheavals that this development may bring or represent, and to reinscribe the civic ideal of downtown that is dear to many Torontonians. Ideologies of Civic Theatre Civic theatres can provoke the response that theatre and local politics are not, or should not be, compatible. Denis Johnston, in his analysis of theatre in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s, argues that the SLC ‘was conceived by civic planners, unlike most Canadian theatres, and has been cursed with civic politics ever since.’6 The implication that the SLC was the brainchild of city planners is not altogether historically accurate, and neither is Johnston’s claim that it was cursed by city politics. As Johnston himself admits, the SLC was the ‘Holy Grail of local professional theatre’ during the 1960s.7 Theatre practitioners

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were as much in favour of the St Lawrence Centre as city planners were, and the involvement of city planners in a civic theatre project did not necessarily mean that their urban concerns were in conflict with the theatrical desires of the time. Johnston assumes that civic politics are opposed to and, he implies, taint theatre projects, but this is untrue both in a broad historical sense and in the specific case of the SLC. Civic theatres, and cultural institutions generally, have historically contributed to the civic as a social and urban ideal. These contributions can be grouped in three ways. First, art’s ‘strong affirmative tendencies toward reconciliation with the established reality,’ as Herbert Marcuse puts it, reinforce civic ideals of citizenship within an idealized public sphere.8 Second, cultural institution-building often affirms the economic dominance of capitalist urban development within the city. Third, theatre-building in Toronto affirms the centrality of the downtown – as both a physical and imaginary space – in creating a sense of civic well-being. Together these affiliations create a sense of urban affluence, where civic theatre-building offers an ideal of civic accord that compensates for the anxieties of economic change. Stacy Wolf points out that the affiliation of theatre with the civic has not usually been dissonant in Western societies. In her perceptive analysis of the civic arts centre in Madison, Wisconsin, Wolf argues that cultural institution-building plays an important ideological role in creating affirmative civic ideals of citizenship, whether or not people actually attend the theatre: ‘Rather than constituting a daily social practice for most people, “the arts” remain in the realm of values. Still, they carry an ethical force, not unlike religion or moral goodness. “The arts,” a general, undifferentiated, seemingly unpoliticized notion, are assumed to be significant and positive. Art, in theory, creates good citizens.’9 Wolf cites Rosalyn Deutsche’s observation that cultural production frequently buttresses the civilizing impulse of modern urban development: ‘The presence of “the aesthetic” – whether embodied in artworks, architectural style, urban design, or museums – helps give redevelopment democratic legitimacy, since, like “the public,” “art” often connotes universality openness, inclusion.’10 Examples of this occur repeatedly in Western theatre history; for example, the city Dionysia – a type of civic performance – is often at the core of historical narratives about Western performance. Carlson argues that Western theatre practice and cities have frequently constituted a mutually legitimating symbolic economy (particularly in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance), or have intersected as oppositional spaces through

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which civil society might be formed (particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).11 Urban theorists have also been concerned with how cultural production and urbanization might be linked to create good citizens, something that is not surprising considering these theorists emerge from an intellectual tradition that frequently considers urbanization a civilizing force in itself. H.D.F. Kitto, whose work has been studied within both theatre and urban studies, argues that the Greek polis exemplifies a civilized social formation because it attempted to be ‘an active, formative thing, training the minds and characters of the citizens’ through their participation in an urban public sphere. The city, Kitto claims, has been more important as an ideal of ‘common cultural life’ than as a ‘political unit,’ and ‘the drama’ played a crucial role in establishing the notion that ‘the polis [was] open to all.’12 Henri Pirenne suggests that cities and cultural products together helped create an ideal of social mobility in late medieval Europe, one that would later inform the egalitarian principles of liberal democracy. He argues that cultural production was the corollary to European urbanization; the development of cultural products helped create an urban laity where ‘the burgher was initiated ... long before the noble.’13 Aesthetic and civic discourses have often been mutually affirmative, and so it is necessary to be sceptical of claims, implicit or explicit, that civic politics taint theatre projects. On the contrary, theatre and the arts have helped form the social ideals that civic politics promote more often than not. While the affiliation of arts projects and cities has helped create affirmative ideals of citizenship, this affiliation may also help create a chauvinistic sense of the civic that is economically affirmative. Urban sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch advance the concept of ‘place patriotism’ to explain this process. They argue that place patriotism occurs when property-value inflation is linked with cultural institution-building to create sentiments of local well-being. Logan and Molotch make a compelling case for the building of cultural institutions in the city as part of an urban ‘growth coalition’ of capitalists and their allies in city governments. In their formulation, cultural institutions marshal localist sentiments in favour of projects that can then be used as levers for private capital investment in the areas surrounding them: The growth machine avidly supports whatever cultural institutions can play a role in building locality. Always ready to oppose social and political

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developments contrary to their interests ... rentiers and their associates encourage activities that will connect feelings of community ... to the goal of local growth ... We do not mean to suggest that the only source of civic pride is the desire to collect rents; certainly the cultural pride of tribal groups predates growth machines. Nevertheless, the growth machine coalition mobilizes these cultural motivations, legitimizes them, and channels them into activities that are consistent with growth goals.14

Logan and Molotch note that arts centres were used as ‘development leverage’ during the 1980s in downtown Miami, Tampa, and Dallas, and cite a Dallas newspaper comment that ‘[t]he feeling persists that the arts have been appropriated here primarily to sell massive real estate development.’15 One could make the same statement about the Ford Centre in Toronto, the 42nd Street development in New York City, and the State Street development in Chicago. Logan and Molotch argue that the encouragement of place patriotism links arts projects with sentiments of civic well-being, while simultaneously enriching private developers and salving the anxieties provoked by economic change.16 If Logan and Molotch allow us to see how arts projects are inserted into an urban cash economy, they also point to (but do not expand on) the way that those projects might contribute to a sense of local wellbeing. In Toronto, place patriotism and civic theatres meet downtown. Toronto’s civic theatres help define and entrench capitalist land-use areas that are called downtowns and their presence becomes evidence of an ontological ‘downtown-ness’ that pleases the local urban subject. This practice is not confined to theatre spaces – it is relevant to the function of cultural institutions in downtown redevelopment in general – but civic theatres are particularly useful from an urban planning and security perspective, since, unlike art galleries or museums, they tend to attract affluent citizens to an area at night. Downtown may be an area where legitimate economic transactions take place (and illegitimate economic transactions are nervously accommodated), but it is also an ideal to which many Torontonians are fiercely dedicated. For proof of this attachment, one need only look to the contemporary history of urban activism in Toronto, much of which has been focused on the downtown core. An early victory was stopping the extension of the Spadina Expressway through old neighbourhoods in Toronto’s core. A more recent example is the vocal opposition by many residents of the former City of Toronto to the provincial government’s amalgamation of the metropolitan federation into a unified

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municipal government in 1998. Many downtown residents feared that the suburban cities would collectively impose more market-led planning regulations after amalgamation, effectively eliminating the ideal and form of downtown to which many Torontonians subscribed.17 The fight was undoubtedly over who would control, in John Sewell’s phrase, ‘the shape of the city.’18 An allegiance to downtown should not, however, be viewed strictly as the preserve of residents of the former City of Toronto. Downtown North York was built by the City of North York to achieve the sense of civic distinctiveness that seemed to be missing as a result of its lowdensity, post–Second World War suburban planning. North York was Toronto’s second city in terms of population, but, in terms of urban planning, was practically indistinguishable from Scarborough and Etobicoke, the other large suburban communities that make up Toronto. North York thought that building a downtown would differentiate it from Toronto’s other suburbs and give the city a distinct civic identity. For many years North York had promoted itself as ‘the city with a heart,’ and the construction of a downtown gave an advertising slogan physical and sentimental form. North York could point to its downtown as evidence of its civic identity and self-confidence. Throughout Toronto, then, downtowns are sites where the investment of capital produces both money value and sentimental value that exceed the boundaries of downtown. The benefits of downtown investment accrue beyond its borders and beyond any purely cash measure. But the ways in which theatre became involved in such civic investment were historically specific. For the SLC, the major impetus came from a then small and financially precarious profession of local theatre practitioners, and it is germane that the SLC was proposed and built during a liminal period in Toronto’s professional theatre economy. For the Ford Centre, the major impetus was as much urban as it was cultural; it was conceived as part of North York’s checklist of civic, commercial, and artistic developments through which the City hoped to inscribe an uninspiring stretch of Yonge Street with the economic and symbolic resonances of a downtown. In the cases of both civic theatres, however, theatrical and urban motives proved amenable to each other. The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts was adopted as the City of Toronto’s official centennial project, and was conceived on a much larger

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scale than what was finally built. The complex was originally planned as a community centre that would not only incorporate larger auditoria than were actually constructed, but also include meeting spaces for community groups, space for ‘town hall’ gatherings, and extensive facilities for technical theatre production. It was one of many such projects across Canada: other theatre complexes built with centennial money and styled in the poured-concrete vernacular of Brutalist architecture include the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg (1969) and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa (1970).19 The SLC was bound up with centralized national macro-economic planning – centennial projects were perhaps the most organized and concentrated extension of the welfare state through physical form that Canada has seen. It is important to emphasize that the welfare state should not be seen as antithetical to capitalism, but, rather, as the means through which public and private capital investment is coordinated at the local level. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel chart the relationship between increasing levels of welfare-state provision and rapid economic growth among industrialized countries during the 1960s and 1970s, and their data show that Canada was no different in this regard.20 As an element of welfare-state provision, the SLC was part of the national state’s desire to fuel economic growth through a country-wide building program. But the SLC also illustrates how the sentimental overtures of centennial projects resonated locally: centennial projects linked national patriotism to local place patriotism. A civic theatre bequeathed by the nation-state implies that cultural institution-building plays an important role in celebrating that nation. The fulfilment of this role by cultural institutions is also predicated on these institutions being granted in the name of the local community, binding national celebration to civic boosterism through state investment. Plans for the SLC, however, were greeted with enormous political and public scepticism. Johnston notes: As debates raged and cost estimates rose ... the scope of the enterprise was steadily whittled down to overcome vehement political opposition at City Hall. In fact, the Centre had become a political football: it was a major issue in two successive mayoralty campaigns, was subjected to innumerable revisions, and was cancelled entirely at least twice. By 1967, with no agreement in sight, the St Lawrence Centre had become (to many Torontonians) a symbol of the city’s short-sighted stinginess in cultural matters, especially when compared to Montreal’s glorious Expo.21

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Debate over the SLC frequently split along lines that had become welldefined through public responses to the Massey Commission Report in 1951: a high-minded call for state patronage and cultural progress, contrasted with a denunciation of perceived social elites.22 In fact, it was Toronto’s artistic elite, led by Toronto Arts Foundation director Mavor Moore, that persuaded the City to push through the SLC project later in 1967; by that point many members of city council were embarrassed at the possibility of Toronto’s civic undertaking being left out of the centennial building boom, and Moore had managed to recruit some private funding for the project. The final result, though, was significantly watered down, and, at a cost of $5.2 million was ‘far less than other centennial projects of comparable stature.’23 The meeting space for community groups was eliminated entirely, along with the technical facilities. The only remnants of the original plan were two multipurpose auditoria, both of which, when opened in 1970, turned out to be concrete boxes whose poor sightlines and dismal acoustics barely acknowledged that performance was their intended use. Toronto’s theatre professionals, however, had won a victory by persuading a reluctant city that cultural institution-building was worthy of national and civic sponsorship. By being built downtown, the SLC provided visible evidence that the professional theatre industry in Toronto occupied a prominent place in the city’s urban consciousness, and made the arts a significant concern of the municipal state in Toronto for the first time (though the SLC’s civic alliance with that state also unwittingly symbolized a cultural coziness against which new, smaller companies would later define themselves). This embodiment of theatrical and municipal confidence was particularly important considering the precarious economic condition of much of the professional and semi-professional – by which I mean waged and partwaged – theatre in Toronto in the mid- to late 1960s. Toronto’s professional and semi-professional theatre industry through most of the 1960s could be divided into three broad groups: the commercial sector, dominated by Broadway and West End touring shows at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the O’Keefe Centre; the ‘serious drama’ stock companies, the most prominent of which were the Crest Theatre, Red Barn Theatre, and the Canadian Players; and, finally, a tiny and economically (if not artistically) marginal small-theatre sector that mostly consisted of one company, the leftist Toronto Workshop Productions. Because of its emphasis on touring shows, the commercial sector employed relatively few local theatre practitioners, and the size of the

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small-theatre sector at this time was simply too modest to provide much work. This left the stock companies to claim the mantle of ‘Toronto theatre,’ if for no other reason than they provided local practitioners with the most employment and best embodied an Arnoldian ideal of theatre practice that dominated Toronto’s aspirant high culture at the time: the presentation and celebration of the theatrical touchstones of Western cultural development. But the case of the Crest Theatre illustrates how this sector was faltering in the mid-1960s. The Crest was the leading stock company in Toronto during the 1950s and for much of the 1960s, mandated to ‘provide repertory theatre in Toronto comparable with the best of British repertory companies.’24 The Crest’s mandate, then, was both high cultural in its aims and derivative in its repertoire, and though it produced more plays than any other local company in the 1950s and 1960s, its work was increasingly seen as dramaturgically stale and unimaginatively staged. Nathan Cohen, the influential Toronto Star newspaper theatre critic, waged a lengthy campaign against what he believed to be the Crest’s smug mediocrity; Cohen saw the work of George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Productions, with its roots in agit-prop and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, as charting a much more promising path for theatre in Toronto. Even the Canada Council, the national foundation that had been established by Louis St Laurent’s Liberal government in 1957 to fund the type of high culture that the Crest represented, called the Crest’s work ‘indifferent’ and withdrew its subsidy in 1964.25 The company lurched along for two more seasons, merged with the Canadian Players in 1966, and finally collapsed, debt-ridden, before the amalgamated company produced a single show. Apart from a few shows presented by Theatre Toronto, a company formed out of the ashes of Canadian Crest Players, the stock sector in Toronto was exhausted by 1966. The stock companies’ artists, however, were still strong local advocates for professional theatre, and the two directors of the Toronto Arts Foundation, Mavor Moore and Leon Major, were Crest veterans. The SLC provided an opportunity to assume the mantle of high culture in Toronto, but under the new rubric of a civic theatre company. However grudging the final result was politically and physically, the SLC provided two badly needed performance spaces downtown and a home for a new theatre company that would take up the gauntlet of ‘mainstream’ drama from the stock companies. The theatrical motives behind the SLC also engendered a shift in the relationship between

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high culture, the national state, and the municipal state in Toronto: the SLC allied one important stream of Toronto’s professional theatre industry much closer with the municipal state than it had been previously. The changes to the built form of the SLC through the planning process indicate that, in the creation of Toronto’s civic centre, theatre space was privileged over space for community groups. One possible explanation for this is that the theatre spaces were not anticipated by the municipal government to be politically dissonant, whereas the community-use space could easily be just that. Toronto’s urban reform movement was gaining ground by organizing neighbourhood groups to oppose the actions of the municipal government at the time the SLC was being planned, and it is not surprising that, given the political anger directed at city politicians, the municipal state would be reluctant – consciously or unconsciously – to extend civic sponsorship to building space that could be used to organize against it. The theatre spaces, by contrast, posed no such threat, and this is best illustrated by the fact that the smaller auditorium was named the ‘Town Hall.’ Its name demonstrated that theatre space was conceived as civically affirmative space. The SLC also signalled a shift in the way that different state apparati in Canada structured their patronage of high culture. If the Canada Council grew impatient with the artistic work of the Crest, the Council still had an institutional desire to fill Toronto’s ‘regional theatre’ quota (the Canada Council has historically provided funding to larger companies that it considers to have an appeal beyond their immediate locality). Toronto lacked a regional theatre until the Toronto Arts Foundation formed its company, and the creation of a civic company backed financially by the city lent the project an institutional legitimacy that its artistic predecessors lacked. Moreover, the abandonment of a nationalist programming philosophy after the first season symbolically weakened the artistic connection between the civic theatre and the nation-state.26 Inching towards the civic did not necessarily mean that theatre was wholly embraced by the municipal state – the city government, responsible for the Foundation’s deficits, divested itself of the production company and retained control over the SLC as a physical plant – but even in its ambivalence towards the civic theatre project, the implications of the theatrical and urban form of the civic theatre company increasingly registered within a municipal context.27 Insofar as that municipal context meant a changing downtown, the built form of the SLC straddled the national and the local, but was

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more important in stressing the importance of the civic at a time when downtown Toronto was starting to shed its Fordist features. The part of downtown immediately adjacent to the SLC illustrates this transformation best. The SLC is located at the southeastern corner of Front Street and Scott Street on the eastern border of Toronto’s financial district, an area stretching from Front Street north to Queen Street, and from Simcoe Street east to Scott Street. The SLC was built at the same time as a major development boom in the district, when, according to Gad, a growing property-development industry financed intensive skyscraper-building in the city core on a scale previously unknown.28 Extrapolating Metropolitan Toronto employment data, Gad argues that it was only in the 1960s that the downtown business core actually became a financial district: In 1951 the present financial district was still the general office district of the metropolitan area. Soon afterwards, however, various offices began to relocate, including several life insurance company head offices, the offices of architects, consulting engineers, advertising agencies, publishers, the head and sales offices of manufacturing companies, and others. Only at this stage did the label ‘financial district’ become justified. Office employment figures for 1970 and 1989 show a continuing trend toward specialization. Jobs in the finance, insurance, and real estate group of industries and in business services have more than doubled in the financial district and have significantly increased their shares of employment.29

Gad claims that ‘[t]his small part of Toronto is undoubtedly the focal point of the Canadian financial system,’ and notes that, of the one hundred largest financial institutions listed by the Financial Post in 1989, thirty-nine had their head or executive offices in the financial district (and eleven more had their head offices somewhere in Toronto). These financial institutions include ‘the majority of Canada’s chartered banks, foreign banks, and trust companies.’30 The dominance of financial services and real estate development contrasts with the subordinance of manufacturing companies: of the thirty-nine head offices in the financial district in 1989, only three were in manufacturing-based industries, and two have since left.31 The urban corollary to the financial district’s development is the stretch of small, upmarket retail shops along Front Street that begins at Scott Street and ends, two blocks east, at the St Lawrence Market. This part of Front Street, which was redeveloped in the 1970s, can be seen as

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the local compensation for the increasingly transnational development next door. The SLC, in terms of its built form and the audiences it attracts, helped smooth the neighbourhood’s transition from one where mercantile wholesalers supplied regional businesses to one where retailing was geared to upscale shoppers and sidewalk flâneurs (many of whom worked in the towers next door). As a facility, the SLC is wedged into a lot at the corner of Front and Scott Streets. Architecture critic Patricia McHugh comments that the complex is in the style of ‘[a]rchitectural Brutalism, with musty-coloured, right-out-of-themold concrete slabs weightily pronouncing a message of 1960s avantgarde vigour.’32 Its form is contextually contrapuntal: neighbouring buildings are rehabilitated Renaissance Revival commercial buildings constructed in the 1870s, and their architecture emphasizes mercantile exchange through large display windows, strong vertical lines, and fine decorative embellishment. They are the confident physical articulation of late-nineteenth-century petty-bourgeois capitalism in Toronto. The concrete exterior of the SLC, however, fits within the architectural vernacular of the post–Second World War Canadian welfare state. But unlike other examples of Brutalism in Toronto – such as the isolated and forbidding John Robarts Library at the University of Toronto – the SLC is not indifferent to it surroundings. The site demolished to allow for the SLC was small, and so the Centre squeezes up against its neighbours and opens directly onto Front Street. The SLC only offers a minimal amount of parking in a privately operated lot behind the building, and the public entrance to the Centre is from the sidewalk on Front Street. Though constructed of massive materials, the SLC eschews the stereotypical modernist disdain for the streetscape and maintains both a contrapuntal and complementary relationship to its surroundings. The SLC and Front Street articulate the change from Fordist to flexible-accumulation capitalism through built form. If much of the downtown core was devoted to offices during the 1950s and 1960s, Front Street provided the wholesale goods that the nearby offices distributed or required. Front Street started to decline as a wholesaling area when the offices on the street started to disappear, and the public sector’s investment helped generate use value by encouraging a new kind of petty-bourgeois consumption (the SLC has always housed theatre companies that attract affluent audiences – ticket prices for its current tenant, Canadian Stage Company, are mostly in the $60–$70 range at the time of writing). Five addresses were demolished to make way for

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construction. These housed a grocery wholesaler, a tea and coffee merchant, a textile supplier, an asbestos installer, and a business furniture manufacturer. None of these business categories is represented in the Central Business District anymore; the SLC was constructed as many of these types of companies vacated the financial core. The SLC was, and remains, a city-owned theatre complex housing a not-for-profit theatre company, but it smoothed the transition from a Fordist to post-Fordist urban economy by helping to train the populace for a new type of commodity consumption. The Centre helped establish the pattern of affluent, individual consumption that transformed Front Street into a strip of artisanal, boutique, and recreational shopping, thereby ensuring the presence of flâneurs in the central business district as it evolved first into a truly national, and then into an international, financial district. The attraction of such people was key, since their activities were consumption-driven and theatrically analogous: flâneurs represent a highly desirable type of affluent social activity in the maintenance of vibrant city districts, since they both consume and spectate, something akin to what a theatre-goer does. The SLC also responded to the neighbourhood’s changing use through modifications to its own built form. The City of Toronto closed the SLC in 1981 for major renovations and reopened it two years later after a $5.8 million refurbishment. The Centre had suffered from the familiar problems of multipurpose auditoria built in the 1960s: a spartan, concrete lobby and auditorium, a marked architectural division between audience and stage in the main theatre, and poor acoustics and sightlines. But the renovations reveal the SLC’s increasing anticipation of an urban economy that linked local and transnational consumption. The façade of the building was opened up somewhat to Front Street, with larger display windows punched through the concrete that could feature promotional materials for the resident theatre company, and that better incorporated the SLC into the commercial landscape of the street (a renovation in 1999 dispensed with opaque exterior walls altogether in favour of a solid glass façade, further dismantling barriers between the Centre and its neighbourhood).33 The renovated lobby, with its cream-coloured walls, wood trim, brass rails, and potted plants, now resembles the interior of an early-1980s transnational hotel such as a Hilton or a Sheraton. The SLC’s lobby suggests that renovations were undertaken for an urban subject who is comfortable with both the locality of Front Street and the transience of a transnational hotel chain. Furthermore, the shops on Front Street are

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beginning to mix the local with the transnational: Starbucks and Blockbuster Video have opened outlets amid Front Street’s boutiques and outdoor-equipment suppliers. The SLC and Front Street are now part of a financial and service-sector economy that attempts to link local and transnational political and cultural economies seamlessly. This link, however, is not as easily made as Front Street’s affluent streetscape implies, and the SLC’s marquee can sometimes draw these tensions sharply into relief: when the Canadian Stage Company produced Stephen Sondheim’s Passion in 1997 on the main stage, the Jane Mallet Theatre (as the Town Hall was renamed in 1985) hosted a public forum on the effects of neo-liberal economics entitled ‘Workers’ Rights: How Low Can Standards Go?’ The affluent civic theatre, which produces an increasingly transnational repertoire, coexists with a political forum trying to deal with the economic effects of transnationalism, in whose name neo-liberal governments in Canada have dismantled protections that were at the heart of the post-war Canadian welfare state. The SLC implies that it is a space in which tensions between these two events can be accommodated. But the civic reconciliation it attempts effaces the resident theatre company’s own participation in a transnational theatre economy through which Sondheim circulates, and takes place against the urban backdrop of a solid wall of banking towers, whose occupants have been some of the most powerful advocates for transnationalism. The SLC offers the hope of a sentimental accord that the transnational economy does not. The realization of this consensus, however, is at best a daunting challenge, and at worst a naive aspiration. The Ford Centre for the Arts The Ford Centre, in contrast, has no anxieties about transnationalism. It articulates the relationship between economic investment, urban form, and theatre practice very differently from the SLC: if the SLC nervously attempts to bridge the Fordist and post-Fordist city, the Ford Centre culturally embraces an urban capitalism based on international flexible accumulation. The Ford Centre may have been the cultural component of a massive downtown creation (and not redevelopment, or renewal) scheme for North York. It may also have been funded solely by the City of North York. But the profits generated by the Ford Centre were always intended to accrue to a transnational theatrical production company. As with the SLC, imperatives of urban

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and cultural development intersected in the construction of the Ford Centre, but the facility is a transnational complex in both motivation and result. Of the suburbs within the former Metropolitan Toronto, North York emerged as the second city in the metropolitan federation, in terms of both population (563,000) and economic activity.34 In 1981 the city began to plan the creation of a downtown on Yonge Street between Sheppard and Finch Avenues, in an attempt to transform the geographic centre of the city into its economic and symbolic heart. Urban analyst Peter Gorrie describes the neighbourhood before its development as downtown North York: ‘The area remained little more than a local shopping street despite an influx of hundreds of thousands of people ... The newcomers did not consider it an attraction, or the centre of their community. Most worked elsewhere and travelled to downtown Toronto or the growing number of regional malls for shopping and entertainment.’35 A massive development project knitted together new office construction, a subway station, city hall, central public library, board of education offices, aquatics centre, skating rink, shopping mall, and art gallery around a central square on Yonge Street. The development also included a new performing arts centre. As Bob Yuill, the North York controller, said at the time, ‘If we’re going to be a city like we say we are, we’ve got to get some culture out here.’36 Gorrie characterizes this frenzy of building, begun in 1984 and largely completed in 1993, as a ‘high-speed attempt to re-establish the basic physique of the city.’37 This is an intriguing comment because a city cannot ‘re-establish’ an urban form that it never assumed in the first place; so downtown North York’s attempt to instal an older urban pattern should be seen as civically nostalgic rather than rehabilitative. Furthermore, by stating that there is a ‘basic physique of the city,’ Gorrie denotes the way in which North York invoked a supposedly agreed-upon urban ideal, for which the old City of Toronto served as a local model. By centralizing a checklist of civic, commercial, and cultural projects, North York hoped to inscribe an urban area with the economic and sentimental resonances of downtown that the older city core privileged. The Ford Centre also illustrates a change in the relationship between the state and capital between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. By the time the Ford Centre was built, local growth had largely ceased to be a concern of national economic development. Growth had become, instead, an issue largely of municipal development. There are several

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reasons for this. The federal government shed its stake in the shape of Canadian cities when it abolished the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs in 1979, and though there have been more recent attempts to reestablish national participation in urban affairs, these moves have been tentative at best (and have largely been driven by pressures from the cities themselves, rather than initiated at a national level). At the same time, the burgeoning wealth of the cities that made up Metropolitan Toronto made sole funding by local government of large-scale economic development increasingly possible during the 1980s. Moreover, if the Canadian welfare state once sought to provide social benefits on a universal basis (however haphazardly), the election of a Conservative federal government in 1984 signalled the end of universalism as a state ideal and severed the link between local growth and national economic planning. The 1989 Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States, and the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, which included Mexico, made such planning nearly impossible. Finally, as Saskia Sassen points out, global migrations of capital, commodities, and people are increasingly focused on urban, not national, destinations.38 In the hope of capturing capital investment (and individual capitalists), Canadian cities now have little choice but to provide elaborate infrastructure out of local funds, infrastructure that once would have been provided mostly by provincial or federal governments. North York did not simply finance the Ford Centre through the municipal tax base, as Canadian cities normally funded infrastructure projects during the Fordist period.39 Instead, the City largely financed the Ford Centre through a complex land deal that depended on the increasing value of the area’s commercial real estate market. When the Conservative provincial government of Bill Davis decided to build a domed sports stadium (later named SkyDome) in the old downtown south of Front Street West, Mel Lastman, then mayor of North York (a Conservative and subsequent mayor of the amalgamated Toronto), extracted a parcel of provincial land next to North York city hall in 1985 as his political price for the government’s failure to build the stadium in North York. This parcel of land was the northwest corner of a larger, provincially owned block at 5000 Yonge Street, and it was here that the City of North York proposed to build a new arts centre. The portion of land the Province kept, however, was potentially more valuable than the one given to the City; unlike the North York plot, it bordered Yonge Street and so would fetch a higher price from private

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developers if sold for commercial office development. The Province looked like the clear winner in this arrangement: it kept the most valuable piece of real estate, while appearing generous to an important local politician, Lastman. The ostensible benefit for North York, though, was that its site retained building density rights that the proposed arts centre, which would only be a few storeys high, would not use. These density rights could then be sold to any developers of the Yonge Street plot, who could, in turn, build taller towers than otherwise would have been permitted under the City’s official plan. The more inflated the local commercial property market became, the more these rights were worth, and the City of North York initially valued them at $12 million, and later at $17 million. The City intended to use this development income to pay for the proposed arts centre, the cost of which had first been estimated at $16 million. The City of North York got its money, though not quite in the way it anticipated. A new, Liberal provincial government was elected shortly after the land deal was brokered. The new government, however, was not interested in joint sales to developers that involved both provincial land and municipal density rights. Instead, it wanted to have the ability to develop 5000 Yonge Street on its own, and as a complete package – land plus increased density rights. As a result, the Province purchased North York’s surplus density rights for itself, and did so at their then market value: $17 million. The funding of the arts centre relied, therefore, on the increasing value of the local commercial real estate market. There was little chance of it being built without this development revenue, since the City was, arguably, engaged in a financial shell game to make the project politically palatable and consistent with the fiscal image it wanted to promote of itself. Although the City of North York was a relatively wealthy municipality, the political climate had become very sensitive about expenditure from the property tax base. Lastman, furthermore, encouraged the idea that North York could be both parsimonious with the City treasury but beneficent with civic projects. The key, then, was to spend municipal money, but make it appear as though no cost accrued to the City. This became particularly important for the arts centre, a controversial project whose estimated cost was rising rapidly (the project’s final budget turned out to be $48 million, four times the initial estimate). Lastman gloated that the arts centre would not cost North York a penny: ‘Anybody can go out and build things that cost millions of dollars, but to do it without spending taxpayer’s money is

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something else again.’40 This claim was plausible only because the City had kept the proceeds from the density sale in a separate, interestbearing account, and had not counted them as part of general municipal revenue. It was also an economic fiction – these proceeds undoubtedly belonged to the people of North York and were being spent without having been accounted for financially or politically. And it conveniently elided the fact that the whole scheme had been made possible in the first place through a provincial land donation and by spending provincial taxpayers’ money – which included contributions from the residents of North York – at commercially determined rates.41 Funding a multi-million-dollar arts project through ear-marked development revenues usefully mystified the sponsorship of cultural institution-building. It not only appeared as though the complex were being built with free money, it also made the terms on which the local population could claim symbolic ownership of the civic theatre more problematic. Though North York legally owned the Ford Centre, the City of North York played no direct role in overseeing its financial administration, and the facility’s elaborate design specifications were largely dictated by Livent, which had been awarded its management contract. Like the SLC, the Ford Centre was owned by the City. Unlike the SLC, though, the Ford Centre was financed entirely by the City, which then contracted its operation to a transnational theatre production company that subsequently operated Ford Centres in Vancouver, New York, and Chicago. It is not hard to imagine the appeal of the Ford Centre to Livent: it avoided the substantial costs of building a theatre, and, in return for a management fee to the City of North York, it gained a rent-free home for its productions and the income generated by rental fees for the Centre’s venues. Thus, the construction of the Ford Centre not only made civic cultural institution-building dependent on rising commercial property values (while obfuscating the terms of state sponsorship), the facility also served as a medium through which North York paid an indirect subsidy to a transnational, for-profit theatre production company. This suggests that civic theatrebuilding had become preferable, and perhaps only permissible, when the municipal state effaced the terms of its own participation in the sponsorship process, or effectively subsidized the costs of a for-profit company to enable the theatre’s construction. As a for-profit enterprise, Livent sat outside the institutional network of national, provincial, and municipal arts agencies that the SLC’s tenants always have. This institutional network, in which many

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Toronto not-for-profit theatres reside, includes the federal Ministry of National Heritage, the provincial culture department, and funding bodies like the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.42 Different state apparati were more interested in the Ford Centre as a lure for American tourists: television advertisements about Toronto’s ‘arts scene’ aired in Chicago in the late 1990s featured the Ford Centre prominently; notably, none of Toronto’s notfor-profit theatre companies was represented, in spite of the fact that they account for a large part of the city’s theatre scene. Whereas the SLC is largely adjunct to urban capital formation – it buttresses investment in an urban area but generates no surplus value itself – the Ford Centre was designed to create surplus value within itself, and reveals the city’s role in supporting transnational capital flows. A civic theatre like the Ford Centre may have been a sign of urban affluence, but, insofar as it was built by the municipal state, it was always intended to be governed by a private corporation that generated surplus value through theatrical commodities that circulated internationally. The Ford Centre is a multi-level structure that occupies the southern edge of North York’s downtown core, set far back from Yonge Street and surrounded by a large parking lot. If one looks at the Ford Centre from Yonge Street, the building serves as a giant billboard, with much of its exterior surface intended to be devoted to large-scale advertising of the show that is in performance. There is a small electronic marquee over the front entrance that flashes messages about the show in performance, but it is illegible from the street. The marquee is a nostalgic architectural reference, albeit a high-tech one, but its urban function is uncertain because it does not acknowledge the streetscape. Viewing the Ford Centre from Yonge Street, the dominant image is one of corporate logos surrounded by automobiles: when Ragtime played at the Ford Centre, there was an eerie continuity between the Ragtime billboards (with their unintentionally acontextual image of the Statue of Liberty’s torch furled in the stars and stripes), the Ford logo over the entrance, and the cars surrounding the complex. From the street, the only fragmentary object was the theatre building itself. Its skin punctuated by corporate logos, the Ford Centre’s self-advertisement fractured a holistic view of the theatre building (and this view has become even more fractured since the belated completion of the Aegon Place towers at 5000 Yonge Street in 2004, which partially obscure the view of the arts centre from Yonge Street). The civic theatre could not contribute to the traditional conception of downtown that North York wanted to

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invoke: an urban space of related but relatively autonomous urban forms. Here urban forms existed only insofar as they referred to the transnational theatre commodity (and, ultimately, only insofar as they physically and symbolically took a backseat to the offices of one of the world’s largest insurance companies). In spite of North York’s attempt to mimic an older ideal of downtown, the city still privileges trips into its core by car. As Filion demonstrates, ample parking and easy road access mean that North York is particularly welcoming to trips by car, and a boulevard directly to the Ford Centre’s entrance encourages cars to drive to the door to deposit passengers.43 The Ford Centre not only fails to bring people onto the sidewalk, it makes them less likely to become flâneurs by providing even more parking space in downtown North York, and by sitting back so deeply from the Yonge Street sidewalk. The Ford Centre can be approached without a car, but the most agreeable way to gain access on foot, whether from the sidewalk or via public transit, means travelling through private commercial space. Insofar as it permits access by flâneurs, this access privatizes their consumption and spectating to a much greater degree than accessing the SLC does. Being a flâneur on Front Street involves negotiating both private and public spaces. The Front Street flâneur may gaze at and enter private shops, but does so from the public street. The presence of public street space is part of what makes being a flâneur pleasurable: one looks at displays, one is on display, and consumption is encouraged but not mandated – the public street has a social value above and beyond its role in assisting consumption. The best pedestrian access to the Ford Centre, in contrast, allows little recourse to public space. In order to get from the North York Centre subway station to the Ford Centre, one must travel through the City Centre. Though its name implies public space, the North York City Centre is, in fact, a privately owned and operated shopping mall. This mall provides the easiest access to most municipal buildings in North York, including the city hall and the main public library, whose entrances open into the mall as though they were any other retail store. The North York City Centre encourages citizens to engage civic space and private commercial space as though they were transposable, and this transposability extends transnationally.44 Whether shopping or going to the theatre, one moves through a retail centre that is dominated by ‘the same chain stores and franchises found in any suburban mall.’45 Even when reaching the Ford Centre, one enters a lobby domi-

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nated by an atrium that evokes the one lighting the City Centre and two other well-known Toronto sites that anticipate transnational exchange: the atrium of the Eaton Centre shopping mall and that of Terminal Three at Pearson International Airport.46 Downtown North York suggests that commercial and cultural consumption are the same thing, and when the products consumed are transnational commodities that could be found in Chicago, New York, or Vancouver, the civic becomes placeless. Downtown North York and the Ford Centre betray a paradoxical post-Fordist desire: to create a unique ontological space in a historical moment of increasing time-space compression using transnational urban and cultural tools.47 Downtown North York and the Ford Centre finally, and ironically, achieve the goal that Herbert Whittaker identified for Canadian theatre in the 1960s. ‘We want to have a culture unmistakably our own,’ Whittaker commented. ‘We want to be different, the same as everybody else.’48 Conclusion If the civic theatre in Toronto initially sustained the link between cultural institution-building and urban development first made by the nation, it now anxiously attempts to insert theatres into a transnational urban political economy. The SLC and the Ford Centre suggest two different ways in which this interjection has been possible. The SLC positions itself as a culturally affirmative broker, easing the urban transition from a national to a transnational economy and nervously reassuring Torontonians that a civic reconcillation between theatre and capital is still possible under transnationalism. The Ford Centre, in contrast, recognizes that post-Fordism has made the relationship between urban and cultural development reliant on a flow of money that circulates throughout the world. Attracting this capital may provide a useful rationale for building new civic theatres at a time when there is little political appetite for state enterprise, but it also creates new relationships of dependence: as the building’s present vacancy demonstrates, when the civic theatre’s transnational operator disappears, the theatre’s cultural and urban appeal fail as well. Post-Fordism has placed cities and cultural institutions in the shadow of transnational capital, and theatres register both its towering presence and its sudden absence.

2 Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District

Moving west from the St Lawrence Centre along Front Street, the streetscape narrates Toronto’s transformations. The glass and steel core of the financial district stretches north from Front Street, with its heart on Bay Street. So synonymous with money has this part of Toronto become that the name ‘Bay Street’ now serves as a geographical metonym for Canadian capitalism in general. Union Station, stretching along the south side of Front Street, recalls an earlier type of capitalism, where goods and people relied on the railway to move. This railway, in turn, was connected to a once-thriving port on Lake Ontario, with links to other Great Lakes cities and, later, to the St Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic Ocean. Two blocks west of Union Station stand the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome), the retractable-roofed sports stadium, and the iconic CN Tower. The CN Tower has become so much a feature of Toronto’s skyline and public image that it is easy to forget that it was built only in 1976. When looking north from the foot of the CN Tower, it is also easy to forget how this part of downtown Toronto looked as recently as the late 1980s. Then, the area was mostly a jumble of aging manufacturing buildings, parking lots, and disused land. Now, the area is the Entertainment District, a busy, flashy neighbourhood of theatres, television studios, leisure complexes, restaurants, cinemas, nightclubs, and hotels. The Entertainment District covers roughly three square kilometres, extending north from the Gardiner Expressway to Queen Street, and east from Spadina Avenue to Yonge Street (though it initially extended only as far east as University Avenue). The Toronto Entertainment District Association (TEDA) comprises over one hundred area companies as members, including small-business owners, Crown

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 49

corporations like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and transnational operations like Sony and Holiday Inn. The District proved immensely popular within a short time of its creation in the early 1990s, quickly drawing an estimated 30,000 people to the area on weekends.1 As the SLC and the Ford Centre show, theatres have participated in Toronto’s civic self-fashioning and changing patterns of production and consumption. The Entertainment District demonstrates, however, that Toronto’s civic performance economy does not only include those theatres to which the term ‘civic theatre’ conventionally applies. The District undoubtedly contains theatrical venues, and the area benefits from their reassuring physical presence, the profitability of the enterprises they house, and the quantity and quality of the spectators they attract. The District does not, however, want to be seen as merely another shopping zone in the city. It offers exciting entertainment commodities, but wants the consumption of those commodities – and the urban redevelopment necessary to make that consumption possible – to be seen as civically virtuous. Theatre is central to achieving this goal, in that it offers the District a grammar that fuses commodity consumption and civic aspiration: as a noun, theatre is a commercial enterprise that contributes to the area’s profitability; as a verb, playing is an act of both spectatorship and consumption, something theatre-goers do and which the District wants its customers to do; as an adjective, the description of various activities as theatrical enables their assembly into a designated urban zone; and, finally, as an object, theatre’s physical presence helps justify the redevelopment of the District in the name of civic health, anxiously supplanting an urban history of the area based on work with one based on play. The Entertainment District has appropriated theatre to make the consumption of entertainment commodities a civically virtuous, and historically necessary, form of urban development. From Factories to Fun: Spatializing the History of King-Spadina and the Entertainment District The Entertainment District now pulses with the sound of dance music and glows with neon light, but it is worth recalling the neighbourhood as it existed before the District’s creation. The Entertainment District incorporates the western edge of Toronto’s Central Business District (CBD), and its heart is the eastern half of what was formerly the city’s

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Central Industrial District (CID).2 But even before the CID emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, the area south of Queen Street between Simcoe and Bathurst Streets was a well-developed mix of ‘houses, manufacturing buildings, and institutions ... built side by side.’3 The land between Simcoe and Peter Streets supported the first major expansion of the Town of York (as Toronto was originally called) beyond its original boundaries on the western side of the swamp that would later become Yonge Street. By the 1830s ‘New Town’ was York’s premier residential neighbourhood. As military needs diminished in the 1830s, garrison land was released so that the area could expand westward, often in the shape of fine houses along new squares and the town’s widest boulevards. Upper Canada College, the lieutenant-governor’s residence, the general hospital, the provincial parliament, and a number of government offices were situated between Simcoe and Peter Streets.4 The arrival of the railway in the 1850s halted the elaborate Victorian residential schemes planned for the area by slicing through the neighbourhood, but it also heralded the first wave of Toronto’s industrialization.5 By the 1890s the area’s occupants included carriage factories, a saw factory, a lead factory, a silverplate company, a stove foundry, a cabinet works, and a machinery.6 Lake Ontario was progressively filled in to accommodate the foundries, gasworks, and lumber yards that fuelled the city’s economic growth.7 The area that became the CID was built up in the first three decades of the twentieth century as public institutions moved out and factories and warehouses moved in. A major fire levelled chunks of the area in 1904, opening up more space for manufacturing industry. Five- to eight-storey brick buildings, frequently designed by the best architects of the day in the modern vernacular of large windows and open floor plans, lined the streets around King-Spadina and grew taller as Toronto’s economy boomed through the 1920s. Indeed, the CID was the hub of manufacturing and warehousing for Toronto and much of Ontario in its heyday, from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War.8 The area became an intense hive of industrial activity, providing thousands of jobs for the working-class residents of adjacent neighbourhoods.9 Downtown residents produced goods that exited the city on ships from the nearby harbour and trains from the nearby railway. The area anticipated manufacturing growth to such a degree that, when Brant Street elementary school was built in the CID’s west end in 1926, it was designed according to ‘specifications which would allow it to be converted to a factory.’10 Social provision might need to

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 51

be subsumed under an expansion of manufacturing at any moment, and, until the end of the Second World War, this seemed like entirely sensible economic preparation. Starting in 1950, however, ‘there was a major decline in industrial activity in the City [of Toronto].’11 Instead of building up, companies moved out. Firms moved to the suburbs in search of large greenfield sites that were cheap to buy and that could accommodate huge onestorey buildings; this was the new urban geography and architecture of the post-war economy. Between 1950 and 1971, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the City of Toronto fell from 156,000 to 82,000. Many of these jobs migrated to the new suburbs – like North York and Scarborough – within Metropolitan Toronto. In 1950, the City of Toronto boasted 83 per cent of the manufacturing workforce in the area that would be federated as Metropolitan Toronto in 1953. By 1971, the City of Toronto’s share of the metropolitan manufacturing workforce had fallen to 34 per cent.12 The decline of manufacturing in the heart of the city was significant, therefore, in both absolute and relative measures. A network of new superhighways linked the factories with recent suburban housing developments like Don Mills, and companies ‘no longer needed to locate within walking distance of residential areas in order to attract employees.’13 Trips to work would now be made largely by car, and the link between living and working in the same downtown neighbourhood was diminished. The CID faltered over the decades following the war, even though the City of Toronto worked hard to sustain it. In 1977 City planners admitted that industrial activity had been slowly declining for almost thirty years, yet they still claimed that ‘the central issue in King-Spadina is the future of industry.’14 The planners declared that ‘the area should be maintained and planned primarily for industrial firms,’ and by this they meant the same firms that had previously dominated the area: principally garment manufacturers and commercial printing companies.15 In a last gasp of municipal Fordism, the City’s official plan continued to reserve most land and buildings in the King-Spadina area for manufacturing use until 1996. To the City of Toronto, the mass production of goods was the most desirable mode of economic production, the rising tide that would lift all boats. Its planners believed that Toronto’s economic growth would be led by expansion in industrial manufacturing and it was simply a matter of providing the right spatial fix for that type of economic activity to continue downtown. Change happened anyway, despite restrictive controls on use. In

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1977 City planners could scarcely imagine the significant role that communications and high technology would play in the area’s development less than a decade later. In 1986 the City’s economic development committee noted that communications and information technology firms were now the second-largest employers in the area after fashion (itself now focused increasingly on clothing design rather than manufacture).16 The garment industry continued to decline and the area’s character changed further; the City reported in 1996 that ‘[t]raditional industrial uses were being replaced by light industrial and business activities, vacancy rates had increased, and numerous fine old buildings had been demolished for surface parking lots.’17 The east end of the CID showed signs of developing in a way that planners had not anticipated, changing from a Fordist urban space of commodity mass production into a post-Fordist space of service provision. The industries on which the neighbourhood had been built – most importantly, garment manufacturing – were in long-term decline (though, as I will discuss later in this chapter, the area was hardly an urban wasteland). For many years the City of Toronto clung to the naive belief that the presence in the area of manufacturing firms like Dover Elevator could be preserved through zoning restrictions on emerging types of development (such as financial services and office projects) that were transforming other parts of downtown.18 But it was increasingly clear by the late 1980s that hopes for reviving the manufacturing base of the city core were unlikely to be realized simply through zoning, and planners expressed some doubt whether manufacturing could play any substantial part in downtown economic development.19 Scattered amid the factories and warehouses were a few entertainment venues: the Royal Alexandra Theatre (commonly called the Royal Alex), Roy Thomson Hall, and the CN Tower. There was little sense of the area offering entertainment attractions in any coordinated way, however, or of betraying much in the way of spectacle at street level. For example, the Royal Alex is Toronto’s longest-serving commercial theatre venue, but the building itself, completed in 1907, is a modest procession of three graduated boxes (lobby, auditorium, stage) stepping back from King Street. Its balustraded windows and pilasters project an air of shabby beaux-arts elegance rather than glittering excitement. For many years, owner Ed Mirvish reserved a kind of retrograde glitziness for the advertising on the façade of his restaurants next door, which offered patrons a steady diet of roast beef dinners to

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 53

accompany the touring shows at the Royal Alex. But much of this promotion consisted of faded posters from old Royal Alex shows and slogans featuring the same kitschy (and savvy) self-promotion that made Mirvish’s fortune at his bargain store on Bloor Street: ‘How Cheap Can a Guy Get? Come In and Find Out!’ While the Royal Alex at least acknowledges the streetscape, its neighbour opposite disavows the street altogether. Roy Thomson Hall might best be described as an inverted glass cupcake squatting smugly in a concrete moat. From its completion in 1982 as the home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Hall’s design has often been derided: This is one of the city’s most arrogant buildings, a Neo-Expressionist extravaganza that integrates with the urban streetscape not at all. It could be argued that buildings designed for entertainment – ‘theatrical’ buildings – have reason for not blending in, witness the grandiose opera houses of Europe, or even New York’s Lincoln Center. But to be successful, exhibitionist buildings require harmonious shape and ceremonial setting. Arthur Erickson’s hall suggests neither ... Its siting, smack on the sidewalk along a side-street entrance and defending itself behind a moat-like sunken court on the main street, is anything but grand and inviting.20

The two performance venues in the area could hardly acknowledge each other, let alone demonstrate an awareness of their neighbourhood as an entertainment destination. Any attempt to develop an entertainment district would have to acknowledge their proximity to a much greater degree than they did themselves, and find a way to integrate them into a larger urban leisure project. Changes were taking place that made such a scheme imaginable, but not for the reasons popularly promoted. Advocates for the Entertainment District have boasted that the ‘success of the Toronto Entertainment District is due to the confidence and participation of many business owners and their employees who have worked steadily together over the past two decades, always knowing that they had something special to showcase to the rest of the world.’21 This proclamation puts a rather romantic spin on the history of the District’s emergence. The twin catalysts for the District were actually government decisions taken in the 1980s for reasons that had nothing to do with premonitions of an urban leisure zone. The first impetus was the Ontario government’s decision to build a sports stadium (subsequently named SkyDome) downtown on a vacant site beside the CN

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Tower. This decision had important urban planning resonances, since it overturned dominant post–Second World War planning ideology which dictated that major sports facilities should be located on the edges of cities, not in their cores. With seating for over 50,000 spectators and offering eighty-one home games a season for the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club alone, SkyDome regularly brought tens of thousands of new visitors into the area after opening in 1989.22 Rock concerts, Toronto Argonaut football games, and corporate exhibitions only boosted these numbers further. SkyDome also assisted the development of the neighbourhood’s service economy through the early 1990s, as an increasing proportion of the labour in the area no longer worked in manufacturing but in service sectors like office work and retail. There was a clear long-term reduction in the manufacturing workforce in the area between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. In 1985 manufacturing workers constituted the majority of the employment in King-Spadina, with the garment industry alone accounting for 58 per cent of jobs. By 1996 manufacturing’s share of the workforce had dropped to approximately 14 per cent. The office sector, however, was now the same size as manufacturing had been in earlier years: it had mushroomed to 58 per cent of the labour force, with retail services and shopping combining to make up another 21 per cent.23 The opening of SkyDome signalled that downtowns were legitimate locations for large-scale leisure venues and encouraged the expansion of the service industry of which those venues would be a part. The second major impetus for change in the area occurred when the City of Toronto rezoned the neighbourhood to accommodate large dance clubs in the early 1990s. City councillors and their constituents had been battling with club owners in the late 1980s over noise and large crowds in residential areas of the city; in response, then city councillor Jack Layton persuaded council to relax the zoning restrictions around the King-Spadina intersection to permit dance clubs (since existing zoning largely prohibited anything other than manufacturing facilities) while restricting them elsewhere in the city. ‘I said that big clubs were good,’ Layton later recalled. ‘People were having fun, dancing up a storm. I looked around at old industrial buildings, mostly empty, in the old garment district around Richmond, Adelaide, John and Peter. There was little housing there, so it wasn’t likely to run into residents objecting.’24 The zoning change had the desired effect and helped concentrate the city’s clubs in the area. Moreover, many of

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 55

the buildings now available were much larger than vacant properties in other parts of the city core, often allowing the clubs to accommodate several thousand patrons each on a given night. As with SkyDome, the clubs proved successful at attracting large numbers of consumers into the area and making it a ‘fun’ destination in itself, rather than simply a place to work or pass through to a more interesting shopping area nearby.25 The Entertainment District as a Play Economy SkyDome and the dance clubs helped remake the area east of KingSpadina for a service economy based on leisure activities. The Entertainment District built on this foundation, and, in doing so, mimicked a familiar historical pattern that has occurred in many Western industrial economies during the past thirty-odd years: an area in the centre of the city formerly devoted to manufacturing goods was transformed into one area offering services. But the distinctiveness of Toronto’s Entertainment District lies in the particular ways it uses theatre to help remake economic production along post-industrial lines. In doing so, it mimicks a familiar language of economic and theatrical production, but transforms the meaning of that language – the District retains the vocabulary of manufacturing and theatre while redefining the product of both. Instead of garments being produced in King-Spadina, the Entertainment District manufactures ‘fun.’ TEDA claimed, ‘Locals and visitors alike know that when they choose the “entertainment district,” they’re going to have fun.’26 For example, Festival Hall, the giant entertainment complex that contains Paramount cinemas, restaurants, a bookstore, a Starbucks, and a Sony Playdium (video-game complex), announces (tautologically) on its façade that ‘FUN IS PARAMOUNT.’ This suggests that fun is synonymous with the interests of a transnational media conglomerate. When Festival Hall opened, staff sported shirts that read ‘FUN SECURITY,’ suggesting that fun was best achieved under the surveillance of the building’s corporate occupants. The District makes fun the output of a tightly organized urban and transnational mode of production, but demonstrates a latent anxiety that the product does not entirely suit the process. As architecture critic Adele Freedman argues: ‘If there’s anything off-putting about all the fun for grabs in the old warehouse district, it’s that it seems so manufactured.’27 Freedman’s use of the word ‘manufactured’ identifies,

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rather ironically, one of the basic contradictions of the Entertainment District: in spite of the District’s unease about the manufacturing history of its neighbourhood, producing fun requires a production process no less structured than that required for the elevators once manufactured where Festival Hall stands. Because fun still bears the whiff of manufacturing, it must not only be an issue of production, but one of containment through visible security. To compensate for this anxiety, the District attempts to remake planning as an economic ideal of urban consumption rather than industrial production. Under a Fordist political economy, planning was something that nation-states undertook at the macro-economic level and cities practised rigorously at the micro-spatial level. The Entertainment District, however, offers planning as a consumer ideal, as a form of self-gratification that organizes and integrates a variety of forms of entertainment consumption into the shopping day. One ‘chooses’ the Entertainment District as though one were ‘choosing’ a toothbrush, which suggests that urban space has been commodified and that its selection makes possible a chain of further consumption. A day in the Entertainment District might go something like this: in the morning a tour of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre, lunch on King Street, a matinee at the Princess of Wales Theatre, a trip up the CN Tower, an early dinner at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant, a Blue Jays baseball game, a late film at Festival Hall, a rush to a club for a last hour of dancing, and then back to the Holiday Inn to collapse into bed. A final, and for me most notable, reason for the Entertainment District’s distinctiveness is that the District justified its creation through theatrical models and metaphors, explicitly representing consumption in the District as ‘playing’ in the sense of theatrical performance. The District’s belief that its commodities were ‘playful’ provided the rationale for grouping them together, and in this assembly the District figured consumption as a theatrical act of individual and imaginative self-pleasuring. Theatre, therefore, became the guarantor of the District as a post-Fordist civic leisure economy. As John Urry points out, leisure is a recreational activity whose value is always tethered to what it is not: work. Urry argues that leisure ‘presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work’ and that leisure and work ‘are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in “modern” societies.’28 More precisely, Henri Lefebvre argues that a leisure economy marks the point where a space of consumption gives way to the consumption of space. The space of

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consumption ‘coincides with the historical locations of capital accumulation, with the space of production, and with the space that is produced; this is the space of the market.’29 The space of consumption is quantitative, and is concerned with how resources may be consumed in order to generate surplus value through commodity production and exchange. The consumption of space, by contrast, is ostensibly unproductive and qualitative; it is the ‘moment of departure – the moment of people’s holidays,’ where the ‘materiality and naturalness’ of ‘sun, snow, [and] sea’ are ‘rediscovered in their (apparent or real) immediacy.’30 In Lefebvre’s formulation, one consumes space for its use value alone, and pleasure results because there is no anticipation of exchange by the user. A contradiction can arise, however, when the consumption of space occurs. While space may be economically unproductive for those who consume it, that does not mean that its consumption is unproductive in toto. Some of the productive benefits–the exchange value – arising from spatial consumption may be displaced, accruing as profits to those capitalists who coordinate it. Though the consumption of space may be imagined as an escape from the market, it is frequently a marketized activity, albeit one where the economic benefits of its qualitative properties accrue somewhere, or to someone, else. As Lefebvre puts it: The quality and the use of space retrieve their ascendancy – but only up to a point. In empirical terms, what this means is that neocapitalism and neoimperialism share hegemony over a subordinated space split into two kinds of regions: regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of production (of consumer goods), and regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of the consumption of space. Tourism and leisure become major areas of investment and profitability, adding their weight to the construction sector, to property speculation, to generalized urbanization.31

The implication of Lefebvre’s argument is not only that ‘subordinated space [is] split into two kinds of regions,’ but that, in a leisure economy, the space of consumption and the consumption of space intersect within one region. A distinguishing feature of a leisure economy is that it insists on the presence of both relationships between space and consumption at the same time, in the same place. The Entertainment District enacts this phenomenon in a defined urban zone, spatializing the means through which leisure activities are

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coordinated and marketized by capitalists and their allies. And from the time the District was first mooted, theatre was identified as one of the three major agents in the leisure economy that its advocates hoped to create in King-Spadina. The general manager of the SkyDome Hotel, for instance, supported the plan because of the way it would bring tourism, shopping, and theatre together. ‘The concept of state-of-theart theatre and shopping activities are the kind of things tourists are looking for,’ she said.32 Beyond this quantitative use of performance, the qualitative appeal of the Entertainment District was articulated through the appropriation of a theatrical language. The District’s promotion relied on theatrical metaphors from its inception, with TEDA claiming that the District was ‘quickly creating a presence on the world stage.’33 David Rockwell, the architect of Sony’s Playdium, which is part of Festival Hall, claimed inspiration for his design from the theatre, crediting ‘his mother, a dancer who toured in vaudeville with Abbott and Costello, for imbuing him with his love of anything that smacks of live theatre.’34 The year that Rockwell spent as a lighting technician on Broadway provided further inspiration.35 Moreover, patrons of Playdium were modelled on theatre spectators. Customers were supposed to ‘check reality at the door,’ recalling the popular theatrical notion that spectators must suspend disbelief in order to successfully experience a performance event.36 In the words of one commentator, it was the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that allowed fun to become ‘the modus operandi’ of consumption.37 Even detractors of the District used a theatrical language to attack the area. Freedman took up a theatrical simile to drive home her criticism that Festival Hall was not the urban jewel its proponents claimed it to be: ‘Architect Michael Kirkland, who designed the guts and framework of the structure, sounded like Macbeth soliloquizing about “nothing is but what is not.”’38 Theatre also helped secure the Entertainment District’s disavowal of particular urban and class anxieities. The District, its advocates claimed, was neither a manufacturing area nor a suburban shopping mall – both places where the working class gathered. The SkyDome hotel manager’s use of the term ‘state-of-the-art theatre and shopping activities’ was revealing, not only because it linked theatre with the creation of a new retail and tourist economy, but also because it identified theatre as a way to mark out the District’s contemporeneity and divorce it from the neighbourhood’s scruffy past. By extension, Playdium’s use of theatrical language and cutting-edge imagery helped

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 59

suppress the memory of the seedy Yonge Street video arcades that popularly characterized local electronic gaming establishments. Festival Hall’s developer insisted that the project was ‘very urban’ because it was ‘not a mall that traps people inside an indoor street’ and ‘sucks [the life] out of the rest of the city.’39 For him, shopping malls connoted poor planning and urban alienation, but the theatricality of Festival Hall and the District made them urban, and therefore good. Playdium’s chief executive officer also linked theatre with enticing an affluent consumer: ‘We’re building this foundation, a premium brand, and we’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the project. We’re developing theatres for play, and [Rockwell] understands that.’40 This emphasis on building ‘a premium brand’ reveals that theatricality was a means to secure the class elevation of the District, a fact that was only amplified when one of the developers behind Festival Hall claimed in the media that the services in the District were intended to ‘draw a high level of postgraduate people.’41 The video arcade and the shopping mall had to be disavowed because, in both geographical and normative senses, they were seen as sub-urban and working class. Theatre, by comparison, could be embraced because it was ostensibly urban, forward-looking, and prosperous. Playing at Civic Harmony To paraphrase Edward Soja, theatre provided a particularly effective way for the Entertainment District to make the city the content, rather than just the container, of the playful consuming experience. But theatre’s efficacy in the District was not limited to its market benefit or metaphorical utility. The Entertainment District suggested that urban play was a civic act by representing consumption as simultaneously pleasurable for the individual and beneficial at a civic level. The fact that this consumption was imagined to be theatrical allowed the District to trade on some of Toronto theatre’s civically affirmative characteristics. Theatre buildings and practices located in the Entertainment District may not have formally been designated as civic in the conventional sense that the SLC and the Ford Centre were, but theatre in the area undoubtedly played an important part in constructing the District as a civically affirmative enterprise. There are two theatres within the heart of the Entertainment District: the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Princess of Wales Theatre, both of which are owned by the Mirvish family. The Entertainment District

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cast these theatres in lead roles in its self-promotion. TEDA claimed that the ‘crown jewels of the district are the Royal Alexandra and Princess of Wales theatres.’42 Both theatres, in turn, were promoted as a key part of the ‘third-largest theatre centre in the English-speaking world, after London and New York.’43 The Royal Alex is Toronto’s oldest commercial theatre, with seating for approximately 1500 spectators. The theatre has operated mostly as a roadhouse for touring shows, offering its subscribers, in Herbert Whittaker’s words, ‘a popular mix of musical hits from London or Broadway, serious drama, comedy, and star performers.’44 When Toronto developed a large audience for megamusicals like Cats and Phantom of the Opera in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mirvish built the Princess of Wales to accommodate local productions of such shows as Miss Saigon, which opened the theatre in 1993. The Royal Alex and Princess of Wales represent a very keen understanding of the market for live performance in Toronto. As the popularity of megamusicals grew, Mirvish Productions suspended its subscription series and booked long-running shows into the Royal Alex. By building the Princess of Wales, Mirvish Productions was able to return the Royal Alex to a subscriber-driven season of multiple shows and programme long-running musicals in the Princess of Wales down the street. The Royal Alex’s season provides a base of approximately 50,000 subscribers, who tend to be older, economically well off, and interested in ‘serious’ drama.45 The Princess of Wales, with productions like The Lion King in residence, is geared more towards families and ‘tour bus’ audiences. The two theatres together appeal to a wide spectrum of the market for premium theatrical commodities in both Toronto and central North America, and draw affluent spectators to the Entertainment District – something that was important if the neighbourhood itself were also to be a ‘premium brand.’ In order to personalize the public image of the Entertainment District, TEDA resurrected the figure of the nineteenth-century theatre impresario and married it to a local-boy-makes-good narrative. The public face of the Entertainment District became Ed Mirvish. Mirvish is popularly known in Toronto as ‘Honest Ed,’ after his Bloor Street discount store, and his folksy maxims and Christmas turkey giveaways have earned him a reputation as the city’s favourite businessperson and civic booster. Mirvish holds the Order of Canada, is a Companion of the Order of the British Empire, received an honourary Chair from the Harvard School of Business, and is a Freeman of the

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 61

City of London. Sheila Copps, then Canada’s deputy prime minister, once called Mirvish ‘a Canadian folk hero and a national treasure.’46 Mirvish’s local renown is hard to ignore: the block of Markham Street beside Honest Ed’s is named Mirvish Village, the mayor of Toronto honoured Mirvish with Ed Mirvish Day in 1996, and, when TEDA created a Canadian ‘walk of fame’ on King Street, they gave the first sidewalk star to Mirvish. Even the Toronto millennial calendar devoted July to celebrating Mirvish, the only individual person singled out in the entire year.47 The calendar’s historical photographs are of Mirvish and his stores, and the two ‘days to remember’ are Canada Day and Mirvish’s birthday. If the District’s public and political appeal relied on Mirvish’s popularity and his perceived benevolent boosterism, Mirvish’s biography also reinforced the notion that the District rose from poor beginnings to become an unqualified success (and that, in the process, it remained humane and concerned for the individual consumer). Mirvish promotes himself as, and is fêted for being, a local boy made good through smart business. Mirvish’s 1993 autobiography, Honest Ed Mirvish: How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate or, 121 Lessons I Never Learned in School, is organized as a series of lessons on being successful in business and in life. The text is inflected with a mix of hyperbole and ‘aw shucks’ modesty, a rhetorical ploy that both highlights and deflects the implications of his present-day class privilege; he may be a millionaire, but he is, after all, just ‘the bargain man.’48 Mirvish’s jokey self-deprecation reinscribes the liberal ideal of meritorious class ascension by reminding the reader of his rise from working-class origins and implying that if he can do it anyone can. Simultaneously, he encourages the reader to see him as still a working-class boy at heart, in spite of the fact that his businesses are multimillion-dollar enterprises with more than a thousand employees (Mirvish claimed in 1993 that his bargain store alone grossed $65 million per year).49 The introduction to How to Build an Empire sets a tone that the autobiography maintains throughout: My name is Honest Ed. Which alone is enough to make anyone suspicious. If people think it’s batty I don’t blame them. After all, I chose the nickname myself. But then again, it never hurt Abe. In fact, Mr. Lincoln and I have a few things in common. Both of us grew up poor. Neither of us had much schooling. He taught himself law; I taught myself business. We started from scratch and learned by experience. And each of us always bucked popular

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Mirvish ingratiates himself as a colourful, self-made man. His popular appeal relies on this invocation of the ascendant, individual, bourgeois businessman. The book also features Mirvish’s theatres prominently, and represents the apotheosis of his success as his theatre enterprises. In addition to the Royal Alex and the Princess of Wales, Mirvish owned the Old Vic Theatre in London from 1983 to 1997. Mirvish’s purchase of the Old Vic only heightened the sense that he had ‘made good,’ since it represented both a capitalist and artistic inversion of colonial history. As the title of his book says, he built his own ‘empire’: Mirvish, whose roots were Canadian, working class, and Jewish, colonized the old imperial power by purchasing an important artefact of Britain’s cultural history. He not only moved from the margins to the centre in his own country, his actions implied that Canada could teach the old master economic and cultural lessons as well. Writing three years before he sold the Old Vic,51 he claimed: To my constant astonishment, we now also own three world-class theatres. Two, of course are internationally famous: the Royal Alexandra in Toronto, built in 1907, and the Old Vic in London, built in 1818. The third is the Princess of Wales in Toronto (just down the street from the Royal Alex) which we erected ourselves in 1993 – the first theatre to be privately constructed on this continent in more than ninety years. It was built especially to house our co-production of the super-hit Miss Saigon, the most expensive theatrical production ever mounted in Canada. I still can’t believe I’m in show biz.52

The penultimate marker of Mirvish’s ascent was becoming a transnational theatre impresario, and being recognized publicly as such: the Globe and Mail refers to Mirvish as the head of ‘Canada’s premier theatre family.’53 Mirvish is known as much for being a ‘show biz’ figure as a ‘bargain merchant’; indeed, he successfully frames his success as

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 63

the improbable marriage of the two. In a public tribute at the unveiling of his sidewalk star, even the edgy, modern Desrosier Dance Theatre presented, in dance, ‘Mirvish’s life from delivering groceries for his father’s store through to buying the Royal Alex and the Old Vic Theatre in London, England.’54 Desrosier’s tribute demonstrates how successfully Mirvish has naturalized his personal narrative as the local boy made good. But an important part of this narrative, regardless of the extent of Mirvish’s notoriety, is that he has always resided in Toronto. Mirvish is able to be such a prominent civic booster partly because his heart and his home have remained in the city. Installing Mirvish as the public face of the Entertainment District was important to TEDA for several reasons. Because Mirvish embodied the bourgeois ideal of the self-made man he counterpointed the fact that the Entertainment District was dominated by huge transnational corporations like Sony, Paramount, and Holiday Inn.55 His claim that the Princess of Wales was the first theatre built with private money in North America for over ninety years is patently untrue – a number of new theatre buildings were constructed in New York with private money in the 1910s and 1920s – but the subtext of this claim is more important than its manifest inaccuracy: Mirvish’s private sponsorship of the Princess of Wales distinguished him from, and privileged him over, Garth Drabinsky, who enlisted state sponsorship for the Ford Centre.56 Mirvish, then, was a self-reliant businessman, he was endearing to many Torontonians, and his biography seamlessly blended the local and the transnational. At a historical moment when there was tremendous anxiety in Canada about the speed and shape of globalization, this type of personalization was naively reassuring.57 Mirvish’s involvement with the Entertainment District illustrates Harvey’s point that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy often gives new importance to ‘older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriarchal), and paternalistic’ capitalism.58 The District gave the bourgeois merchant an even more prominent place in the neighbourhood than he previously enjoyed, and it was only with the rise of the Entertainment District that Ed Mirvish and his theatres were fully integrated as ‘centrepieces rather than appendages’ of the neighbourhood’s urban economy.59 The romantic appeal of the merchant was doubly effective when it possessed the familial and civic connotations of the theatre impresario – something that Mirvish and his family have been called in the popular press, and which figured from the beginning in TEDA’s promotion

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of the District.60 As impresarios, the Mirvishes blurred the distinction between market and sentimental value, and between quantitative and qualitative benefit – obfuscations that served the District’s interests. The sentimental connotations of the impresario, articulated through Mirvish’s promotional role in what he called ‘show biz,’ conflated market and sentimental value. This conflation was necessary to a District that sought to make consumption of entertainment commodities – predominantly a market activity – a playful and civically virtuous act. John Rosselli notes that, for impresarios, ‘the firm’ was often an individual and his family.61 Mirvish Productions is wholly owned by the Mirvish family and Ed is its businessman patriarch. As Hampson’s profile of Ed, wife Anne, and son David illustrates, keeping the theatre business ‘All in the Family’ successfully recuperates the dominant premodern business structure, minimizing the chance that the Mirvishes would provoke social anxiety in the way that the transnational business structure has. Mirvish Productions also embodies positivist familial ideology, which values intimate personal relationships outside the market (values that may be characterized as ‘caring,’ ‘sharing,’ or ‘supportive’) to elide the less romantic market mechanisms by which the Mirvishes became millionaires. In addition, Rosselli argues that the impresario has historically been preoccupied with civic pride, something that Mirvish illustrates in a contemporary context. Rosselli states that the impresario was highly conscious of the locality of his enterprise, and was therefore keen ‘to avoid any seeming offence to local patriotism.’62 Mirvish’s civic honours suggest that he not only refrained from offending local patriotism, but that his civic boosterism played a part in creating the populist notion of Toronto as a ‘world class’ city. This civic capital made Mirvish, and, by extension, the interests he represented, more difficult to dissent from politically. Considering Toronto’s often fractious history over urban redevelopment since the 1960s, the Entertainment District provoked remarkably little disagreement at the local political level. This was due, in part, to the fact that the District was proposed during the early 1990s, when Toronto was struggling to emerge from a severe recession. The commercial property-development industry, which fuelled the downtown economy through the 1980s, had collapsed, leaving behind the unfinished core of the Bay-Adelaide Centre as a raw concrete reminder of what happened when business simply ceased. Mirvish’s civic appeal was tremendously helpful in assembling a new service-sector oligar-

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 65

chy that married urban development to leisure provision instead of office space. This oligarchy was coordinated through the development and administration of the District: the Entertainment District is overseen by TEDA, which is the formal link between the District’s capitalists and the city government; TEDA oversees the Entertainment District as a Business Improvement Area (BIA), which means that the municipality turns back a portion of property taxes to TEDA to spend on neighbourhood promotion and ‘public improvements’ like special street signs, tree planting, customized street lamps, and advertising. BIAs have always been an important political constituency of capitalists at city hall, but the Entertainment District brought together a group of service-sector proprietors who were particularly prominent in the post-Fordist economy (theatre owners, hotel operators, convention centre managers, local restaurateurs, and media corporations), and it brought them together not as competitors but as cooperators. The Entertainment District used theatre to help secure a kind of civic economic corporatism.63 The Entertainment District, then, was a test case for a post-Fordist version of civic harmony. In Toronto, the period between the 1960s and the 1980s were marked by vigorous political activism as neighbourhood coalitions and their allies on city council fought blockbusting development of old neighbourhoods and helped to instal a modestly progressive system of social services and urban planning. In this older political model, civic harmony in Toronto was often achieved by the municipal state functioning (admittedly awkwardly) as a broker between neighbourhood political organizations and capitalists, most of whom were commercial property developers. But when the development market collapsed in 1990 and the worst recession since the 1930s brought about a major retrenchment for the Left in Canada, the relationship between the municipal state and capital changed. Now, in addition to commercial developers, some of the most prominent capitalists in the city were cultural impresarios like Mirvish and the thenhead of the LivEntertainment Corporation, Garth Drabinsky. Instead of brokering disputes between local political organizations and big business, the role of the municipal state was increasingly to broker disputes between theatre industry capitalists themselves. In 1996 an argument broke out between King-Spadina businesses and Yonge-Dundas businesses over the boundaries of what was then to be called the ‘Theatre District.’ Yonge-Dundas could also make a legitimate claim to the designation: the area was home to Massey Hall, the

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Elgin and Wintergarden Theatres, and Livent’s Pantages Theatre. Business owners at Yonge and Dundas saw the Theatre District moniker as a way to displace the area’s homeless community and lever investment into an area that they perceived as too downmarket to capitalize heavily on the transnational cultural tourist trade. The conflict was only resolved when the City named King-Spadina the Entertainment District and Yonge-Dundas the Theatre District. This latter designation was never employed by the media or in municipal publications to any extent, however, and, in post-Fordist Toronto, it seemed an antiquated designation. Mirvish was the spokesperson for the Toronto Entertainment District Association, and Garth Drabinsky spoke for the YongeDundas association. Through these two men city hall brokered the compromise, but the ultimate solution was to incorporate the Theatre District area within the Entertainment District (and Mirvish eventually took over the lease on the Pantages Theatre, which was renamed the Canon Theatre). Civic harmony was now promoted by the City of Toronto ensuring that theatrical capitalists got along with each other, and then, when Livent became bankrupt, supporting the expansion of the Entertainment District throughout a large section of the downtown core. Making the City Safe for Play If civic harmony was required for the Entertainment District to exist in the present, this was made possible because advocates represented the District as breaking with a discordant urban past. Promoters of the District rewrote the history of King-Spadina to present their development in a more positive light, and, in the process, they used theatre to salve an anxiety about cities, labour, and public health. Their new narrative inverted an older association of theatre with moral ambivalence and urban decline. Instead, theatre was represented as a healthy activity that required protection from an unsavoury neighbourhood that had become a ‘slum.’ The Entertainment District became all the more necessary because it would make King-Spadina safe for theatre and, by extension, clean for civic consumption. Advocates for the Entertainment District propounded a glib and revisionist history of the area that they used to justify the District’s development. Their promotion inverted the usual nostalgic trope of good past / bad present, invoking a nostalgia for the present that was made possible by recuperating the neighbourhood’s past as malign.

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 67

Ed Mirvish remade the area’s history in precisely this way when he contrasted the Royal Alex’s neighbourhood in the 1990s with its condition in the 1960s: Within the immediate area of the theatre today are Toronto’s most famous tourist and architectural attractions. Directly across the street is the magnificent Roy Thomson Hall renowned for symphonies, plus the enormous three-tower Metro Hall, which houses the bulk of city bureaucrats. Behind them are the giant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre, as well as the massive Metro Toronto Convention Centre and adjoining L’Hotel. But also within [a] stone’s throw are two world-renowned, record-breaking constructions: the CN Tower, at 1,815 feet the world’s tallest free-standing structure; and the Skydome [sic] holding 52,000 fans beneath its movable roof, the world’s largest domed sports stadium. To say nothing of our own 2,600 restaurant complex, and the area’s newest jewel, the Princess of Wales Theatre. The district is now without a doubt one of the most exciting anywhere.64

Mirvish’s hyperbole about the present was matched by the purported horrors of the area before the Entertainment District: When we bought [the Royal Alex, in 1963] ... the surrounding area was even seedier than the Old Vic’s. Warehouses on both sides and a desolate stretch of railway tracks across the street. Yet three decades later, the slum has become a city showcase ... When reporters ask why we ever bought a theatre in such a squalid section of the city, I say I always visualized the area’s potential. Of course, to be honest (which I must be), I hadn’t a clue.65

Mirvish was not the only supporter of the Entertainment District who depicted the neighbourhood’s past as ‘desolate’ and its present as a ‘showcase.’ Christopher Hume, the influential architecture critic at the Toronto Star, wrote that the history of the King-Spadina area, pre–Entertainment District, was ‘anti-urban: the city as a cesspool of poverty, pollution and paranoia.’66 The redevelopment of the neighbourhood represented ‘a new metropolitan age. The city itself has emerged not just as the context of contemporary culture, but as its content, too.’67 The problem with these characterizations of the King-Spadina area in the decades before to the Entertainment District is that they are historically misleading about the neighbourhood’s urban history and consequently exaggerate the threat that the area posed to theatre. There is no evidence that the Royal Alex’s neighbourhood, contrary to what

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Mirvish and Hume claim, has ever been a ‘slum’ or a ‘cesspool of poverty.’ While there is little doubt that the dominant economic motors of the area were slowing in the 1960s when Mirvish bought the Royal Alex, this was a gradual and relative process taking decades and was not by any means a wholesale economic collapse. In fact, King-Spadina absorbed recessions and potentially traumatic changes in Toronto’s economy rather better than might be expected, and evidence gathered by the City of Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto between the 1970s and 1990s invariably showed that King-Spadina had one of Toronto’s healthier post–Second World War economies (this was even more the case in the part of the area immediately surrounding the Royal Alex). King-Spadina is one of the most studied neighbourhoods in Toronto, and if the anxiety that prompted these analyses stemmed from concern about the effects on the area of a national and local decline in manufacturing, research consistently concluded that the neighbourhood was, and has always been, remarkably healthy economically.68 The City of Toronto reported in 1977 that, while a number of firms had migrated to the suburbs, the decline had levelled off during the 1970s and vacancy rates were the lowest that they had been since the 1960s.69 A decade later the City reported that the area was still ‘the largest industrial district in the City in terms of employment’ and that business vacancy rates of 7 to 8 per cent were relatively low by local standards.70 If the economic history of the area disproves the content of Mirvish’s and Hume’s assertions, what is the significance of their rhetoric? The adjectives they used to describe the neighbourhood before the Entertainment District are vivid: the neighbourhood was ‘seedier’ than Waterloo Road in London when Mirvish owned the Old Vic (a preposterous notion, as anyone who crossed over the large homeless encampment under Waterloo Bridge or walked the broken-down Waterloo Road in the 1980s or early 1990s can attest), it was ‘desolate’ and a ‘slum,’ and was a ‘cesspool of poverty, pollution, and paranoia.’ These descriptions justified the Entertainment District by invoking a longstanding anxiety about the class inflection of cities in western Europe and North America. Calling the city squalid, a cesspool, and polluted also recalled an anti-urban discourse in which cities activate a panic about hygiene; in this discourse, cities are, de facto, unclean and unhealthy. Sewell argues that this conception reconciles three strands of thought: ‘[A] straightforward belief that cities are bad, in and of themselves; a sense that cities are unhealthy – physically, socially, aes-

Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 69

thetically, and morally; and a feeling that cities mitigate against a good family life. These ideas found expression in Western thought from the sixteenth century onward, and fell on fertile ground in thought and deed in the twentieth century.’71 Though a hygienic discourse gained greater purchase in the United States than in Canada, Sewell argues that ‘anti-urban’ sentiment has a Canadian history as well. He points out that, with some notable exceptions, Canadian cultural production has been distinctly uneasy about the city, preferring to use an often idealized wilderness or ‘nature’ as its imaginary material.72 When observers turned their attention to the Canadian city, they often failed to distinguish between the ill effects of poor municipal services and cities in general. ‘While the city may have failed Canadian writers as a locus of the imagination,’ Sewell comments, ‘most Canadians were city dwellers from the mid-nineteenth century on. Commentators looked at this real world and concluded the city was a place that threatened health.’73 Mirvish and Hume, then, invoked an urban discourse that saw the manufacturing city as the space where contamination by poor hygiene and the working class occurred, and implied that this was an unnatural environment for playing. Mirvish and Hume testified once more to the class anxiety inscribed within the Entertainment District by remaking the labour history of King-Spadina – which for the majority of the twentieth century was largely manufacturing-based and working class – as a narrative about the dirty and poor. The Entertainment District, in contrast, supposedly embodied a ‘new urbanism,’ a cosmopolitan mode of production that implied affluence, clean production, and forward thinking – and thereby made the city safe for theatre and its wellheeled audiences. Conclusion The inevitable question arises: Who are the discontents in this economy of urban play? There are a range of potential disruptions that the Entertainment District tried to efface, for they represented a potential rupture to its cozy play economy. The first was Toronto’s large not-forprofit theatre sector, which resists definition as commodity performance. There are patterns of urban consumption of which not-forprofit theatres are a part, but these are more likely to be localized, known primarily to Toronto residents, less amenable to large-scale tourist marketing, and difficult to reify geographically. The second

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potential threat was on the border of the Entertainment District. A Queen Street residents group protested the extension of the Entertainment District to Queen Street. Their organizer argued that ‘Queen St W. we feel is part of our community ... It’s not an entertainment district.’74 It is important not to idealize the political motives of residents’ associations, which, in Toronto, have predominantly concerned themselves with sustaining private property values; however, it is interesting to note that some people, in spite of the best efforts of the Entertainment District, still believed that ‘entertainment’ and ‘community’ were antithetical. A third potential disruption lay in the heart of the District itself. As Sassen points out, ‘global cities’ rely on a large pool of service labour that is highly stratified internally by wage and skill.75 On the one hand, there are the producers who work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre; on the other, there are the people who clean their offices and those who make the beds at the Holiday Inn. Market and sentimental harmony may be a goal of the Entertainment District, but class and labour conflict did not simply disappear with its creation. For instance, on the night that Ed Mirvish was being celebrated by political and cultural luminaries as a hero for his contributions to the city, members of Local 75 of the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Union protested Mirvish’s tough line in contract negotiations. Theatre labour may have been well treated by Mirvish, but those who worked in his restaurants for far lower wages were often frustrated by his management and bargaining practices.76 Moreover, the membership of the Hotel and Restaurant union is dominated by women, immigrants, and people of colour. The Entertainment District values transnationalism as theatre and consumption, but, as urban labour, transnationalism has proved more problematic. The transnational migration of labour provided a workforce on which this play economy depended, but those workers’ class position, and their racial difference, was potentially disruptive. Theatre may have helped secure the creation of the Entertainment District, and the District has been successful in offering a vision of civic harmony gained through urban leisure consumption. But the protest by Mirvish’s restaurant workers serves as a reminder that this consumption – theatrical and otherwise – also involves rather less romantic urban struggles.

PART TWO The Edifice Complex

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3 Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe Muraille

When John Juliani described theatre in Canada as suffering from an edifice complex, he had in mind regional theatre companies that occupied buildings like the SLC. Canada’s regional theatre network was inaugurated by the opening of the Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) in Winnipeg in 1958, fulfilling recommendations made seven years earlier by the Massey Report. During the next two decades a string of buildings sprung up to house companies like Theatre Calgary and Neptune Theatre in Halifax, whose repertoires drew largely on the international mainstream and whose purviews were intended to extend beyond their immediate locales to wider audiences. This expansion of the Canadian theatre industry, though, was not without its critics. As Ric Knowles and Jennifer Fletcher comment, the regionals were often disparaged for operating according to an industrial and bureaucratic model of culture, ‘as “branch-plant” operations, taking Art and Culture from the Centre to the supposedly culturally impoverished regions.’1 Indeed, the regional theatre network provided a structure through which the production and distribution of relatively homogeneous high cultural commodities could be coordinated. The built forms of these theatres, often styled in the massive concrete vernacular of state-sponsored testaments to the Canadian public good, confirmed both their dominance and their interchangeability. A number of theatre companies grew up outside this network, however, and some of these became important features of the Canadian theatrical landscape during the 1970s. In Toronto, these included Theatre Passe Muraille (founded in 1968), Factory Theatre Lab (1970), Tarragon Theatre (1971), and Toronto Free Theatre (1972). These companies were among the more prominent members of what became

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known as Toronto’s ‘alternative theatre movement,’ with Theatre Passe Muraille frequently seen by commentators as the paradigmatic alternative theatre.2 While these companies shared at least an initial suspicion of the regional theatre system, the label ‘alternative theatre movement’ implies a common purpose that simply did not exist. As Knowles and Fletcher observe, the ‘mandates and practices of the socalled “alternates” ... in fact varied considerably.’3 In spite of this, a substantial body of theatre history about these companies has tended to adopt a teleological model of their historical development (embracing what Alan Filewod has termed the ‘alternative orthodoxy’)4 and driven a firm wedge between the concerns of the regional theatres and those of their smaller counterparts. Juliani’s characterization of the Canadian theatrical mainstream as suffering from an edifice complex may have been true, but it is equally true that many of the alternates experienced a variant of the same condition. Indeed, companies like Passe Muraille, Tarragon, and Toronto Free shared the same desire to own their buildings, and such ownership testified to the companies’ success. Of the alternates or their successors that still exist, all now own the buildings in which they reside. Where the alternates diverged from the regionals was in the types of buildings they occupied: many were formerly manufacturing facilities that had become vacant when their owners departed the city core during the suburbanization of manual industry in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s. Factory Theatre consciously drew attention to the industrial character of its first location (a former candle factory) through the company’s name, but its decision to locate in such a building was not unusual in the first half of the 1970s. Tarragon, two blocks from Factory’s original home, occupied a former cribbage board factory (where it remains today). Toronto Free Theatre’s premises on Berkeley Street at the southeast edge of downtown were formerly a gasworks, and are still the headquarters of CanStage, Toronto Free’s successor company. Theatre Passe Muraille purchased a vacant metalworks near the intersection of Queen and Bathurst Streets, in the southwest of the older city core, and has resided there since. It is no accident that most of these companies followed the same pattern of ownership, and it is this pattern that points to the implication of small and mid-sized theatre companies in Toronto’s urban political economy. Factory aside (which did not purchase a home until much later), these companies identified a building that once housed manual industry, purchased it, and renovated it to accommodate theatrical

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performance. Such a process was possible because of a historically circumscribed combination of events: the buildings were available because of the increasing suburbanization of Toronto’s manufacturing industry, and they were relatively affordable because the massive property-value inflation that came to characterize the downtown real estate market in the 1980s had not yet occurred (before this, post-war property prices in Toronto were largely stable, keeping pace with inflation but neither rising nor falling sharply). Establishing a ‘permanent home,’ as Passe Muraille called it, became a greater possibility than it could have been before or since. With this possibility came tremendous challenges, however, and it is Passe Muraille that has grappled with Toronto’s urban political economy more directly (and tumultuously) than the other so-called alternates. Passe Muraille was not the first alternate to occupy a former factory (that was Factory Theatre), nor is it the longest resident company in a former factory (that is Tarragon Theatre). And, arguably, it does not possess the building that has been gentrified most extensively (that is likely CanStage at Berkeley Street). But Passe Muraille was the first of these companies to own a former factory, and its attempts to negotiate the challenges posed by the ownership of such a building – by the property’s built form, its industrial history, and its value as real estate – consistently elaborate a more subtle and expansive understanding of the edifice complex than Juliani imagined. From its inception, Theatre Passe Muraille grappled with a spatial contradiction raised by the local application of modern performance ideology. On one hand, performance space was coded in late 1960s Canada as the architectural expression of artistic ossification and social privilege. Brutalist theatre buildings seemed to enforce boundaries between stage, audience, and world, making these boundaries appear immutable and impermeable. On the other hand, experimental theatre of the late 1960s saw performance space (broadly defined) as a site of theatrical and social contest, where, if the space itself were subjected to consistent re-theorization, the theatrical event could be artistically and socially liberatory. Theatre Passe Muraille was named with this in mind: translated from the French, théâtre passe muraille means ‘theatre through (or “without”) walls.’ The founder of Passe Muraille, Jim Garrard, desired ‘a theatre free of distinctions between actor and spectator, between “inside” and “outside” the theatre.’5 Paul Thompson deepened the exploration of these ideals during his tenure as artistic director through collective creations that often questioned what it meant to

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perform in spaces not conventionally deemed theatrical. A production like The Farm Show, played in a barn on a southwestern Ontario farm with the audience sitting on hay bales, explicitly drew attention to the way that space was an important constituent of the theatrical event. Garrard’s notion of a ‘plastic theatre,’ and the company’s emphasis in the early 1970s on touring and helping to develop new work across Canada, demanded a constant re-evaluation of the location of performance. Such a continuous re-theorization of performance space was difficult to reconcile, however, with the administrative demands of an expanding theatre company. Although Passe Muraille’s use of multiple and flexible performance spaces was an inventive response to the way in which the Canadian theatrical establishment predominantly used performance space, this flexibility created problems as well as possibilities. As any theatre company that attempts to tour on tight budgets knows, re-situating a company in various, often logistically demanding, spaces eventually can become tiring, expensive, and difficult to manage. Consequently, Passe Muraille focused on establishing a single theatre complex that could function as a ‘home for its administration’ in the mid-1970s.6 The company’s purchase of 16 Ryerson Avenue was an attempt to divide spatial considerations from artistic ones; more specifically, its goal was to make performance space assume a predictable consistency through monopoly control of one location. The creative possibilities of performance space were mitigated by the administrative concerns of its management – in effect, the solution to the spatial problem in one location was to move it to another. The volatility of Toronto’s property market during the 1980s – and the effect that this volatility had on the value of Passe Muraille’s property – subsequently contributed to a financial crisis that nearly bankrupted the company. Yet once again the tense spatial dialectic continued. While the building had become part of the financial problem, now it became part of the solution to that problem. In the 1990s, Passe Muraille’s property was enlisted in an increasingly insistent commemoration of the company’s own history through performance, a commemoration that helped restore the company to some measure of financial stability. If there were any doubt that the boundaries between mainstream and alternative theatre were tenuous, the inextricability of Passe Muraille’s theatrical and spatial histories shows that such divisions became increasingly irrelevant. And if there were any question about the difficulty of theatre companies asserting complete control over performance space, Passe Muraille’s experience of urban

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property ownership removes all doubts about the challenges of doing so. The theatre beyond walls repeatedly discovered that its walls offered more opportunities – and created more challenges – than its founders could have imagined. Towards a Permanent Home: Spatializing the History of Theatre Passe Muraille Theatre Passe Muraille was founded in 1968 by Jim Garrard at Rochdale College, the now defunct housing and educational laboratory affiliated with the University of Toronto. Garrard was influenced by the theatre experiments of LaMama in New York, Panic Circus in France, and various work that he had seen while a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.7 Garrard saw Passe Muraille as a similar response to naturalist theatre aesthetics and the Canadian regional theatre movement, and his first two shows were productions of plays that he had first seen performed by LaMama. Paul Foster’s Tom Paine (1968) received only one performance in the underground parking garage of Rochdale, but Garrard gained greater attention with Rachel Owens’s Futz (1969), a love story between a farmer and a pig. Passe Muraille’s notoriety in Toronto was cemented when the actors in Futz were charged with and convicted of staging an indecent performance (they were acquitted on appeal), and the show inaugurated a provocative stylistic and political pose that became popularly associated, for better and worse, with the alternative theatres. When Paul Thompson took over as artistic director in 1970, he moved Passe Muraille’s acting ensemble into the collective creation of plays, a mode of dramaturgy and performance style in which Thompson and the actors created productions through research and improvisation in rehearsal. This approach often involved a complete rethinking of the way in which performance space contributed to the creation and reception of theatre. The Farm Show (1972), for example, was developed as a play about farm life by actors who lived and worked on farms near Clinton, Ontario. The original production was rehearsed and performed in Ray Bird’s barn, where the spectators included people on whom characters in the play were based. The show subsequently played Toronto and toured widely. 1837 (1973), created by the Passe Muraille company and writer Rick Salutin, re-staged the Upper Canada Rebellion as an allegory for Canadian cultural and economic independence in the 1970s. The location of performance had a

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direct impact on the dramaturgy of the play, with the ‘left-of-liberal politics’ of the Toronto production toned down and the emphasis on the farmers’ role in the revolt strengthened as the show toured Ontario.8 The title of the show, now 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt, changed to reflect the fact that it had been rewritten for rural audiences. Although Theatre Passe Muraille produced the work of individual playwrights, the company became best known for its method of collectively developing plays that had ‘ordinary (even banal) Canadians as their central figures.’9 The work of Passe Muraille in the early 1970s used collective creation to yoke an intensely localist dramaturgy with national (and nationalist) commentary: theatrical location, method, subject matter, and political imperative seemed to converge more immediately than in the established theatres. In Toronto, Passe Muraille best exemplified the cultural nationalist ideal of, as Don Rubin put it, ‘Canadian theatre as something distinct from the more traditional notion of theatre in Canada.’10 For the first eight years of its existence, Theatre Passe Muraille operated out of a variety of performance spaces in downtown Toronto, all of which it rented. The 1975 production of I Love You, Baby Blue, however, provided Passe Muraille with the capital necessary to purchase its present home at 16 Ryerson Avenue. I Love You, Baby Blue was a collective creation that examined sexual attitudes in Toronto, taking CityTV’s popular late-night soft-porn movies as its point of departure. The show contained nudity and sexually explicit material and was shut down twice by the morality squad of the Toronto police. In a rerun of the Futz case, Thompson and cast members were eventually acquitted of obscenity charges, but the play’s notoriety ensured a lengthy and enormously profitable run. Passe Muraille located a vacant building in a residential neighbourhood at the west end of downtown near the intersection of Queen and Bathurst Streets and purchased the property for $100,000. Passe Muraille thus became the first ‘alternative’ theatre in Toronto to own its home. This ownership testified to the company’s apparent vibrancy and stability, and it inaugurated an affiliation between property ownership and theatrical legitimacy in Toronto that would prove persistent for years to come. Built in 1902 as a commercial bakery, complete with stables for delivery horses, 16 Ryerson Avenue is a competently designed but now slightly shabby example of Toronto’s mercantile industrial architecture, styled in beaux-arts neoclassicism. The Toronto Historical Board describes the building as ‘a notable example of a small indus-

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trial building of the period. The skilful use of brick and classical architectural design elements in the façade gives it a prominence in the neighbourhood that is usually found only in public buildings.’11 The building was listed in the City of Toronto’s Inventory of Heritage Properties in 1974, and it was subsequently designated as a historical property of architectural value by Toronto City Council in 1977.12 This prominence was not only aesthetic but physical and economic, since the building occupied a site considerably larger than those of its residential neighbours and was relatively valuable; at 60 feet wide by 100 feet long, its lot was three times the width of the neighbourhood average, and the building’s 1902 City assessment valued the property at $9000, a substantial sum for the time (especially since the neighbourhood’s workers lived in houses usually worth between $250 and $600).13 The building housed bakeries and confectioneries until 1926, but in 1927 Wilkinson and Kompass of Hamilton took over the facility, manufacturing and wholesaling hardware until 1957. Sol Friendly Sheet Metal Works, which manufactured heating supplies, occupied the vacant building in 1959 and remained there until 1967, after which the building sat empty until Theatre Passe Muraille’s purchase in 1975. Following repairs to bring the space into compliance with building codes for theatres, Passe Muraille opened its doors on Ryerson Avenue in 1976. The former home of bakers and machinists was now the home of theatre. Finding a permanent home meant that Passe Muraille was making a monopoly claim over the use of a particular space. Asserting monopoly control over space as property owners is only possible, however, when certain historical conditions are met. It is not only a matter of prices in the local real estate market being affordable; a supply of amenable properties must also be available. The possibility of buying a property like 16 Ryerson Avenue was contingent on changes in Toronto’s urban political economy. Theatre Passe Muraille could only purchase 16 Ryerson Avenue because manufacturing industry was abandoning the downtown core. Fordist suburbanization of manufacturing in Toronto was well under way by 1975, and the location, scale, and design of 16 Ryerson Avenue was economically impractical for manufacturing metal products by the late 1960s, a fact that was demonstrated by the building’s nearly eight-year vacancy when Passe Muraille purchased it in 1975. When Wilkinson-Kompass (as Wilkinson and Kompass of Hamilton became) and Sol Friendly Sheet Metal

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Works left 16 Ryerson Avenue, both moved to larger sites in the rapidly expanding suburb of North York.14 Manufacturing industries that formerly would have occupied buildings such as 16 Ryerson Avenue had largely left the downtown core or closed up shop permanently; the portion of Canada’s economy devoted to the manufacturing industry (already smaller than that of its major trading partners in North America and Europe) had been declining since the end of the Second World War, and Toronto’s industrial decline was even greater than the national average. As remaining manufacturing companies like Wilkinson-Kompass and Sol Friendly moved to greenfield sites and industrial parks near 400-series superhighways, the majority of the economic activity in the city core became tied to financial services and commercial property development.15 This transformation suppressed the market value of former downtown manufacturing sites enough that even cash-strapped theatre companies could move into the property market, and it freed up space that, while sometimes uncomfortable, could accommodate the needs of theatre companies and their audiences. In fact, it is difficult to imagine 16 Ryerson Avenue as a working factory today. This conceptual shift speaks to the way that the post-war economic boom changed the dominant understanding of the amount and type of space needed to do manufacturing work in Toronto, while, at the same time, making former manufacturing spaces seem entirely appropriate for theatre work. The idea of 16 Ryerson Avenue as a manufacturing building seems almost quaint now, but as a theatre space it seems entirely natural. Property as a Spatial Instrument of Theatrical Labour That it should appear this way, however, does not mean that the process of transforming a manufacturing facility into a theatre venue is without conflicts and contradictions. Under modern capitalism, the privileged relationship of the subject to urban space is secured through private-property ownership, and small and mid-sized theatre enterprises like Passe Muraille best exemplify the complexities and contradictions of achieving such status. David Harvey argues that ownership is the means by which monopoly control is asserted over space, and that the property relationship attempts to produce ‘absolute space’ where ‘“owners” possess monopoly privileges over “pieces” of space.’16 By 1975 Theatre Passe Muraille was looking for some sort of predictability in its relationship with performance space; the company

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wanted to exert greater control over space, and private-property ownership offered the greatest opportunity to do so. But owning one’s property does not automatically mean that one can immediately use that property most effectively; property ownership is only useful insofar as a property can be integrated into the everyday working practices of a theatre company. As a result, Passe Muraille’s ownership of its building, particularly one that was part of an increasingly tumultuous urban political economy, had consequences for the company’s labour process. It is illuminating to consider 16 Ryerson Avenue as a spatial instrument of theatrical labour for Passe Muraille. In framing the issue of Passe Muraille’s relationship with its property in this way, I draw on Marx’s foundational analysis of economic production, and on contemporary materialist geography, which has attempted to spatialize Marx’s categories in order to account for the affiliation between social practice and place. In the first volume of Capital, Marx makes a tripartite division in his discussion of labour: there is the labourer, the social subject; there is labour power, the ability to work; and there is the labour process, the structured system by which the worker puts his or her labour to use in service of the production of an object. The labourer and labour power are potential resources, but are not actually labour practice until structured through some sort of process. The labour process, in turn, is made of three parts: ‘(1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work.’17 It is this final component – comprising the instruments of labour – that is particularly interesting in the context of Passe Muraille and its property. Marx defines an instrument of labour in the following way: [A] thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes ... In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour, in addition to things through which the impact of labour on its object is mediated, and which therefore in one way or another, serve as conductors of activity, all the objective conditions necessary for carrying on the labour process.18

Marx did not imagine, however, that the spatial characteristics of a

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labour process might be important in a complex fashion; insofar as he considers space in Capital, Marx tends to treat it as the unmediated physical reflection of a capitalist mode of production. In response, materialist geographers have attempted to integrate spatial concerns into Marx’s labour theory. Dorren Massey points out that spatial practices are always already inscribed in the labour process, exploring ‘spatial divisions of labour’ in which space functions as a necessary and frequently disciplinary part of the organization of the labour process.19 At the same time, the labour process is an important constituent of space, part of what makes space not merely a physical precondition for work but a social product created through work. This distinction is also particularly significant for Henri Lefebvre, who ‘distinguishes between Nature as naïvely given context and what can be termed “second nature,” the transformed and social concretized spatiality arising from the application of purposeful human labour. It is this second nature that becomes the geographical subject and object of historical materialist analysis, of a materialist interpretation of spatiality.’20 Materialist thinkers, then, have argued that labour and space are inseparable. Marx draws attention to the fact that the labour process requires instruments of work to function, and materialist geographers show that space – regardless of the forms in which it appears – can function as just such an instrument. Passe Muraille’s use of 16 Ryerson Avenue as an instrument of its own theatrical labour process illustrates that such use has concrete administrative and theatrical effects. Accounting for 16 Ryerson Avenue as a spatial instrument of Passe Muraille’s labour not only involves measuring how the company puts the building’s physical qualities to work, but also how the company’s work imagines the building’s ‘second nature’ in performance. As with any mode of production, theatrical production requires that its labour process be organized and administered. For Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue was the spatial means by which to centralize and coordinate its work, and, as such, became an administrative instrument of labour. A fund-raising prospectus circulated in 1978 explicitly linked building renovations to Passe Muraille’s labour process and practices: ‘The growth of this creative and resourceful enterprise, and the flourishing of many affilliated [sic] projects, has necessitated the establishment of a CENTRE, a home for its administration, for the building and storage of sets, and most importantly, for a flexible performance space.’21 Significantly, this statement redefined the earlier conception of flexibility employed by the company:

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whereas previously Passe Murraile understood flexibility to be the ability to perform in multiple places, now it understood flexibility to be the ease with which a single place could be used. The practical challenges of working in rented space at Rochdale College and Trinity Square (let alone the various sites that Passe Muraille had used around the province) made ownership a desirable goal pragmatically; one could, for example, drill holes in the floor and schedule work without being accountable to nervous landlords or competing users.22 But property ownership also brought with it an air of permanence. By gaining ownership of fixed capital, Passe Muraille was able to lay claim to an ideology of permanence – using space, in effect, to become timeless – that could be mobilized as an administrative tool and virtue. This ideology of permanence would also become important as the spatial basis by which a Passe Muraille ‘tradition’ could later be proclaimed in performance. Passe Muraille’s building also became an institutional instrument of labour by helping to organize and sustain complementary economic investments with the state and with trade labour. The extensive renovations made to 16 Ryerson Avenue in 1983 are illustrative in this regard. Significant funding for the renovations came from the federal and provincial governments through the Canada/Ontario Employment Development Program, a scheme that provided wage subsidies for registered businesses, not-for-profit organizations, partnerships, and corporations to hire the long-term unemployed for specific projects.23 Passe Muraille’s successful appeal for funding was made not in artistic language but in that of spatialized political economy: company correspondence to the federal government stated that construction ‘requires at least 22 skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen totalling 221 work-weeks of labour – a significant figure at a time of widespread unemployment.’24 Passe Muraille used its physical plant to attract required investment from the state in the building itself, transforming a manufacturing space into a space better suited to theatre work over the long term, and it linked funding for the company’s spatial requirements to state desires to alleviate long-term unemployment during a major economic recession. This state contract also involved the building in supporting both an internal labour economy (the company’s work in its own space) and an external labour economy (the non-performance labour that the building attracted into the theatrical workplace, as trade workers dismantled and remade the interior of Theatre Passe Muraille during the 1983 renovation).25 This

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moment embodied a shared work history, in which two types of workers often considered to have little in common worked in, and on, performance space. Theatre companies need not only to coordinate their labour processes but also to capitalize them, and it is in this context that its property also became a financial instrument of labour for Passe Muraille. The company used the industrial history of 16 Ryerson Avenue strategically to attract capital investment to finance its work. As I noted earlier, the building was deemed in 1977 to have ‘architectural value.’ When Passe Muraille first acquired the property, renovations were geared primarily to making the space usable for public performance in the short term: fitting fire doors, enclosing stairwells, and installing public washrooms. But the building still required substantial reconstruction. Its industrial heritage ensured an appropriate physical scale and price, but the space was still not ideally suited for a theatrical workplace. Thus, a major renovation in the early 1980s removed most of the second floor and many of the building’s internal supporting, and therefore obstructing, pillars. It also restored historically ‘correct’ sash windows to the building’s second-storey exterior. The transformation of the interior for theatrical purposes depended on the invocation of the exterior for ‘heritage’ purposes.26 Persuading the City of Toronto of the building’s heritage value had prevented its previous owner from demolishing the empty factory and encouraged him to sell the plant to Passe Muraille.27 The official heritage designation, granted later, increased the urban status of the space, allowing Passe Muraille to invoke 16 Ryerson Avenue’s protected industrial façade as a means of levering capital investment into the theatre company. The 1978 fund-raising prospectus offered contributors the opportunity of ‘investing in a handsome building, the continued existence of which is assured by its designation under the ontario heritage act,’ and gave them the chance of ‘enhancing and preserving a part of toronto’s history,’ while ‘providing audiences with a comfortable and accessible theatre.’28 The importance of the building’s industrial history persisted after Passe Muraille’s assumption of ownership, then, but that history was now framed as heritage. The façade helped to smooth a difficult transition from an industrial to a theatrical workplace by turning the building’s architectural, aesthetic, and local history into tools of capital investment that allowed Passe Muraille to finance its work, and define that work spatially.

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Economic Crisis Theatre Passe Muraille nearly ceased operations when it ran into serious financial difficulty in 1990. The company had accumulated a deficit of approximately $500,00029 and its bank ultimately refused to extend its line of credit. There was widespread concern in the theatre community over this state of affairs: in a performance of the The Noam Chomsky Lectures, Daniel Brooks remarked, ‘some of you may know that Theatre Passe Muraille is undergoing great financial difficulty at the present time. In fact, their general manager has told me that they are in the avant-garde of financial crisis management.’30 This is a clever way to describe the situation, but also a revealing one: the problem of being avant-garde had shifted from the aesthetic to the economic realm. Yet its property had allowed Passe Muraille access to capital that it would otherwise have been denied; the value of 16 Ryerson allowed work to continue far longer than would have been economically sustainable for many other theatre companies, and only amplified the company’s desire to hang on to the property. ‘What we’re fighting for,’ Passe Muraille’s general manager told Theatrum magazine in 1991, ‘is the survival of the facility as a viable theatre space.’31 Residential property values across Toronto rose significantly during the 1980s, driving up the potential resale value of 16 Ryerson Avenue to the point where the company could borrow heavily against its equity in the building.32 As figure 3 demonstrates, residential prices in both the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area and in the downtownwest district increased almost in lock step through the early 1980s recession and skyrocketed after the recession ended. By the time of an appraisal in early 1983, the market value of 16 Ryerson Avenue had almost trebled to $275,000.33 By 1990 the value of the property had leapt to $890,00034 and the only thing that allowed the company to continue to operate – its line of credit with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) – was secured against 16 Ryerson Avenue.35 The property value of 16 Ryerson Avenue permitted heavy borrowing on this line of credit (up to $200,000 initially and then $300,000) to sustain the company’s operating budget, allowing its work to continue when its overall revenues were insufficient to meet expenditures.36 But borrowing against the property to such an extent also tied Passe Muraille’s financial administration to a highly speculative and volatile downtown housing market. Real estate markets can fall as easily as they can rise, and Passe Muraille’s crisis in 1990 and 1991 coincided

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Dollars

250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 Year

19

Toronto CMA

District C1

Figure 3 Residential property average sale prices for Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (1953–98) and District C1 (Bloor Street–Lake Ontario, Yonge Street–Dufferin Street) (1970–98). Source: Toronto Real Estate Board.

with a dramatic drop in the value of residential properties in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area and an even steeper decline in its immediate area (see figure 3).37 While Passe Muraille’s debt-to-income ratio was undoubtedly extremely poor, this shudder in the real estate market would not have reassured the company’s bank either, since the CIBC would have been faced with the prospect of seizing an asset whose value was threatened. Property-value inflation and deflation, on a scale previously unknown, became a dominant feature of Toronto’s post-Fordist urban economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Passe Muraille entered this economy through its building, and the measure of the company’s economic integration is the way in which its physical space offered, on the one hand, a means of capitalization and, on the other, an ever greater exposure to the economic shocks of property-value speculation. In effect, Passe Muraille internalized the post-Fordist property market through its performance space, and this contributed to the company’s near collapse. Heritage and the Spatialization of Collective Memory Although Theatre Passe Muraille often privileged theatre space as an

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administrative issue (as a ‘container’ for its theatrical activity), theatre space did not disappear as an artistic issue. While heritage referred to a particular representation – historical, aesthetic, and symbolic – of the architectural features of 16 Ryerson Avenue in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term took on a different meaning after Passe Muraille’s financial crisis in 1990–1. Alongside its functional and administrative significance, the building became a spatial commemoration of the company’s own history, and this commemoration helped restore the company to a measure of its former health. Materialist geography argues that it is an epistemological error to assume that the measurement of spatial relationships is necessarily physical and a fetish to make the physical the referent and analytical touchstone of the spatial. As a corrective, Harvey emphasizes Bachelard’s theory of ‘poetic space’ and Lefebvre’s concept of ‘imagined space.’ Here space functions as a representational discourse in which ‘codes, signs, ... utopian plans, imaginary landscapes, and even material constructs such as symbolic spaces, particular built environments, paintings, museums, and the like’ produce social meanings above and beyond the physical.38 One of the ways in which 16 Ryerson Avenue became a poetic space for Passe Muraille was through its role in producing collective memory. ‘Heritage,’ after Passe Muraille’s financial crisis, increasingly connoted the way in which 16 Ryerson Avenue spatially commemorated the theatre company’s own history, and offered a way to recuperate the past in order to secure a future existence. Commemoration, as Susan Bennett points out, is nostalgic. It activates an ‘imaginary past’ as a ‘stable referent’ in order to compensate for a ‘defective and diminished present.’39 Bennett describes commemoration as functioning through a binary of good past/bad present, though this binary may be reframed slightly in the context of Passe Muraille; for the company, it was not only an issue of good past/bad present but also of stable past/unstable present. As Passe Muraille weathered the upheavals of a post-Fordist political economy in Toronto in the 1990s, the company’s history became a marker of stability and its property an important means by which that history could be made spatially manifest. The theatrical event at 16 Ryerson Avenue increasingly commemorated this ostensibly stable past, transposing it to the present as a form of theatrical compensation for contemporaneous political and cultural volatility. The 1990s were unkind to mid-sized, not-for-profit theatres across Canada.40 The recession of the early 1990s was deep and long in Ontario, to a degree unseen since the Depression. Moreover, the politi-

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cal consensus around the desirability of public arts funding in Ontario, on which not-for-profit companies rely heavily, began to break down in that recession (and was dismantled completely after the election of Mike Harris’s Conservative government in 1995). Without the degree of access to private sponsorship that the regional theatres enjoyed, mid-sized theatres in Toronto, of which Theatre Passe Muraille was only one, were generally under severe financial pressure for the entire decade. Theatre Passe Muraille was distinct from these other companies, however, because of its ability to recuperate a historical period in the 1970s when it was seen – rightly or wrongly – as ‘probably the most influential company in Canada.’41s To this end, Passe Muraille’s programming increasingly recalled its early and most famous collective creations. This work included The Urban Donnellys (1993), which resituated some of the themes of the 1973–4 collective creation Them Donnellys in inner-city Toronto; a new production of 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt (1998); Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy (first produced in the 1998–9 season and then remounted in the 1999–2000 season), based on the making of The Farm Show; and The Rediscovery of Sex (2000), a collective creation that revisited the ideas explored in I Love You, Baby Blue. Furthermore, many of the practitioners from Passe Muraille’s first decade were prominently involved. These included Paul Thompson, actor David Fox, Jim Garrard, actor-writer Linda Griffiths, and Miles Potter (who acted in The Farm Show and 1837 and directed The Drawer Boy). Throughout the 1990s, the company’s repertoire and personnel increasingly drew on what were perceived as Passe Muraille’s golden years. A performance of The Drawer Boy was a particularly powerful commemorative event, in which the company’s representation of its past shored up an unsteady present by positing the existence of, and its allegiance to, a Theatre Passe Muraille tradition (however ill-defined that tradition may have been). The basic plot of the play – an actor named Miles lives and works with a pair of farmers as research for an unnamed play that he is helping to create and in which he will perform – was inspired by the creation of The Farm Show. The role of Angus, one of the two farmers in The Drawer Boy, was played by David Fox, who also performed in the original production of The Farm Show. The director of The Drawer Boy, Miles Potter, performed in The Farm Show, and the character of Miles in The Drawer Boy is a clear reference to Potter and some of his experiences living and working on a farm.

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The origin of the haying scene in The Farm Show, which was based on Potter’s frustrations with farm labour, is depicted in The Drawer Boy. For those in the audience who saw the original production of The Farm Show, The Drawer Boy acknowledged their spectatorial history with the company and affirmed that this history was constitutive of their present spectatorship. In the same way that a production of the play helped to unify Theatre Passe Muraille’s history into heritage, the production’s inclusiveness reassured spectators that the history of Passe Muraille was also their own history and, like the company’s, was uncontested and stable. For those in the audience who did not see the original production of The Farm Show, The Drawer Boy’s appeal to the socially affirmative power of theatre was equally inviting; the production implied that, by attending a production of The Drawer Boy, one memorialized the theatrical past and through that commemoration assumed a place within the Passe Muraille tradition. Consequently, this conflation of histories and subjectivities completely re-figured the conception of Theatre Passe Muraille’s work during the 1970s as ‘alternative.’ By deploying Passe Muraille’s history as a stable and unifying referent, the theatrical event could no longer conceive of this history as being in formation, dissonant, and anti-institutional. Passe Muraille’s production of The Drawer Boy stripped the company’s ‘alternative’ past of its radical content because that past was now bourgeois, hermetic, and accessible through unmediated representation in the present day. And an important part of that radical past – the way in which it was spatially interrogative – became unrepresentable once 16 Ryerson Avenue was imagined as a commemorative site. The nostalgic invocation of a stable past, so reassuring in a particularly uncertain moment of cultural production, was contingent on performance space being conceived as transhistorically uncontested and infinitely transposable. But this was misleading: 16 Ryerson Avenue was a necessary part of this commemoration because, in the postFordist economy, the building itself was reassuring. Its heritage, in both an architectural and ideological sense, commemorated a Fordist age that was ostensibly ordered and coherent and from which an insurgent theatre company and its audience could emerge. Conclusion The problems of performance space did not cease to be an issue for Theatre Passe Muraille after it purchased 16 Ryerson Avenue. Rather,

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the company first used the building to relocate spatial concerns from an artistic ideal to the administration of its labour process. The company’s challenge became finding the right theatrical ‘container’ for its work, a challenge that could be met because the post-Fordist suburbanization of manufacturing in Toronto’s urban political economy released former industrial spaces for use by theatre companies. When Passe Muraille purchased 16 Ryerson Avenue, however, it became tightly tied to Toronto’s volatile property market, forcing the theatre company to attempt to reconcile the spatial contradictions of the building adminstratively: while owning it offered methods of capitalization and physically embodied a sense of stability that funding sources and audiences usually welcome, the building, as real estate, also tied Passe Muraille to swings in local property values. In this sense, Passe Muraille awkwardly assimilated Toronto’s urban political economy into the conception and management of its performance space. But if materialist geography and political economy help illuminate the unacknowledged spatial history of a theatre company, it is important to acknowledge how transformations in theatre practice itself are part of that history. For Passe Muraille, this transformation increasingly meant that 16 Ryerson Avenue became a commemorative site, the spatial means by which the theatre event blurred histories, and invented and reproduced cultural tradition. A Theatre Passe Muraille that was, in Jim Garrard’s words of 1968, ‘free of distinctions between actor and spectator, between “inside” and “outside” the theatre,’ came to promote a very different understanding of the ‘theatre beyond walls.’

4 A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop Productions

Theatre Passe Muraille may have struggled to resolve its anxious relationship to 16 Ryerson Avenue, but it was not the only mid-sized theatre in Toronto to be preoccupied with its property. It is equally striking how much of the history of Toronto Workshop Productions (TWP) was tied up with its property at 12 Alexander Street, a former car showroom near the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley Streets in the city core. Through the 1980s, TWP increasingly invoked its property as a way of solving (or eliding) mounting financial and administrative difficulties. Like Theatre Passe Muraille before it, TWP invoked its property as an ideal of ‘home,’ where 12 Alexander Street functioned as a locus for a community of artists and political fellow travellers that was perceived to be socially marginal.1 TWP’s preoccupation with 12 Alexander Street was a compensatory response to the company’s precarious situation, and the theatre building a site of anxiety displacement: if TWP was in crisis administratively and financially, then the symbolic and physical presence of that building implied stability and permanence. For the company, these qualities were particularly important to assert when Canada’s political economy was moving to the right during the 1980s. This chapter focuses on the ways that TWP’s decline and ultimate death were mediated through its property. It does not provide a company history, at least not of a conventional sort; Neil Carson, in Harlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions, has already written a detailed history of TWP, and he devotes a substantial portion of his book to the company’s troubles in the 1980s. But Carson’s analysis also exemplifies the conventional response to a major problem one faces when writing about TWP: for all but its final two

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years, the company was headed by one artistic director. George Luscombe was the central figure at TWP for so long that it can be difficult to distinguish whether commentators are discussing the company or writing Luscombe’s biography. Carson calls Luscombe ‘the single animating spirit of the theatre,’2 Johnston claims that ‘the history of Toronto Workshop Productions ... is indistinguishable from that of George Luscombe,’3 and one of TWP’s assessors at the Ontario Arts Council states bluntly that ‘the history of TWP is the autobiography of George Luscombe.’4 Furthermore, the demise of the company is often accounted for in patriarchal and Lear-like terms, a narrative strategy that reproduces the conventional ideal of history as the chronicle of great male leaders, and submits the history of TWP rather uncomfortably to the representational demands of tragedy. For example, in a magazine profile of Luscombe written by Urjo Kareda shortly after Luscombe’s death, entitled ‘Our Father,’ Kareda ties TWP’s downfall to a declining Luscombe, the company’s collapse the result of a glorious but waning patriarch staying on the throne too long and failing to complete the division of his kingdom successfully.5 It is important not to diminish the significance of George Luscombe’s many roles, each one practised determinedly, in the history of TWP: whether as director, administrator, acting teacher, or political advocate. It is also important, however, to recognize that one man cannot be the sole historical cause for, or measure of, the slow death of a company. The story of TWP’s demise may feature Luscombe as protagonist, but it is also a more complicated narrative involving a theatre company’s long struggle – and ultimate failure – to stabilize its relationship to urban space. If space, rather than the individual, is the frame through which TWP’s collapse is read, then it is possible to identify how TWP’s demise was also rooted in the way that the company was valued spatially by those who worked on its behalf (and this includes not only George Luscombe and the company’s staff but also TWP’s board of directors, artistic colleagues, political advocates, and funding agencies). The death of TWP vividly illustrates how a theatre company may negotiate multiple and sometimes conflicting spatial values, and it is through its property that the unanticipated consequences of such contradictions can be indexed. As I indicated at the outset of this study, it is important to recognize that ‘space’ can only be known by the forms it assumes. Moreover, these forms are various, can exist simultaneously, and may combine in unexpected ways. The history of TWP reveals that two broad spatial

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forms were particularly important to the company – theatre space and urban space – and that their intersection was particularly consequential during the 1980s. More specifically, distinct characteristics of theatre and urban space became important during this period: the aesthetic, ontological, and physical features of theatre space encountered the spatial forms of urban property, land, and real estate. TWP not only negotiated these various spatial phenomena, but, especially during the 1980s, negotiated combinations of them simultaneously, whether it realized this or not at the time. To its guardians, TWP was valuable because, as a theatre enterprise, it was seen to be separate and offer a refuge from everyday life. This sentimental ideal stemmed from the separatist way in which TWP spatialized socialist aesthetic ideology, first as a kind of company autoimaginary and then in the company’s use of physical places. But in an ironic and unexpected twist, TWP’s eventual turn to property ownership to shore up the sentimental value of the company also contributed to the conditions by which the market value of TWP emerged sovereign through the potential for real estate speculation. The sentimental value of guardianship unwittingly encouraged, and then gave way to, the market value of proprietorship because the spatial means of their articulation – 12 Alexander Street – were the same. Proprietorship initially offered TWP the opportunity to capitalize on the market value of 12 Alexander Street as a commodity in Toronto’s inflationary real estate market during the late 1980s, and the company attempted to play this real estate market to its advantage. The results proved wholly unsuccessful, however, and exposed a central problem that could not be resolved, at least at that historical moment: TWP saw itself as a company resisting the dominance of market relations, but, by attempting to use its property to secure the company’s future, was propelled more deeply into the market economy than it could manage. Performance, Property, and Problems: Spatializing the History of Toronto Workshop Productions Toronto Workshop Productions plays a key role in the history of contemporary Toronto theatre. Founded in 1959 as Workshop Productions by George Luscombe (‘Toronto’ was added to the company’s name in 1963), TWP was, for nearly a decade, an important alternative to commercial touring shows and local avatars of high culture like the Crest Theatre. Much of its distinctiveness stemmed from the fact that Lus-

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combe’s politics were explicitly socialist (unlike the softer left-liberalism of many of his peers in Toronto theatre), and he was committed to developing the group theatre techniques that he had learned as an actor in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Britain. Unlike much Toronto theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, TWP’s work was actor- rather than playwright-centred (though one could justifiably argue that, in its singularity of method and presentational style, TWP’s work was equally Luscombe-centred). Luscombe’s acting ensembles were often exceptionally skilled and disciplined; performances in a TWP show extended naturalist characterization through stylized, often rhythmic stage movement, and productions like Hey, Rube! Ten Lost Years, and The Mac-Paps saw the stage as a distinct forum for socialist and theatrical advocacy. TWP started producing plays in a donated, 100-seat basement space in Parkdale, a working-class neighbourhood in the old city’s west end. The first play to draw popular and critical acclaim was Hey Rube! which TWP first mounted in 1961 and then re-staged periodically. A play about a tattered circus troupe that performs for a hostile town, the play’s success in its 1966 production helped convince TWP to move to larger quarters (the arts councils’ insistence that TWP attract larger audiences also compelled the transfer). The following year Luscombe leased an empty car showroom in the heart of downtown Toronto. With the help of a friendly architect, and through colleagues donating their labour, the company quickly transformed 12 Alexander Street into a 285-seat theatre. On New Year’s Eve, 1967, TWP gave its first performance in its new home. Productions like Mr. Bones (1969) and Chicago ’70 (1970) attracted local and international attention, but in 1974 a fire seriously damaged 12 Alexander Street. Though it did not own the building, the company raised the funds to pay for repairs and quickly reopened. The fire inaugurated a pattern of periodic anxiety over its property. In 1977 TWP’s lease was terminated, but, after successfully staving off eviction, the company faced the same threat in 1979. A major public-relations campaign persuaded the City of Toronto to freeze commercial development on the site and the province agreed to provide an interest-free mortgage so that TWP could buy the property (which it finally did in 1984). These spatial anxieties were accompanied by increasing financial and administrative trouble at the company: audiences were declining and the company was under pressure from the arts councils to improve its administration. Moreover, TWP’s politics seemed increas-

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ingly out-of-step with the emerging conservatism of the 1980s; even though provincial governments remained largely middle-of-the-road ideologically, the Progressive Conservative federal government, elected in 1984, was committed to reducing arts funding and fostering private enterprise; and a faction of aldermen (as city councillors were then called) with close ties to commercial property developers controlled Toronto city council. Put simply, TWP was in serious trouble by the 1980s. As table 1 shows, TWP’s accumulated deficit in 1980 was nearly $90,000; though the deficit had, in fact, been accumulating over the previous few years, accounting errors had led the company and its funding bodies to believe that TWP had been operating in the black.6 The unexpected appearance of a substantial deficit was alarming and called into question the company’s attention to administrative and financial planning. In 1982 the Canada Council expressed its concern that the company projected a deficit of over $200,000, noted falling attendance, and urged it to ‘re-establish contact with an audience.’7 By 1984 TWP’s funding bodies were becoming increasingly uneasy about the company’s administrative and financial difficulties – TWP had, for example, employed four different administrators between the 1981–2 and 1984–5 seasons8 – and progressively more frustrated with Luscombe and the board of directors.9 They, along with the theatre’s board of directors, were anxious to resolve the issue of Luscombe’s successor, keeping a watchful eye to Luscombe retiring or, at least, reducing his role to directing TWP’s actor training program. Luscombe resisted being eased aside and his relations with the board grew tense, but in March 1985 he agreed to the appointment of Robert Rooney as associate artistic director. After a year’s probation, Rooney would be promoted to artistic director. This ostensibly signalled that the board was now taking a more active role in the administration of the company and that the long-standing problem of how to plan Luscombe’s succession had been successfully resolved. But if TWP’s affairs looked like they might stabilize, two more serious blows landed that summer. The company’s accumulated deficit, already barely sustainable and only kept in check by sharp reductions in programming, more than tripled in one season to almost $200,000. This figure did not include the $100,000 mortgage liability to the Ontario government that TWP now carried because its purchase of 12 Alexander Street had been finalized. TWP acknowledged that the company faced ‘the most serious financial crisis in its history.’10 To make matters worse,

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Table 1

Toronto Workshop Productions annual accumulated operating deficit

Yeara

Accumulated deficit

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988e

$81,654 167,407 181,153 95,683 54,271b 179,328c 223,371 149,920d 375,870

Sources: 1980, 1981 – Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Financial History 1979/80–1982/ 83,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1982, 1983 – TWP, ‘Balance Sheet,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1984 – TWP, ‘Copy of Completed Metropolitan Toronto 1985 Application for Grants in Aid of the Arts,’ 1985, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1985, 1986 – TWP, ‘Financial Report,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1987 – TWP, ‘Financial Report,’ 1987, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1988 – TWP ‘Revenues and Expenses Report,’ 1988, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library. a This refers to the end of the fiscal year, which for 1980–3 was 31 August. From 1984 on, the end of the fiscal year was 30 June. Figures are not adjusted for inflation. b This figure should be treated with some scepticism. A figure from a financial statement was unavailable, the data provided to the Cultural Affairs Division of Metropolitan Toronto in the application from which this figure is drawn appear to be incomplete, and TWP had a history of under-reporting its accumulated deficit to funding bodies. In some cases, this is because of accounting errors on its part, in others because the company’s fiscal year did not correspond to that of the granting body; therefore the deficit projection was – as it was every year in TWP’s year-ahead budget – significantly optimistic. c An alternative deficit figure of $249,566 is contained in a fragment of a larger, undated document pertaining to the financial picture of the company and its plans for deficit reduction. This figure is not included in the table because of the presence of an audited figure; however, it is possible, given the confused state of TWP’s financial administration at the time, that this figure more accurately reflects the deficit position of the company that the one that the records assessed by the auditor produced. Either way, the situation is poor. TWP also finally received the deed to the 12 Alexander Street property during the 1984–5 financial year. As a result of this purchase, TWP now carried an additional $100,000 liability on top of its accumulated deficit in the form of an interest-free mortgage owed to the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture (this was the only mortgage on the property, as TWP’s agreement with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce covered a revolving term loan secured against the property, but the province was lead creditor in the event of bankruptcy). This liability was not discharged until 12 Alexander Street was sold and the company wound up. d This figure includes a one-time deficit reduction grant from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture in the amount of $109,489. e TWP dismissed all staff and ceased operations at the end of June 1988. The company finally ceased to exist legally in the fall of 1989.

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the Canada Council informed TWP that its operating grant would be cut by $30,000 for the upcoming year. The OAC followed with a $6000 cut. This crisis atmosphere prompted the OAC and the Canada Council to commission a study of TWP’s management. Consultant Graeme Page recommended wholesale administrative reorganization, including the establishment of a board of trustees to ‘review, approve and monitor all budgets, cash-flow projections, renovation plans and the like’ and, ultimately, to serve as a final arbiter on all administrative functions of the company.11 Page’s report provided the final impetus for Luscombe to assume the position of ‘Artistic Director Emeritus.’ The trustees took over in September 1986, with representatives of TWP, the Toronto Arts Council, and the OAC constituting the board, and Robert Rooney’s ascension to the artistic directorship meant that he now grappled with the precarious state of the company. Neither Luscombe nor Rooney lasted long in their new positions, however, as the board of directors and the administrative trustees soon dismissed both (in 1987 and 1988, respectively) amid cancelled shows and soaring deficits. They appointed actor Leon Pownall as the new artistic director, and, in the face of vocal opposition from many local artists and politicians, mooted various schemes to capitalize on the real estate value of 12 Alexander Street. TWP finally collapsed in 1989, with the City of Toronto purchasing the boarded-up property at 12 Alexander Street so that it would remain a theatre building. The purchase price covered TWP’s debts, but there was nothing left over to continue producing plays. Theatrical Guardianship as a Spatial Ideology Critics, most notably Carson, have discussed TWP’s difficulty in reconciling artistic and economic imperatives, but they have considered only indirectly how the company’s property was often at the heart of this struggle. The best way to describe TWP’s view of itself is as a guardian of the theatre, with George Luscombe as that view’s chief exponent. This lengthy quotation, taken from a speech Luscombe gave at a crisis meeting between TWP and its funding councils in 1986, illustrates best the sentimental economy that Luscombe and the company had constructed over the lifetime of the theatre: We live in hope, or we would not have begun the enterprise of theatre production in the first place. Our optimism and faith in ourselves has not

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Part Two: The Edifice Complex diminished with the years. In fact, many of our objectives over the past 27 years have come to pass and have contributed to the development of theatre, not only in Toronto, but nationally. But change and adaptation to a new era is essential and our problem has become the very thing we fought so hard to achieve – the building – it’s [sic] condition. Repairs are a constant problem ... But in my opinion it is not these things, most unnoticed by the audience that has [sic] caused our audience to withdraw from our theatre. By far the stronger reason is the perception of 12 Alexander Street as a theatre that ‘once was,’ a theatre of uncomfortable benches that ‘once was’ the ‘in’ thing. A theatre of black painted walls that ‘once was’ what one expected or would put up with. In short a theatre that has remained in the 60’s and 70’s – whose appeal is ‘once was’ ... At the time of our winning the theatre in 1980 from the developer, the city passed a by-law defining the building and land at 12 Alexander as a theatre space from this time on.12 This was the result of the enthusiasm of the people of Toronto at that time to maintain the theatre and TWP ... It is my intention as I relinquish the Artistic leadership of the company to see it firmly settled in its home [emphasis added]; to see it as a theatre for other young companies and groups lacking a home of their own; to see it as a meeting place of like-minded men and women whose concerns for man’s plight has led them to seek solutions and whose love of life has led them to seek those solutions in the theatre. The first and immediate change needed is the long overdue renovations to the theatre ... It is obvious from the above that while the situation is very serious, we still have great faith in the viability of TWP. We feel, and the Board agrees with me on this, that the traditions so firmly established by the Theatre over the past quarter of a century must be kept alive; that the need for the type of socially responsible work is probably more important in the future when we are and will be faced with more social problems.13

For Luscombe, TWP’s ‘tradition’ was inseparable from its ‘home’ at 12 Alexander Street. The company’s purpose, then, was to serve as a guardian of the ‘meeting place’ for the theatrical community of ‘likeminded men and women’ it housed. Though this speech was perhaps the single clearest articulation of Luscombe’s desire to keep TWP afloat, it also brought into focus the way in which TWP’s ideology of theatrical guardianship was spatially dependent. Luscombe’s lofty language and romantic appeal should not obscure the fact that this ideology relied on a long-standing, complex, and often rigorous logic about the ideal relationship between theatre and place. For TWP, its building represented the spatial manifestation of

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the socialist and oppositional artistic lineage of which it considered itself to be a part. The value of that building was rooted in its separation from everyday life, and the company frequently articulated this value in sacral and domestic terms, representing the building in such a way that its preservation and protection became a necessity. These sentiments – the separatist and the protectionist – required TWP to assume the role of guardian over 12 Alexander Street, since the property was their most visible embodiment. In doing so, TWP articulated the aesthetic, social, ontological, and physical logic on which that guardianship rested. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard proposes a phenomenology of space, an attempt to theorize what he calls ‘felicitous’ or ‘eulogized’ space.14 He sets out to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, and with the differences entailed by poetic shadings, this is eulogized space. Attached to its protective value, which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become dominant. Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination. Particularly, it nearly always exercises an attraction. For it concentrates being within limits that protect.15

Bachelard argues that ‘poetry,’ by which he means artistic forms in general, communicates through a series of arresting and revelatory ‘images.’ He argues that art activates (though, he stresses, does not create) an ecstatic ontological ‘archetype lying dormant in the depths of the unconscious.’16 It is a logical question how Bachelard’s formulation, with its poetic romanticism, essentialism, and ahistoricism is useful to materialist criticism (Bachelard writes, for example, that ‘the poetic image has no past’ – a problematic claim in a materialist context).17 But Bachelard is useful – if read against the grain – when one considers TWP, because he tries to account for the ways in which certain spaces are valued over others and marked off from everyday life. He claims that this process is possible because those separate spaces are imagined to be ontologically expressive. They need protection because they express the ‘being’ of those who occupy them, and so must be defended from seizure, which would represent the occupants’ symbolic death. What Bachelard

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lacks, though, is a historical account of how and why this process occurs. He claims that space, in general, is separatist, ontological, and in need of protection; it is more important here to show how and why TWP’s theatre space, in particular, was imagined to be separatist, ontological, and in need of protection – and what the material effects of this imagining were. TWP’s work resided within a lineage of socialist theatre defined by Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator, and Joan Littlewood. The company shared with these artists a systematic pursuit of anti-naturalist theatrical forms, a commitment to left-wing politics, and a mistrust of direct polemic. TWP also shared the view that because theatre relies on representation, the relationship between theatre and everyday life should not be homologous but refractory; that is, theatre should not try to collapse the distinction between itself and everyday life, but rather should exploit that distinction, because its basis – representation – opens up the possibility of a distinct performance vernacular that is irreducible to everyday language. Luscombe described this ideal as ‘the opportunity to lift out of life onto a very high frame that which is not realistic but rather, representational ... Remember what Shakespeare said, “... as if into a mirror,” not into a mirror; and Stanislavski expressed it as rendering into artistic terms. The word rendering is very important.’18 In Luscombe’s understanding, representation’s emphasis on the conditional ‘as if,’ on rendering and transposition, meant that even if theatre invoked everyday life it did this through a representational logic that was autonomous and indigenous to performance itself. This meant that, in the theatre event, the everyday should be seen as a representational effect of the medium itself, not as a blurring of the space between theatre and the everyday. Luscombe’s description echoes a line of thinking within socialist aesthetics about the way in which representation should be used to rupture any presumed homology between art and everyday life. Though he does not say so explicitly, Luscombe obviously invokes Brecht’s thinking; Luscombe shared Brecht’s respect for the supposed ‘epic’ qualities of Shakespeare, and concurred with Brecht’s conception that the ideal representational relationship between art and ‘real life’ was one of refraction rather than verisimilitude.19 In a broader sense, Luscombe’s thinking had much in common with that of Herbert Marcuse, who elaborated upon the ideal of a deeply politicized ‘autonomous’ art first articulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Marcuse argues that the aesthetic form both sublimates

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and de-sublimates the ‘given reality,’ reconciling the social subject to it but also opening up the possibility of seeing it anew, because the operations of representation and the operations of reality can never be entirely reconciled: The work of art is thus ‘taken out’ of the constant process of reality and assumes a significance and truth of its own. The aesthetic transformation is achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding so that they reveal the essence of reality in its appearance: the repressed potentialities of man and nature. The work of art thus re-presents reality while accusing it.20

Achieving autonomy was primarily an aesthetic problem for Luscombe, Brecht, and Marcuse; the distinctiveness and possibilities of the artistic form were marked out through the specific demands and representational vocabulary of art itself. For them, art ideally provoked an imaginary schism between itself and its social formation. Its efficacy and legitimacy were predicated on the existence and exploitation of that imaginary space apart. It is in this context that TWP’s recurring productions of Hey Rube! were exemplary: the play insists on the primacy of a representational vocabulary that it understands to be indigenously theatrical, and then extends those representational ideals into a statement on the ideal relationship between a theatre company and its social formation. Hey Rube! was TWP’s signature piece, and was staged more often than any other play in the company’s repertoire (the first production was in 1961, and the play was remounted in 1966, 1972, and 1984). Filewod describes Hey Rube! in this way: ‘Its plot is little more than an extended sketch: it describes the ordeals of a tattered one-ring circus as it prepares to battle creditors and hostile townsfolk. Much of the performance consisted of circus acts mimed in the Littlewood manner, with orchestrated lighting effects, music and sound cues, and group improvisation.’21 Part of Luscombe’s enthusiasm for the play stemmed from his belief that the circus, with its emphasis on rigorous physical training and precise gesture, on visual spectacle, and on a necessary connection between individual virtuosity and strict collaboration, offered ‘an essentially theatrical language.’22 Luscombe’s theatrical language was physical and imagistic, but, more importantly, it attempted to mark out a representational vernacular that was indigenously performative and obstinately separatist. The circus of Hey

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Rube! provided an ideal model of the vernacular distinctiveness of performance. Hey Rube! also offered a paradigm of an oblique relationship between the theatre enterprise and its social formation. The down-atheels circus in the play performs to a hostile town, but it is because their theatrical language is deployed from a position of social marginalization that the circus performers are able to offer uncomfortable critical revelation to the townsfolk about themselves and the place in which they live. Hey Rube! presented a model of theatrical community and of civic critique that did not rely on the existence of an inclusive public sphere. The circus performers’ sense of themselves as a community is formed through their indigenous performance language and their social exclusion from the town, and it is this separation that ostensibly makes their civic critique possible. TWP identified with the circus in Hey Rube! and encouraged its audiences to view the company in the same way. Productions of Hey Rube! transformed the entire auditorium into the inside of a circus tent, complete with striped canvas and red poles. TWP also took on Hey Rube!’s harlequin logo as the logo for the company itself, suggesting that TWP was like the circus clowns: collaborating in adversity, marginal, but critically revelatory about society at large. Carson comments that Hey Rube! was important because its recurring productions were ‘useful as a means of taking Luscombe and his actors back to his roots,’ and this is true insofar as Hey Rube! manufactured and reproduced a reassuring mythology of autochthonous theatrical orgins.23 But Hey Rube! was perhaps more significant because it translated these orgins into an ontological statement for TWP itself: the play transformed ideals of performative and social autonomy into an expression of who TWP was, proclaiming an ontological conviction at moments of uncertainty or crisis: at the time of the first performance in 1961, TWP faced eviction from its theatre building in Parkdale; in 1966, the Canada Council threatened to eliminate TWP’s funding unless it reached larger audiences; in 1972, TWP was trying to declare its relevance in the face of popular attention turning to the new ‘alternative’ theatres; and, in 1984, TWP entered its worst phase of financial crisis. Hey Rube! was a compensatory auto-ontological manifesto for TWP, proclaimed whenever the theatre’s future was in doubt or its existence needed to be reasserted. The production marked out the supposed distinctiveness of the company, and served as a reminder of ‘who it was’ to the wider public. TWP imagined itself as an ontological space apart, there-

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fore, by linking an ideal of representational autonomy drawn from socialist aesthetic theory to a romantic notion of the social marginalization of the arts within society and translated this into an essentialist ontological statement about itself. TWP imagined itself as a space apart, this space was suffused with its being, and this space was frequently under attack. This imaginary ontological space did, however, have a physical inscription: stage space, and the theatre building that enclosed that stage space. These physical contours defined a border with everyday life. Preserving this border could take the form of relatively minor behaviour regulation. Filewod quotes one of Luscombe’s dicta: ‘No one eats, drinks, reads newspapers or plays pinochle in my theatre.’24 Filewod justifiably interprets this comment as evidence of the disciplined behaviour Luscombe demanded from his actors, but it is also a prohibition on everyday activities penetrating the theatre space, which must be preserved from their invasion. Such physical conservation could also be spiritually inflected. Carson recounts an incident early in TWP’s history that became almost legendary among observers of and participants in Toronto theatre, in which Luscombe fired an actor after discovering him and a group of friends walking across the stage outside of rehearsal. Luscombe would later explain his rationale for firing the actor by saying, ‘I don’t know what hit me, but I had a bad feeling seeing them laughing on the stage. I felt it was important to show other actors that you have reverence for the place you work in.’25 Carson claims that the incident illustrates ‘what some people regarded as Luscombe’s “fanaticism,”’ but the nature of the transgression and the language Luscombe uses to describe it indicate something more than personal irascibility. The transgression was that the group walked on the stage as though they were traversing any other space. The actor brought ‘outsiders’ into the theatre building and together they used the stage like an everyday space. In effect, they trespassed: they failed to recognize that the theatre walls marked both a physical and symbolic barrier and that the stage had a spatial presence of its own that demanded codified negotiation–only in ‘theatrical’ moments could it be crossed. Furthermore, Luscombe’s use of the word ‘reverence’ to describe the ideal relationship between theatre practitioner and the stage suggests that stage space was sanctified, a sense that TWP subsequently encouraged by quoting Herbert Whittaker’s comment in the Globe and Mail that 12 Alexander Street was a ‘citadel practically sacred to the City’s cultural development’ in its promotional and administra-

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tive materials.26 For TWP, theatre space was not a physical space that could or should be used like any outside the walls of the theatre. To use it in such a way symbolically violated the important distinction between theatre and everyday life. The sacral spatial metaphor was also a useful way to argue against the incursion of the market into the theatre space. In 1977 a developer, Domingo Penaloza, took out an option with TWP’s landlord, Fobasco Ltd., to purchase 12 Alexander Street and an adjoining parcel of land. Penaloza recognized that, as Toronto’s property market heated up, TWP’s home was becoming a valuable piece of real estate. Only after a protracted battle involving Penaloza, Fobasco, and the City did TWP arrive at a lease arrangement that would halt the company’s eviction and its building’s demolition. When the deal collapsed two years later, however, control of 12 Alexander Street reverted to Fobasco, which made plans to proceed with its own development and served TWP with an eviction notice.27 As Carson recounts, Karl Jaffery, a TWP board member and the company’s lawyer, convened a meeting between Fobasco and Luscombe. In Carson’s description of the encounter, there is a clear difference between the way Fobasco viewed the property and the way TWP viewed it: The landlord wanted vacant possession of the property at a time in the near future which would be convenient for TWP. Instead of being crestfallen (as the agent no doubt expected), Luscombe bridled with righteous indignation. Eyes flashing, he insisted that 12 Alexander Street was not just any building to be traded, vacated, or demolished. Whether the landlord liked it or not, his property housed a theatre, and such a facility was a spiritual resource to be preserved and cherished.28

The disagreement over the property between Fobasco and TWP pointed to two different conceptions of 12 Alexander Street: the property as a market space, which could be ‘traded, vacated, or demolished’ at the will of its legal owner, Fobasco, and the property as a sentimental theatre space, which was a ‘spiritual resource to be preserved and cherished’ by its steward, TWP. Financial Crisis and the Domestic Refuge The counterpart to 12 Alexander Street as citadel is a conservation area of another sort: 12 Alexander Street as home. Bachelard devotes a sig-

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nificant portion of The Poetics of Space to the home, which he reads as ‘a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space.’29 TWP demonstrated that the ideal of home and the protectionist values it represents can be tremendously reassuring to a theatre company during times of difficulty; the ‘intimate values of inside space’ are not only relevant to phenomenology, but are material values that theatre companies may invoke at times of crisis. In TWP’s case, 12 Alexander Street was a domestic refuge from the encroaching demands of the market economy. The rhetoric of ‘home’ is not unique to TWP. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, Theatre Passe Muraille mobilized its funding campaign for 16 Ryerson Avenue around the ideal of ‘a permanent home.’ But TWP inaugurated and insisted on a domestic appeal to a greater degree than any other theatre in Toronto. Kareda comments that TWP illustrated best the ‘credo that a theatre company needs its own building, needs to be a family.’ He also adds ominously, ‘The story continues with the move to bigger quarters and their attendant bigger problems.’30 TWP’s move to 12 Alexander Street in 1967 signified an ascendancy in status not only because it moved to a larger building but because its change of neighbourhood – moving into the heart of the city – also suggested the company’s own increasing importance. TWP’s new downtown location announced that the company was a more legitimate enterprise and worthy of broader public and private support. Indeed, TWP soon began to draw on this cultural and civic capital. Funding appeals began to invoke maintaining the property as a reason for supporting TWP, and linked the maintenance of the property with a larger civic mission for the theatre: the company’s ‘new theatre fills a very real need in the Community [sic],’ administrator June Faulkner wrote to potential contributors,31 and ‘Toronto Workshop Productions is making an important contribution to the cultural life of the city and providing a facility for other worthwhile groups.’32 Fundraising also began to employ property-related metaphors: ‘We really need your assistance in keeping our doors open.’33 Due to its liminal urban location, between a somewhat seedy stretch of Yonge Street commercialism and large beautiful homes of old-money Toronto, the theatre’s new home enabled a self-fashioning in which TWP became invested: as a company close to Toronto’s margins, but with the bastions of economic privilege in its view. The new property, then, provided a complex metaphor for the company itself. It embodied TWP’s legitimacy as a theatrical and civic enterprise, and provided a spatial

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language through which that legitimacy could be embodied and sustained financially. But its urban location also implied that the company’s move into the heart of the city demanded a difficult negotiation between privilege and marginalization. It was not until after 1980, though, when TWP’s legal ownership of 12 Alexander Street became a possibility, that the building was consistently invoked in domestic terms.34 Although TWP did not own the property, the lease agreement imposed many of the responsibilities of ownership over 12 Alexander Street – in addition to rent, the company was required to pay for all property taxes and building repairs, for example. TWP’s restoration of the theatre building after the 1974 fire and its subsequent fights to avoid eviction had also encouraged a sense of symbolic ownership over the property. The growing possibility of legal ownership, however, facilitated TWP’s assertion of domestic spatial values in response to its rapidly worsening financial and administrative situation (and, notably, the historical moment when TWP first came close to collapse – in 1985 – was the moment when the invocation of 12 Alexander Street as a home was greatest). The most important characteristics of domestic ideology, according to Bachelard, are stability and protection. ‘A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability,’ he writes.35 Bachelard also argues that the house is seen to unify the ontology of the subject – ‘Without it, man would be a dispersed being’36 – and that it links this ontological unification with a sense of social value: ‘A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.’37 Qualities like stability and a unified sense of being became particularly important to TWP as the company’s future looked increasingly unsteady, and these qualities were articulated through the built environment. TWP’s building became a physical metaphor for the viability of the company, and so, in order to display the relevance of the company, TWP fetishized 12 Alexander Street as the main solution to problems primarily located elsewhere. During the 1980s TWP repeatedly invoked 12 Alexander Street as a domestic refuge that would ensure the survival of the company in the face of hostile forces from without. A promotional document from 1980, entitled ‘A Parable: The Year of the Golden Egg,’ uses the analogy of the ‘Golden Goose’ residing in and protecting her ‘nest.’38 The ‘major and minor tragedies of the old bird’s life,’ including ‘Flood, Fire and Expropriation,’ involved attacks on her nest, 12 Alexander Street.39 The nest, as Bachelard points out, is a central metaphor for

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home; it is associated with notions of self-protection and self-reproduction, and is the space of refuge through which a necessary sense of ‘well being’ is reproduced.40 Bachelard suggests that the nest is a primal archetype, but I would argue instead that the historical significance of nesting lies in its strategic value for those who use its rhetoric. The necessity to withdraw into one’s own corner, as Bachelard puts it, is significant not because it is primal (an assertion that Bachelard struggles to offer convincing evidence to support), but because it signifies a marshalling of resources in the face of perceived attack. Nesting emphasized the central role that 12 Alexander Street was perceived to play for TWP. Twelve Alexander Street sheltered the company, offering the space in which it might reproduce itself. Without that nest, the company would die. This explains why TWP encouraged the City of Toronto to pass a by-law proclaiming 12 Alexander Street a theatre in perpetuity, something the City finally did in 1982. It also explains Luscombe’s later statement, ‘We must ensure that TWP and 12 Alexander Street stay together.’41 In order to take on the qualities of stability that the built environment represented, the company had to become inseparable from its building and its affirmative values. When requesting funding for a building refurbishment study from the Ontario Ministry of Culture and Recreation, TWP argued that the ‘continuity’ of the company depended on making 12 Alexander Street a ‘permanent home.’42 The phrase ‘permanent home’ implies much the same thing as it did in Theatre Passe Muraille’s earlier use: the notion that the company’s survival could only be secured permanently through the ownership of the built environment. But TWP’s invocation of this ideal of physical entrenchment more emphatically amplified the virtues of intransigence: having a ‘permanent home’ allowed TWP to claim that it was a ‘permanent resident’ in the neighbourhood with no possibility of being ‘moved on by a fickle landlord.’43 The inseparability of TWP from 12 Alexander Street meant that renovations to its building assumed as great a symbolic role for TWP through the early 1980s as they did a practical one, and often curtailed needed discussions over the company’s administrative and financial position.44 Luscombe and the board of directors believed that TWP could only demonstrate the company’s value through its building. By September 1982 renovation plans had broadened from a 400-seat scheme to a 600-seat scheme. The justifications for expanding the proposed theatre were as likely to be based on a sentimental appeal as they were an economic rationale. The hope was that the ‘physical

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space,’ both ‘interior and exterior,’ would give the opposite picture of the company than that depicted by its grant assessors, low audience attendance figures, and rapidly escalating deficit. On the contrary, its home would announce that TWP was ‘exciting,’ had a ‘synergistic impact on the environment’ and was devoted to ‘newness.’45 This sentimental self-fashioning could only defer financial crisis for so long. TWP’s application for emergency funding from the councils in 1985 prompted consultant Graeme Page to lay a significant portion of the blame for the situation on TWP’s preoccupation with its building. Page argued that this preoccupation was compensatory: The [financial] situation was further complicated by an unwarranted amount of energy being expended on the needs, future and value of the building. The statement that the Board had reached a clear ‘understanding that the renovations are not just something desirable, but economically essential to the future health of the theatre’ suggests that planning was being done as a response to the crisis rather than as a carefully thought-out process with definite priorities, goals and strategies.46

In the meeting convened with TWP’s funding bodies to discuss Page’s report and the theatre’s financial crisis in January 1986, Luscombe ignored the details of the consultant’s commentary and presented his high-minded statement about the link between the company and its building. Luscombe’s statement, however, confirmed that Page was correct: 12 Alexander Street had become totemic for TWP, the company’s raison d’être and potential saviour. At the height of the crisis, and in the moment where TWP needed to outline a plan to reduce its deficit and stabilize its administration, Luscombe launched into a romantic demand for renovation funding. The arts councils’ response to Luscombe’s entreaty was unanimous and uncompromising. The company, they stated, had produced the crisis itself through poor administration and ‘the diversion of TWP’s attention from its primary artistic objectives and mandate to the management and development of its theatre property.’47 They added that ‘developing the theatre property has been advanced by TWP as a solution to problems lodged primarily in the structure and operation of the producing company. TWP’s preoccupation with its equity position in the theatre appears to prevent it from coming to grips with its serious operational difficulties.’48 The councils were ‘unanimous in [their] appraisal that any consideration of capital expansion by TWP is

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unrealistic at this time and therefore we are not supportive of this request.’49 This does not mean that the building did not require attention; indeed, it required substantial repairs to make it more functional and comfortable. Luscombe, however, did not address a central problem: by the mid-1980s attendance figures at TWP hovered around the 30 per cent mark, and showed no signs of improvement. Luscombe’s proposal failed to address how expanding the theatre from 300 to 600 seats would solve a long-term decline in attendance, especially since such an expansion would require a significant boost in the company’s budget at a time of an already unsustainable accumulated deficit.50 Luscombe appealed, instead, to an entirely different conception of the building: as the spatial means by which social solidarity could be recuperated and reproduced in a ‘new era’ when ‘we are and will be faced with more social problems’ – in other words, an increasingly neo-liberal political economy. Though satisfying Luscombe’s demands would require money, the appeal itself was not primarily made on an economic basis, since Luscombe instead made the case in sentimental terms: 12 Alexander Street was a ‘home,’ and a ‘meeting place of like-minded men and women.’ Only expanding the building – not working with different artists in different ways, changing administrative operations, or altering the repertoire – would sustain the distinct ‘traditions so firmly established by the theatre over the past quarter century,’ with the physical growth of the building symbolizing the renewed strength of TWP’s values. When Luscombe defended 12 Alexander Street, then, he not only defended the theatre company, he tried to preserve an entire system of value that the property represented. If the Canadian political economy was growing increasingly right-wing and antagonistic towards the type of theatre that TWP offered, 12 Alexander Street offered an opportunity, it seemed, to proclaim TWP’s sentimental value through physical form. The continued presence of a building implies, rightly or wrongly, that physical form transcends the passage of time, so that a building can ideally become a transhistorical marker of community. TWP’s property testified to a marginalized history and cultural memory under threat, and appeared to be the spatial means by which theatrical guardianship could be sustained and reproduced in a neo-liberal political economy. But the doubtful practicality of Luscombe’s strategy also meant that his statement became a eulogy for the place and the values for which it stood. And, like a eulogy, it marked a death – not

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the death of the company, which was still to come, but the death of the value system that 12 Alexander Street embodied. From Guardianship to Proprietorship The problem in seeing 12 Alexander Street as the solution to the company’s woes was that the building itself was part of the problem. This is due to the nature of private property ownership, and the fact that this ownership brought the property directly into Toronto’s urban economy as a real estate commodity. If TWP focused increasingly on the sentimental value of 12 Alexander, once it owned the property it was difficult to ignore its market value as real estate indefinitely. Like Theatre Passe Muraille before it, TWP came to believe that property ownership was the best way to mark theatre space in the company’s name, to identify with theatre space, and to administer theatre space according to the company’s wants and needs. But if George Luscombe saw the purchase and refurbishment of 12 Alexander Street as the key to shoring up TWP’s sentimental value, the company’s board of directors would later come to see the sale of 12 Alexander Street as the way to eliminate TWP’s substantial and growing deficit. TWP had purchased the property – land and building – in 1984 for the knock-down price of $100,000. By 1988, developers were circling 12 Alexander Street, which had by then become valuable downtown land in Toronto’s highly inflationary real estate market. When Robert Rooney was forced to resign in April of that year, TWP’s accumulated deficit was rising towards $400,000; two months later, the company suspended operations and dismissed all of its staff. The only asset that TWP possessed was its property, and so the board of directors set about looking for ways to use the market value of 12 Alexander Street to underwrite the company’s deficit and operational costs. Though TWP had been keen to own 12 Alexander Street for many years, it initially did not desire property ownership because of any plan to capitalize on that property’s increasing exchange value. Indeed, its position towards the value of the property was contradictory at best. While TWP was happy to use 12 Alexander Street as collateral against a revolving annual loan with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, its successful campaign for the legal designation of 12 Alexander Street as a theatre in perpetuity imposed a development classification that actually reduced the market value of the property significantly – the value of 12 Alexander Street lay in its

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potential to accommodate condominiums, not theatres. But in 1988, the board of directors responded to the worsening deficit situation by looking for ways to exploit 12 Alexander Street’s value as real estate. If previously the property was believed to be a bulwark against a neo-liberal emphasis on the market economy, now its commodity position within that market economy was to be recognized and exploited. A sense of guardianship had eventually moved TWP towards legal ownership of the property as a way of sustaining that property’s sentimental resonances, but legal ownership also opened up the possibility of capitalizing on its proprietorship over an urban commodity in market terms. One scheme, announced in June 1988, involved George Vari, a highprofile local developer, paying TWP $300,000 for the property. With TWP’s support, Vari would likely be able to persuade the city to change the zoning of 12 Alexander Street to permit condominium development. Included in this development would be a theatre space for TWP. In return, TWP would transfer its land to Vari, and the developer would appoint the majority of TWP’s board of directors. If the plan went ahead, the $300,000 would be considered to be the purchase price of the property, and, if not, the money would be considered a charitable gift from Vari’s personal foundation. TWP’s board jumped at the offer, which they thought would wipe out the company’s debts (though, as it turned out, $300,000 would not have been enough to cover what TWP owed to its many creditors) and allow them to hang on to a theatre space at 12 Alexander Street. There were two key complications to the deal. First, the fact that Vari would control TWP’s board of directors meant that Toronto’s oldest left-wing theatre company would be under the effective control of one of the city’s more prominent capitalists. Second, Vari’s involvement would signal a change in the company’s mandate, although there was some confusion over what this change would be. Pam Rogers, then TWP’s general manager, said that TWP would shift from being a ‘political’ theatre to a ‘social’ theatre.51 She did not define exactly what this meant, but her additional comment to the Toronto Sun newspaper that TWP was too often a ‘political forum rather than a theatre company’ seemed to signal a retreat from TWP’s previous commitment to advocacy.52 Vari echoed this thinking when he claimed to be ‘not interested in politics at all,’ but put an eccentric and, seemingly for TWP’s board of directors, unexpected spin on what he saw the company’s new future to be: ‘We want to enhance the cultural approach of France and

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Canada,’ he stated, by presenting ‘French plays in English, English plays in French.’53 In its desperation to strike a deal on the property, the board had not worked through the implications of what the agreement might mean. The theatre community and interested political parties were deeply uneasy about the sale, and, in response, the board attempted to insert a clause in the deal that Vari would not change the mandate of the company.54 When he refused, the board broke off negotiations. Vari’s refusal to accept the clause was hardly surprising, but TWP’s anxious insistence on the guarantee and Vari’s outright rejection both articulated the same thing: that TWP’s entry into Toronto’s real estate economy effectively inverted the system of value that TWP had worked to construct since 1967. Whereas previously the property was the spatial means by which the sentimental value of the company was affirmed, now the market value of the property superseded the sentimental value of the company. In fact, insofar as the sentimental value of TWP resided in its presence testifying to the lofty virtues of ‘like-minded men and women’ concerned with ‘man’s plight,’ the company was a hindrance to the development of the property. The only solution, as Vari recognized, was to sever the property from the company or, at best, to make the company subservient to the property. Either way, the existing theatre building would be demolished. The implications of entering into the real estate economy were the key issues around which members of the theatre community rallied. While TWP’s board of directors still sought some sort of deal with a commercial property developer through the summer of 1988, a ‘Committee of Concern’ was formed that included, among others, Luscombe, director Ken Gass (the founder of Factory Theatre), Tarragon Theatre’s general manager Mallory Gilbert, and the former head of the Ontario Arts Council, Walter Pitman. Pitman said that the committee was ‘concerned by the degree of influence that developers have in this city’ and claimed that TWP’s survival was going to be difficult enough without taking part in the city’s ‘fever of real estate development.’55 Indeed, over the course of the summer the board of directors appeared as though it were encouraging a bidding war for 12 Alexander Street: it declined an offer from one developer worth $327,500,56 and spurned another from the owner of the Poor Alex theatre and a group of local businesses for $430,000.57 Since the Poor Alex group was willing to commit to continuing TWP’s mandate as a left-wing theatre, the board’s rejection of its offer seemed curious initially, but the board

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now stated publicly that it was attempting to generate maximum surplus value on the sale of the property and that this would only come through an arrangement with a commercial developer. The president of TWP’s board of directors commented in the Globe and Mail that the board ‘turned down this offer out of hand’ because they had calculated that $430,000 was not the maximum possible return on the property.58 ‘We are trying to capitalize on an asset,’ she stated, making clear that sustaining the ‘traditions so firmly established by the Theatre’ were now completely subservient to the market speculation on its property. When the board of directors announced an agreement to develop 12 Alexander Street as a retirement lodge for performers in September 1988, members of the Committee of Concern staged a dawn occupation of the theatre building.59 Though it did not succeed practically, the occupation spatially re-established the symbolic link – however temporarily – between the theatre building and the older conception of TWP in which the Committee of Concern was invested. In his appreciation of Luscombe after the director’s death, Rick Salutin noted the tenacity of spatial metaphors in determining and remembering social value. ‘This is a society that handles things that exist in space better than things that exist in time,’ Salutin argued. ‘It’s as though what’s past can only be imagined if it can be spatialized.’60 The occupation reasserted a cultural history (however idealized) that the market displaced; it was only when the Committee of Concern reasserted that history spatially that the message resonated publicly. The occupation was the last moment when TWP, as a sentimental entity, could be said to exist. As a legal entity, however, TWP limped on, and over the next eight months the market economy triumphed at 12 Alexander Street. In May 1989, with the company on life support, the board fostered a final bidding war between two developers interested in the property, resulting in a high offer of $650,000, more than six times the 1984 purchase price.61 The City of Toronto, which had offered $500,000 to keep the property out of private hands, was eventually forced to match the $650,000 offer. When opponents of the sale argued in favour of the sentimental value of the building – that 12 Alexander Street was a public trust that had largely been paid for by various representatives of the Canadian people and that its sale to a private developer would break this trust by appropriating a community asset – the company’s board of directors responded as capitalist landowners. ‘Judging from their behaviour and pronouncements,’ argues Carson, ‘it appeared to out-

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siders that the directors considered the theatre their property to dispose of as they wished. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge any moral obligation to the City or the Ministry, but they insisted that $650,000 represented the fair market value of the building.’62 One member of the board of directors told a local newspaper that the board had the legal right to ‘accept the best offer for the property to which it holds the title,’ and in this he was correct; whatever sentimental ties once existed to 12 Alexander Street, the board of directors ultimately held the juridical power to exchange the property as a commodity on the market, and Toronto’s speculative urban economy provided both the opportunity and encouragement to do that.63 Twelve Alexander Street may have been a public trust, but its value as a commodity could not be deferred indefinitely. That this commodity might one day be exchanged in a speculative transaction may have been disappointing, but it is not entirely surprising. Conclusion TWP finally collapsed in June 1989 when all of its grant applications were rejected. The City of Toronto eventually organized a new lease on life for 12 Alexander Street, albeit in a very different guise: as the smartly renovated home of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto’s queer theatre company. In many ways, the fit between Buddies and 12 Alexander Street has become as natural as it once seemed for TWP, and the reason for this is also partly geographical. In the years since TWP moved to 12 Alexander Street, the eastern end of its neighbourhood had become home to a thriving gay and lesbian community. For Buddies, moving to 12 Alexander Street brought the company into close physical proximity with an important constituency. Buddies became well settled at 12 Alexander Street, though, as I will discuss in the next chapter, the urban economy of Toronto was also implicated in the process of the company making its home there. It is possible that, at another historical moment, the spatial contradiction that undermined TWP would not have become so consequential. Had TWP’s financial and administrative difficulties not become particularly severe during a downtown real estate boom, other ways to address the company’s troubles might have come to the fore. Nonetheless, it is entirely explicable why events transpired as they did, and the reasons for this go beyond the personalities involved. TWP’s sentimental self-fashioning became deeply rooted in 12 Alexander Street,

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and, in order to preserve the link between the company and the property, it made a decision that is as understandable as it is ironic: in order to attempt to preserve itself from the market economy, TWP was forced to enter the market through private property ownership. This was a logical response to pressures in one area – the threat of eviction was long-term and significant – but it also opened up the company to pressures in other areas. When a theatre company in difficulty owns property that is becoming increasingly valuable, it becomes harder to ignore the market value of that property. The problem for TWP, however, was that exploiting this market value undermined the sentimental economy that the company set out to preserve in the first place.

5 Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography of Theatrical Legitimacy

Among the generation of not-for-profit theatre companies founded in Toronto since the late 1970s, none has purchased its own home. There are many possible explanations for this, including the fact that, while a number of these companies became well-known and long-lived members of Toronto’s theatre community, many remained relatively small enterprises. Companies like Nightwood Theatre, Necessary Angel, and Theatre Columbus often produced only one or two shows per season. This was not necessarily a problem, since the arts councils’ eventual extension of operating (in addition to project-based) grants to a few smaller companies provided a limited degree of stability for a growing sector of Toronto’s theatre industry – a company did not have to grow or die, and, arguably, the proliferation of small companies during the 1980s and 1990s encouraged a welcome diversity of theatrical production in Toronto.1 But for any of these companies to purchase a performance space would have been an economic and administrative challenge, to say the least. Even a company like Buddies in Bad Times, which grew substantially during this period and is now a mid-sized operation, does not actually own the property in which it performs – when Buddies took over 12 Alexander Street two years after the demise of Toronto Workshop Productions, it did so on a long-term lease at a nominal charge from the City of Toronto. The fact that no not-for-profit theatre company founded in Toronto since the late 1970s owns a performance space indicates a historical shift in the dominant relationship between theatre companies, the local real estate market, and the built environment during the 1980s and 1990s. As the Small Theatres Caucus of the Toronto Theatre Alliance

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(TTA), whose membership includes most of the city’s professional theatre companies, noted in 1986: The previous [sic] accepted model for theatre development in Toronto, based on the experience of the early 1970’s, when most of what are now the established theatres came into existence, no longer applies. At that time, as a theatre was able to prove itself artistically, its grants from funding bodies increased ... The more successful of these companies were able to acquire buildings – either through long-term leases or eventual outright purchase – and the capital necessary to renovate and equip their performance spaces.2

This description may not give a full picture of the complexities that were often involved when theatre companies established in the late 1960s and 1970s acquired and renovated property, but insofar as it identifies the decline of a privileged model of theatrical development – and points to the way that the dominant understanding of theatrical development was tied up with property development – it is correct. And yet the popular ideal that a theatre company should own a building (or, at the very least, occupy a single building for a long enough period of time that it becomes associated with that building) persisted. The TTA’s model of property-centred theatrical development is simply a variation on the trajectory of theatrical legitimacy that Urjo Kareda outlined in his discussion of TWP, where the acquisition of a building becomes a sign of theatrical maturity. Others have also illustrated the tenacity of this model. In 1989 Malcolm Burrows described having a ‘home’ as one of the key ‘trappings of success’ in Toronto theatre.3 When the Toronto Star characterized Necessary Angel in 1995 as ‘[p]robably the most important theatre company in Toronto not to actually have its own theatre,’ it yet again demonstrated the spatial normativity that has historically been at the heart of theatrical legitimacy in Toronto: in this representation, Necessary Angel’s success was the surprising exception to the spatial rule, which is that having one’s own theatre is either the precondition for, or consequence of, theatrical significance.4 In writing this, I am conscious that one of the ‘small company’ generation could purchase a property at any moment. One may also point to an important company like Soulpepper, which has gained a home, but it is important to note that this has been achieved through a different type of arrangement, which, while perhaps pointing to the emergence of new models of theatrical occupancy, is unlikely to be

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transposable beyond that company (or a very small number of others).5 Yet even if Necessary Angel were to purchase a property the day after this book is published, it would not change the fact that no theatre company of its generation had done so for more than two decades. This suggests that, even if the legitimacy of a theatre company as a cultural enterprise is still informed by a spatial calculus at the time of my writing, the possibility of a company ‘proving itself’ (to use the TTA’s phrase) through property acquisition was radically foreclosed for subsequent generations of theatre companies. This chapter, then, theorizes how such a historical change occurred and why it is significant, and it employs two concise case studies to examine some of the more exceptional ways that theatre companies negotiated this shift. The shortage of theatre space that became increasingly acute during the 1980s and 1990s did not come about by accident, and the way that theatre companies engaged this problem contributed to a particular urban geography of theatre practice and cultural value. Two companies were particularly illuminating in this context: Necessary Angel and Buddies in Bad Times. These companies, along with Nightwood, AKA Performance Interfaces, and Autumn Leaf founded the Theatre Centre in 1979 in order to provide administrative support and affordable performance space for themselves and other theatre companies in the city. While the Theatre Centre eventually operated independently of its initial members, its creation recognized a growing problem in Toronto: there was not only a shortage of rehearsal and performance space for the city’s increasing number of theatre companies, but these companies often could not afford to rent or buy the spaces that were available. The Theatre Centre’s subsequent, and recurring, difficulties in fulfilling the spatial component of its mandate illustrates how this problem only grew worse in the ensuing years.6 While AKA Performance Interfaces no longer exists and Autumn Leaf focuses largely on opera and music performance, Nightwood, Necessary Angel, and Buddies have all survived as theatre companies, and have prospered (albeit sometimes peripatetically). For the purposes of my investigation, however, it is Necessary Angel and Buddies’ distinctive uses of the built environment that are most instructive.7 Necessary Angel and Buddies, in different ways, secured their legitimacy as theatre companies through their use of the built environment, even though they did not own performances spaces. In effect, both companies achieved greater cultural equity than many other

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theatres of their generation by making a virtue – accidentally, intentionally, or through some combination of both – out of changes in the urban geography of Toronto. And in doing so they revealed two related facts. First, even if increasing its financial equity in Toronto’s theatrical property market through outright ownership had become impossible, a company could still find ways to secure its legitimacy through its relationship with the built environment. Second, Necessary Angel and Buddies also showed that site specificity encompassed not only a type of theatre event that was spatially self-referential, but also a theatre company’s conscious, monopolist claim over the built environment. This claim may not have depended on property ownership, but it still traded on the older link between the built environment and theatrical legitimacy. Put simply, in the 1980s Necessary Angel secured its cultural equity by making a virtue of its homelessness. In the next decade, Buddies secured its cultural equity by making a virtue of its homecoming. Theorizing Toronto’s Other Housing Crisis Many working in theatre in Toronto during the 1980s will recognize the title of this section. The city’s ‘other housing crisis’ was a phrase used by the Small Theatres Caucus of the Toronto Theatre Alliance in its submission to Arthur Gelber, who assessed the state of arts facilities in the Metropolitan Toronto area at the request of the provincial Ministry of Citizenship and Culture in 1986. This characterization was evocative because it drew on public anxiety about the supply and cost of residential housing in Ontario, and particularly Toronto, in the mid1980s. By using a popular political discourse about the need for affordable housing, advocates for theatre companies framed their predicament as an extension of a wider problem, and implied that their needs were similar to, rather than distinct from, those of many people of the province. Their use of the word ‘housing’ also invoked, yet again, the ideal of home that registered affirmatively for many in Toronto’s theatre community. Gelber recommended a series of improvements to, and a significant expansion of, the physical infrastructure of theatre in Toronto. He argued that Toronto’s arts community had ‘grown considerably over the past few years, and it is apparent that this growth will continue over the next decade.’8 State subsidy, however, had ‘not kept pace with this expansion.’9 Existing facilities suffered increasingly from disrepair,

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and a growing number of arts organizations – often newer theatre companies working in downtown Toronto – struggled to find workspace. Among other things, Gelber claimed that these difficulties undermined two key convictions underpinning theatrical production in Toronto at the time: that ‘the acquisition of permanent homes [my emphasis] is extremely important to the stability of the arts community’10 and that arts facilities played an important role in stimulating healthy urban economies.11 Although Gelber was correct in predicting that the size of Toronto’s artistic community would continue to grow, few of his recommendations were ever acted upon. As he pointed out, state funding for capital building projects in the arts has tended to occur on an ad hoc basis in Canada, with the assumption that arts organizations will fund building repairs and upgrades out of ongoing income.12 Since the budgets of these organizations are tight at best, and building costs usually high, facilities can be in almost constant need of attention. Gelber’s report did not prompt any change in state policy, but it did confirm that a problem existed with Toronto’s theatre facilities, and that the usual rationale for supporting such facilities was not being heard. How, then, might we explain the emergence of Toronto’s theatrical housing crisis through an urban analysis? And what were its consequences for the theatre companies it most affected? The answers to these questions lie in a combination of theatrical, economic, and geographic factors. One major artistic cause of the crisis was a change in the theatrical demography of Toronto. The number of theatre companies in Metropolitan Toronto had grown to over one hundred by 1986, with the vast majority of these working in downtown Toronto.13 Such a number would have been difficult to forsee a few years earlier. Furthermore, there were now thirty-two companies in the TTA’s Small Theatres Caucus, with the majority of these having been created since the late 1970s.14 Any company seeking performance space also encountered the larger challenges of Toronto’s urban economy. In general, it is arguable that not-for-profit theatre companies are likely to face a housing scarcity in most robust urban economies (at least without significant state intervention on their behalf). Their spatial requirements tend to be particular, and they tend to compete for those spaces with wealthier private businesses. Provincially, changes to the Ontario Fire Code in the early 1980s also meant that many existing warehouses and manufacturing buildings – the types of places that were converted into theatres

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in the 1970s – now failed to meet statutory requirements, and few of the newer, smaller theatre companies could afford the cost of retrofitting to bring them up to standard.15 But there are further explanations for Toronto’s theatrical housing crisis that are specific to the urban geography of theatre in the city. As the TTA was aware, many of the companies constituting its Small Theatres Caucus were finding their feet during a downtown property development boom, a phenomenon I have discussed in previous chapters. The widespread property-value inflation in Toronto’s downtown real estate market through the 1980s occurred in both the residential and commercial markets, creating a whipsaw effect on theatre companies: on the one hand, the types of buildings that could serve as performance spaces were usually in the commercial market, and theatre companies had difficulty competing for these spaces with profit-driven enterprises that could often pay higher rents; on the other hand, rising prices in the city’s residential market meant that commercial landlords could sometimes gain a higher return by converting the buildings in which theatre organizations resided into condominiums, as happened when the Theatre Centre was forced to move out of its facility on Lippincott Street in the Annex neighbourhood. That these buildings were often located in older downtown neighbourhoods made them even more appealing to landlords – the zoning of these neighbourhoods was largely residential already, making it more likely for the City of Toronto to approve their conversion from commercial to residential use. This predicament was exacerbated by the fact that Toronto’s theatre companies did not react to this tightening of the property market in ways that one might anticipate economic agents – which theatre companies undoubtedly are – to do. One might have expected them to respond to the operations of supply and demand by seeking out less expensive properties further from the downtown core, but, in the main, they did not do this. In fact, it is remarkable how little change there has been to the map of Toronto’s not-for-profit theatre industry during the last thirty-odd years, even as potential performance spaces downtown have become fewer in number and markedly more expensive: the vast majority of theatrical activity in the city remains roughly bounded by Lake Ontario to the south, Davenport Road to the north, Bathurst Street to the west, and the Don River to the east. This theatrical geography has not changed since the late 1960s, even though the economic geography of this area has altered radically. As a result, the economic model that could explain theatre compa-

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nies’ relationship to urban property in the 1970s fails to do so in the 1980s and 1990s. When the decline and suburbanization of older forms of industry made suitable downtown properties available at reasonable prices in the 1970s, theatre companies purchased them (or at least occupied them and began to work towards purchasing them at a later date, as in the case of Tarragon). Roughly speaking, the demand for ‘homes’ was, at least to some degree, met by the supply of homes (however imperfect this fit may have been in practice). But there was renewed demand for downtown properties in the early 1980s – from an expanding theatre sector and its private competitors – at the same time as the supply of suitable properties was at best static and, more likely, diminishing. According to a classical economic explanation, then, theatre companies responded to a slack (or at least stable) real estate market in the 1970s by moving into the property market. When the property market tightened considerably in the 1980s and 1990s, theatre companies were no longer able to acquire property in the way they once were. The phenomenon that such an economic model has more difficulty explaining, however, is theatre companies’ response to this spatial scarcity. Instead of moving to a location where space was available and cheaper, as many businesses would have done, they stayed downtown. Ironically, this complicates the popular notion that theatres became more responsive to the demands of the free market in the 1980s and 1990s. No doubt they were in some respects, but not in terms of their relationship with the local property market. In their negotiation of the urban economy of the 1970s, theatre companies were market-led enterprises to a greater extent than is commonly acknowledged; in the urban economy that followed, theatre companies were market-defying enterprises to a greater extent than is commonly acknowledged. Some of this resistance to moving away from downtown was likely due to the phenomenon that I identified in the introduction to my investigation: that theatre companies perceived their audiences to be unwilling to travel beyond the existing borders of theatrical activity in numbers great enough to risk locating outside the downtown core. Theatre companies balanced the constraints posed by one market (the property market) against the perceived benefits of another (the market for audiences), and chose the latter. But this adherence to a relatively constant urban geography, even as the market for performance space became tighter, also had a number of intriguing consequences. In the first place, it demonstrated a continued theatrical investment in the

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ideal of downtown, maintained in spite of adverse property market forces. It also demonstrated that the ideal of downtown was not only the preserve of the civic theatres, or even of the generation of midsized theatres like Tarragon and Theatre Passe Muraille that had become solid municipal citizens by the 1980s; instead, it was smaller companies that entrenched the connection between theatre and downtown through the 1980s and 1990s. The desire of these companies to remain downtown – and their success in doing so – testifies to the way in which the ideal of downtown in Toronto continued to be constituted, in part, through a link between theatre and the city. Indeed, the spatial intransigence of small theatre companies only further deepened the homology between downtown Toronto’s theatrical and urban geographies. Higher and Better Use Such an urban economy poses significant challenges if a theatre company is to ‘prove itself’ through space. One way to do so, however, is to achieve a higher and better use of the built environment. The concept of ‘higher’ and ‘better’ use – or highest and best use, as it is sometimes called – is foundational to the field of urban planning. As both a profession and field of inquiry, urban planning has historically been concerned with the spatial coordination of the built environment in order to facilitate optimal arrangements of ‘production, circulation, exchange and consumption’ in given times and places.16 Realizing this optimal relationship involves an assumption that, in specific times and places, certain arrangements will be higher (of a superior type) and better (of superior use within a type) than others, and that the role of urban planners is to offer both a process by which these can be conceived and, ultimately, the plan that facilitates their achievement and effective use by urban subjects. Securing the higher and better use of the built environment can be very awkward in practice. As Neil Smith points out, the calculation of whether or not a property or area has achieved its higher and better use is usually market based; it occurs, for example, when a significant gap between the existing and potential price of a property (between its actual and potential ground rent, to use the appropriate technical terms) widens to the point where it creates a strong incentive for economic agents to purchase and refurbish it in order to achieve much greater equity and possible exchange value than would previously have been

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the case.17 This process ostensibly leads to a neighbourhood’s higher and better use through its class elevation, secured by greater homeowner equity and increased cultural status (a phenomenon usually called gentrification). It is also a process that involves economic winners and losers: those who benefit from the rising value of properties whose purchase price was relatively low, and those who are priced out of the market as others who have access to greater investment capital recognize and exploit the rent gap. In Toronto, the first example of such urban gentrification is usually considered to be the Don Vale neighbourhood during the 1970s (an area in the eastern part of downtown Toronto more commonly called – somewhat inaccurately – Cabbagetown).18 Its theatrical equivalent, at much the same time, might be considered to be Theatre Passe Muraille, which largely conformed to the standard gentrification model and achieved a higher and better use for 16 Ryerson Avenue. But the local property market became very different in the 1980s. In market terms, it could be argued that the downtown Toronto property market, in the aggregate, was achieving its higher and better use in the 1980s: property values rose, vacancy rates fell, and the construction of projects like office towers in the financial core accelerated. According to such a market-based calculus, however, the smaller theatre companies that came to prominence in the 1980s lost out. Theatre did not constitute a higher and better use of the built environment in Toronto during the 1980s in a market sense because the rent gap that theatre companies had exploited previously was progressively narrowing, or, if the rent gap was still substantial, the actual rent needed to enter the market in the first place had become high enough to rule out theatre companies’ participation, whatever the potential rent might have been. The achievement of higher and better use should not be evaluated solely by a market-based test, however, and certain theatre companies’ negotiation of Toronto’s built environment in the 1980s and 1990s shows why. Necessary Angel and Buddies demonstrated that companies could – in different ways – achieve a sense of higher and better use of the built environment through cultural means; they could gain cultural equity and secure their theatrical legitimacy even without the privilege of property ownership. They achieved this, though, by selfconsciously making monopolistic claims on certain urban places. As I have discussed in another context, theatre companies and events often make monopolistic claims on space: a particular place is imagined to be the ideal location for a particular performance event, and a particu-

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lar property is imagined to be the ideal location for a particular company.19 Thus, Strachan House becomes ideal for Necessary Angel’s production of Tamara, and 12 Alexander Street becomes the ideal home for Buddies. The reasons for making such links may be many, but they are persuasive because claims about non-replicability are central to both place and cultural production, and are often made using similar language. As Harvey observes: ‘If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built, social and cultural environments)?’20 A production like Tamara and Buddies’ occupancy of 12 Alexander Street does not involve monopoly rent in a market sense (in that neither owns the performance spaces involved), but they do involve monopoly rent in a cultural sense: each company achieves greater cultural equity by trading on the non-replicable and legitimating properties of the built environment. While there is no inherent connection between an environmental performance and its location, or a theatre company and its location, if one can mobilize the qualitative properties of a site persuasively, one can achieve greater cultural equity for one’s theatre company. In different ways, Necessary Angel and Buddies did precisely that. Necessary Angel The success of Necessary Angel was built on an interrogative approach to theatre and urban space. Productions like Tamara and Newhouse demonstrated that buildings never intended for use as theatrical venues (such as a former bishop’s residence or a hockey arena) could, for a short time, become inseparable from a theatrical experience and draw attention to a small company that might otherwise have disappeared. When one surveys press material related to Necessary Angel, the word most consistently used to describe its work is ‘innovative.’21 This term, and other affirmative language used to describe the company’s work, is often linked to the environmental productions that Necessary Angel mounted through the 1980s. The highest-profile of these was John Krizanc’s Tamara (1981). The play, set in Fascist Italy, was first performed in the former Strachan House in Trinity Bellwoods Park and subsequently produced internationally. Tamara drew considerable attention to the then-fledgling company, which had been founded in 1978 by a

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group of young theatre artists that had previously staged only a few, low-profile shows. Necessary Angel’s later environmental productions included Censored (1983), a play about Molière and religious authority, in St Paul’s Church on Avenue Road; Yankees at York (1984), produced with Autumn Leaf and set in Old Fort York; Chekhov’s Seagull (1984), in the Queen’s Quay Terminal on Lake Ontario; Newhouse (1989), an AIDS parable that transposed Don Juan to the contemporary Canadian political scene, set in the William Bolton Arena in the Annex; and Coming Through Slaughter (1989), an adaptation of the Michael Ondaatje novel, set in the Silver Dollar Tavern on College Street. While environmental work formed only a minority of Necessary Angel’s repertoire during the 1980s (and almost no portion since), these productions helped make Necessary Angel stand out from the many small companies that flourished during the decade.22 Not only did Necessary Angel’s environmental productions make the company distinct from its peers, the company made an artistic virtue out of Toronto’s shortage of performance spaces. In doing so, it both confirmed the dominance of, and yet re-plotted, the conventional trajectory of institutional legitimacy in Toronto: the theatre’s ascent during the 1980s was secured by its use of the built environment, but also by a self-conscious resistance to being associated with a single building. This, in turn, contributed to the sense that Necessary Angel was more avant-garde than many other companies during the 1980s (even though the company’s dramaturgy was as strongly script-centred as that of many other theatres, and it worked comfortably with many of Toronto’s established larger companies). The efficacy of Necessary Angel’s spatial self-reflexiveness was achieved by conjoining an environmental aesthetic lineage with contemporary urban imperatives. Necessary Angel used theatrical means to achieve – however temporarily – higher and better use, and demonstrated that it was possible to do this even from a disadvantaged market position. Its environmental performances implied that their uses of urban space temporarily achieved a higher and better use for a given place by metaphorically positioning the company as urban planners, and the audience as urban subjects successfully negotiating a built environment that, in Harvey’s words, had been transformed for optimum production, circulation, exchange, and consumption. Tamara is paradigmatic in this respect. The production took place in the historic Strachan House, named after one of the most prominent families of Upper Canada and located in Trinity Bellwoods Park on

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Queen Street West. Krizanc and Richard Rose, Necessary Angel’s artistic director, had originally wanted to stage Tamara in Casa Loma, the mock castle in midtown Toronto that functions as a busy tourist attraction. The operators of Casa Loma declined, however, and, according to Krizanc, the only other suitable place was Strachan House.23 By 1981 Strachan House was in poor repair; indeed, one of the reasons that Rose and Krizanc were able to secure use of the property was because it was of little immediate value to its owner, the City of Toronto. As Krizanc later recalled: The toilets at Strachan House were broken. The actors read in the dark because there was no power. After an eight-hour rehearsal, they would stay to paint walls, lay tile, or cook dinner. This zeal soon spread to friends, even strangers in the park. Everyone wanted to help: a grade-eight class spent an afternoon gathering up garbage, a carpenter volunteered labour in exchange for tickets.24

Put simply, Strachan House, as it stood, was an unproductive place. Those who helped refurbish it so that it might host a theatre event made it productive again. The play itself continued the planning process. As members of the audience entered the building they were given ‘identity cards’ and the regulations governing their negotiation of the performance (and therefore their negotiation of the building) were explained to them by two characters: Dante: Buona sera, Signore, Signori! Il Commondante is expecting you but first you will please speak to Capitano Finzi. He will stamp your papers and explain their importance to you. Capisce? Finzi: (stands behind a small lectern in the hall, dressed in a black Fascist uniform) Papers. (looks at the passport then hands it back to audience member) Sign there. You will keep this with you at all times. If you are asked to produce your visa, you will do so and you will be required to know its contents. Read it. Anyone found without their papers will be arrested and deported. I would also ask you to take special note of the date, January 10, 1927. (stamps the papers, blows them dry and hands them back to the audience members) This visa is good for forty-eight hours only.25

The identity cards were not only a theatrical device, they were the means by which the audience’s circulation through the building was

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inaugurated and regulated. The cards marked audience members as spatial subjects, privileged to remain in the building for the duration of the performance. Audience members were explicitly licensed to participate in the time-delimited world of the play that the building physically defined, and that the theatre event offered a structured way to engage. Although the rationale behind the identity cards is clearly authoritarian within the fictional frame of the play, within the context of the actual world the cards represented the audience’s efficient mobility through space. As Rose and Krizanc recognized, the circulation of the audience through Strachan House had to be planned; if audience members went where they liked when they liked, the event would quickly falter and the space would become disorganized. Ric Knowles argues that ‘audiences tend to find [the identity card scene] amusing rather than threatening,’ and one should not underestimate the degree to which audience members’ pleasure relies on spatial legibility and regulation; even if Tamara offered a degree of choice in the rooms that audience members could enter and the scenes they could watch, it was important for the success of the theatre event – and for successful planning – that such choices be transparent but limited.26 The identity cards signalled a theatrical and spatial contract that helped ensure the higher and better use of the property. The other productions in Necessary Angel’s environmental repertoire mapped this sense of higher and better use across the downtown area as a whole. Taken together, productions like Tamara, Seagull, and Newhouse practically and symbolically produced new theatre spaces where none existed before, temporarily increasing the supply of performance space in a city characterized by a scarcity of such space. Necessary Angel’s environmental work was seductive not only because it articulated an inventive spatial dramaturgy, but also because that dramaturgy appeared to give an individual theatre company the ability to solve a problem of space that was urban and systemic. In an urban environment marked by a scarcity of performance space, the theatre company that can create surplus is endowed with authority. Indeed, one might argue that Necessary Angel’s near cessation of environmental performances after Coming Through Slaughter signified that the company’s legitimacy was secure. Buddies in Bad Times The success of Buddies in Bad Times should not be underestimated. Like Necessary Angel, it was one of the founding members of the The-

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atre Centre, and was also associated closely with a long-time artistic director (in Necessary Angel’s case, Richard Rose, and in Buddies’ case, Sky Gilbert). Buddies, however, was the only company of the small theatre generation that grew significantly in size during the 1990s, a fact made all the more remarkable because of its explicit embrace of dissident sexual politics. Productions like Drag Queens on Trial (1985) and Ban This Show (1990) not only made gay and lesbian identities visible on the Toronto stage to a greater degree than ever before, Buddies actively took pleasure in exploring what Gilbert once described as the ‘cornucopia of queer life: drag, man/boy love, promiscuity, prostitution, nudity and masturbation.’27 In spite of the company’s ‘history as a whipping boy of outraged city politicians and tabloid columnists,’ as the Toronto Star put it, Buddies became a wellestablished member of the city’s mid-sized theatre sector, and plausibly claimed to be the continent’s – and possibly the world’s – largest queer theatre.28 In 1994 Buddies moved into the former home of Toronto Workshop Productions, 12 Alexander Street. The property had been vacant since TWP’s collapse and had been bought by the City of Toronto in 1989. A selection committee comprising artistic and political representatives was formed to determine the facility’s future use, invite proposals for its management, and make recommendations to the City of Toronto. The committee’s main objective was ‘to maintain a facility at 12 Alexander Street, primarily for non-profit performing arts uses.’29 The competition for the property was fierce, since 12 Alexander Street was a major theatrical landmark in a downtown location (even if the building needed repair), and the city’s shortage of theatre space had not lessened during the previous decade. In its report to Toronto city council, the selection committee stated that it was ‘acutely conscious’ of the fact that, even if 12 Alexander Street remained a home for non-profit theatre, there remained an ‘unmet demand for appropriate, accessible, and affordable space to house Toronto’s thriving small and medium sized non-profit performing arts community.’30 Buddies’ bid for the property was unsuccessful at first. Although the committee shortlisted The EDGE, the alliance of companies that Buddies led, a management team of producers called the 12 Alexander Street Project was initially awarded the long-term lease to operate the facility.31 The Project planned to use the facility to house touring productions of plays from across the country. A ‘roadhouse’ for touring Canadian productions had never succeeded before and it did not succeed this time; more than a year after the project had assumed the

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management of 12 Alexander Street little had happened, and it was clear that the facility was not achieving a higher and better use. As Sky Gilbert recalls, Buddies’ general manager Tim Jones saw the opportunity to resuscitate The EDGE proposal, which involved Buddies as the lead tenant providing support to a number of smaller, experimental companies that would program a substantial number of weeks each season. Buddies approached the City of Toronto when it became apparent that 12 Alexander Street was little closer to being revitalized, and the City agreed to transfer responsibility to Buddies and its associates. The 12 Alexander Street Project name remained, but its mission was effectively transformed into that of The EDGE. Buddies undertook extensive renovations to the facility, and, when the building reopened in 1994, it was a far cry from the leaky and uncomfortable venue that it had been in the time of TWP.32 It now boasted well-equipped and flexible performance spaces, expanded workspace, a public bar, and a complete interior and exterior restyling that opened the building to the street to a greater degree. The redesign did not attempt to obliterate the building’s past use (its aesthetics remained rough), but Buddies’ new home was intentionally sexier and more user-friendly than it had previously been. With renovations completed, Buddies had undoubtedly achieved a higher and better use for 12 Alexander Street, not only for itself but also for the small companies that benefited from Buddies’ support. It had realized a better physical arrangement of the facility than had previously been the case, and its use of the building to support small experimental companies arguably improved the health of Toronto’s wider theatrical ecology. Furthermore, Buddies’ suitability for 12 Alexander Street was geographically persuasive to a wider urban constituency. Buddies’ promotion of 12 Alexander Street as its ideal home, and its occupancy of the building as a ‘homecoming,’ hinged on a homology between the property, the theatre company, and Toronto’s urban geography of sexuality. During the years that TWP had occupied 12 Alexander Street, the surrounding neighbourhood had become the locus of a vibrant gay and lesbian community. While other bidders for 12 Alexander Street could claim that they possessed the administrative capacity to run 12 Alexander Street, only Buddies could argue that the property reflected, and would supplement, the identity of the neighbourhood in which it was located. Indeed, Robert Wallace argues that 12 Alexander Street physically spatialized Buddies’ queer subjectivity in a way that its previous, smaller home on George Street could not, and that the company

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self-consciously represented its move to Alexander Street as a marker of its cultural ascendancy.33 A sign of how appropriate the fit between Buddies and 12 Alexander Street was perceived to be can be seen in the geographical inflection that Buddies’ self-promotion gained following its move. Now the company, property, and neighbourhood were represented as being in a kind of urban symbiosis. Buddies’ fund-raising effort to restore the building was named the ‘Coming Home’ campaign, which implied that Buddies was returning to its point of origin and ideal dwelling.34 The president of the company extended this sentiment in the promotional literature for Buddies’ inaugural season at 12 Alexander Street, claiming that Buddies was ‘back home where we belong,’ and that it had ‘landed right smack dab in the middle of our community’ after a ‘sixteen year diaspora.’35 Of course, Buddies had never been in exile, just as it had never lived at 12 Alexander Street before. This discourse, however, did not rely on historical accuracy for its efficacy but rather on the persuasiveness of its sentimental geography. Buddies’ language of homecoming communicated its confidence that the higher and better use of 12 Alexander Street had been achieved and that the company was fully integrated into its neighbourhood. The plausibility of this discourse signalled Buddies’ legitimacy as a cultural enterprise; this legitimacy was enhanced not only through the alliance with other experimental companies that Buddies’ new building made possible, but by the company’s new-found affiliation with the urban fabric of the city. Buddies’ move to 12 Alexander Street was impeccable urban planning, and the company made sure that its audiences knew this. Conclusion For at least three decades, the calculus of theatrical legitimacy in Toronto has incorporated a spatial element. A theatre company achieved greater cultural equity by occupying – and preferably owning – a property downtown. But the inflationary real estate markets of the 1980s and 1990s meant that property ownership was an unattainable ideal for the generation of smaller companies that grew up during this period, since the cost of buying a property rose at the same time as the supply of theatrically amenable properties dwindled. The response of theatre companies to this situation re-inscribed the centrality of downtown to the urban geography of theatre in Toronto, but their spatial

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intransigence also made the shortage of performance venues more acute. By extension, they also made it more difficult to trade on the affirmative valences that have historically been gained in Toronto by a theatre company being associated with a particular place. Two companies, however, demonstrated that it was possible to achieve a significant amount of cultural equity through the built environment without recourse to property ownership. This involved making monopoly claims over particular spaces, whether temporarily (Necessary Angel) or recuperatively (Buddies). In both instances, these companies self-consciously implied that their occupation of a place achieved a higher and better use of the built environment, and skirted the problematic issue of ownership by exerting a geographical rather than legal authority over performance space. For Necessary Angel, this involved explicitly linking dramaturgy with geography in order to create new theatre spaces during a time of their scarcity, an accomplishment that secured the company’s legitimacy as a theatrical enterprise and, ironically, meant that it no longer felt compelled to create environmental productions anymore. Even when Necessary Angel did stage an environmental production – a re-mount of Tamara in 2003 as Richard Rose’s swansong as artistic director – this only emphasized and commemorated the degree to which the company’s success had been spatially secured. For Buddies, its civically sanctioned occupancy of 12 Alexander Street seemed to achieve an urban harmony by bringing together a mutually sustaining geography of theatre company, neighbourhood, and sexuality. This homology not only implied that the gay village would be more complete with Buddies in residence, but also suggested that Buddies could only really gain its greatest cultural equity through residing at 12 Alexander Street. Whether homeless or coming home, Necessary Angel and Buddies illustrated how theatre companies in Toronto could still achieve legitimacy through the built environment, even if their success demanded inventive uses of space and, at the same time, sophisticated modes of geographical self-fashioning.

Conclusion

To title this book City Stages is to identify a conjunction between the urban and the theatrical. But exploring this conjunction is by no means straightforward, as this urban history of theatre in Toronto has repeatedly demonstrated. Time and time again, I have found that what appeared initially to be relatively contained case studies were far more complex than I anticipated. When I first became vaguely aware that there might be a link between theatre and urban planning (in its narrowest sense) in Toronto some years ago, I did not foresee that this would lead to a wider investigation that encompassed everything from theatre buildings to property markets to arts administration to civic ideology to staging practices to political economy (and more). Yet the deeper I examined these issues the more I become convinced of their connection and their relevance to the history of theatre in Toronto, though perhaps not in ways I initially had envisaged. This is partly because the link between theatre and the city is not always direct, and not always explicit. To invoke Louis Althusser’s schema of effectivity, the relationship between the theatrical and the urban in Toronto has been as much structural as mechanical.1 Examples of mechanical (or direct) links between theatre and the city are easy enough to find in Toronto, and I have examined a number in this book: when a municipal government provides money to construct a civic theatre facility, for example, or a theatre company finds a brokendown mansion in which to perform. In cases like these it is quite easy to see that theatre and the city intersect. In other cases this intersection occurs in ways that are more ‘transitive’ (to use Althusser’s term), but no less consequential: when transnational economics, urban development, and a theatre company’s spatial requirements meet, for example,

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or when systems of theatrical value and a local real estate market negotiate each other. I have tried to trace some of the many direct and refractory links that have occurred, and been made, between theatre and the city in Toronto since 1967, but always in the interest of showing the material effects – some unexpected – of these connections. As a result, I have argued that certain things are key to explaining the development of Toronto as a city stage. The first is political economy. Whether at the transnational level or the neighbourhood level, economics matter to the urban geography of theatre in Toronto. At the same time, however, economics do not exist independently of political structures. Different levels of the state have served a number of functions in helping to make Toronto a city stage: patronage, regulation, economic stimulation and restraint, and, perhaps most importantly, as the ultimate legal and financial guarantor of many theatrical and civic enterprises. I have also argued that Toronto functions as a city stage through a combination of empirical and ideational practices. The sentimental economies of theatre in Toronto have been at least as important as the market economies of theatre in Toronto; in fact, Toronto’s development as a city stage has been constituted through the ways that these economies have often been in negotiation with each other. Finally, the spatialization of the relationship between theatre and the city in Toronto has occurred in a variety of forms, and not only those that might seem most immediately familiar. It is possible to recognize Toronto as a city stage not only because of the physical contours of its theatre buildings and the neighbourhoods in which they reside, but also by the ways in which a city stage depends on valuing certain places in certain ways, privileging some places over others, and working to create, sustain, and defend places. In addition, I have undoubtedly privileged certain modes of analysis and types of historical artefacts over others. I have been more concerned with the urban conditions of theatrical production (and, equally, the theatrical conditions of urban production) than I have been with the analysis of individual plays. While I hope that my periodic discussion of paradigmatic or particularly illustrative performances furthers my analysis, my approach to individual plays has been much the same as my approach to individual people: they are always part of greater political, economic, and cultural processes. This does not diminish their importance, but it does affect the way that their role is understood and their efficacy measured. For me, one of the more consistently intriguing features of the people, performances, and

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practices that I have examined is the way that their efficacy often bears only a tangential relationship to the intentions driving them in the first place. This recurring incommensurability of intention and effect has been a constant feature of theatre in Toronto, and, from my perspective, a fascinating one. How might any insights gained here be useful elsewhere? In the introduction to this book I warned against falling into the cognateness trap, and I also warned against automatically seeing my findings as nationally or regionally transposable. I have also tried to avoid a kind of urban synecdochic fallacy that would be equally debilitating: seeing Toronto as representative of all city stages. Many of the findings here are specific to Toronto, and, in my view, are more illuminating because of their spatial and historical particularity. This does not, however, preclude examining city stages in other times and places – Toronto is a distinctive city stage, but it is not an exceptional one. The methodology employed here may also be transposed elsewhere – working in a similar way with different case studies could yield illuminating results that might offer the basis of a wider geography of theatre in urban space. That this book might contribute to a greater diversity of urban analyses of theatre would be very welcome indeed.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Harvey employs this distinction fairly consistently through his work, at least beginning with Social Justice and the City, though he is less concerned with place as a conceptual category than he is with the materiality of particular types of places: a factory as opposed to a residence, or a shopping mall as opposed to a skyscraper. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117–18. 3 Peter B. Evans, Theda Skocpol, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 4 Jane Jacobs attributes the comparative stability of Toronto’s downtown to four ‘virtues of omission’: first, ‘Canadian banks did not adopt the practice of “redlining” various city neighbourhoods, designating property in them to be ineligible [for mortgage lending] henceforth’; second, ‘although radical prejudices and discriminations infest Toronto too, these evils were not exacerbated and intensified by creation of racial ghettos’; third, ‘the Canadian federal government has financed only one major automotive artery, the TransCanada Highway,’ and while Toronto has suffered from some expressway building, ‘saving Toronto from these juggernauts was accomplished more speedily than if the federal government and its largesse had been involved too’; fourth, ‘urban renewal schemes and programs were less destructive to Toronto than to cities across the border’ because ‘Canadian politicians soon perceived what a horrendous generator it was of civic dissentions and other nasty problems.’ See John Sewell, The Shape of the City: Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), x–xi.

138 Notes to pages 7–12 5 The use of ‘Fordism’ and ‘Taylorism’ can also be considered to be broadly interchangeable, although, as Graeme Salaman points out, there may be useful analytical distinctions between them. See Rosemary Deem and Graeme Salaman, Work, Culture, and Society (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1985). 6 Though I prefer ‘flexible accumulation’ to post-Fordism (and Harvey offers a convincing explanation of why this is a more precise term in The Condition of Postmodernity), for the most part I use the term ‘post-Fordist’ throughout this project. The rationale for this use is largely a pragmatic one: it is difficult to use ‘flexible accumulation’ in the adjectival form. 7 For the economic case for this transition, see Robert Boyer, The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). For the best explanation of the shift, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 119–97. 8 For even the barest outline of this debate, see Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Boyer, Regulation; Daniel Drache, and Marc S. Gertler, eds., The New Era of Global Competition: State Policy and Market Power (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); J.K. GibsonGraham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994); and Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987). 9 See Gunter Gad, ‘Toronto’s Financial District,’ Canadian Geographer 35, no. 2 (1991); David M. Nowlan, ‘The Changing Toronto-Area Economy,’ in Toward an Industrial Land Strategy: A Forum on the Future of Industrial Land (Toronto: Metropolitan Toronto, 1994). 10 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith 1, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982). 11 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13. 12 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 123. 13 Marvin Carlson, ‘Theatrical Audiences and the Reading of Performance,’ in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 85. 14 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker, The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 595.

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15 Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), 83. 16 Imre Szeman, ‘Introduction: A Manifesto for Materialism,’ Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 68 (1999): 66. 17 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 79. 18 Anton Wagner, Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). For a discussion of the epistemological and methodological split within Canadian theatre historiography, see my review of Wagner: Michael McKinnie, ‘Rev. of Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism,’ Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 70 (2000). 19 Robert Wallace, Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990), 128–34. 20 Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999). 21 Craig Stewart Walker, The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 22 See, for example, Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 23 Readers are also likely to observe that there are no photographs in this book. This is partly due to the economics of present-day academic publishing – incorporating photographs is expensive – but there is some intellectual justification for it as well, at least within the context of this project: photographs, especially of individual theatre buildings, often privilege the type of architectonic perspective that I try to acknowledge, but go beyond. They can also visually hive off individual sites from their environment in ways that could prove problematic given my emphasis on structural conditions. 24 Although it is technically just beyond the Dupont Street border of the downtown theatre area, I would include Tarragon Theatre among downtown theatres. It is located on Bridgman Avenue, a small street one short block north of Dupont Street. 25 Don Rubin, ‘John Juliani’s Savage God,’ Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 20 (1975–6): 152.

140 Notes to pages 25–30 1. Urban National, Suburban Transnational 1 Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond, Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey (Scarborough: Prentice Hall Canada, 1996), 50. 2 D.P. Schafer and André Fortier, Review of Federal Policies for the Arts in Canada (1944–1988) (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of the Arts, 1989), 19. 3 Factory Theatre Lab was founded in May 1970 with a mandate to produce only Canadian plays. 4 Sewell, Shape of the City. These struggles include the successful fight to stop the Crosstown and Spadina expressways, which was finally achieved in 1971; the renovation, rather than demolition, of Trefann Court, a workingclass neighbourhood in the east end of downtown; the development of infil housing in Baldwin Village near the intersection of Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue; the imposition of strict frontage requirements on new commercial office towers in the financial district; and the building of the St Lawrence Neighbourhood, a popular mixed-use and mixed-scale neighbourhood built on reclaimed railway lands in the southeast end of downtown. 5 In a sign of how much control Livent held over the facility, Ford purchased the right to name the facility from Livent and not from the municipal owners; however, this meant that when Livent went bankrupt Toronto was under no contractual obligation to retain the Ford Centre name. See Michael Valpy, ‘Livent Got Ticket Money before Curtain, City Finds,’ Globe and Mail, 5 Dec. 1988, A17. 6 Denis W. Johnston, Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto’s Alternative Theatres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 12. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 10. I do not want to elide the ‘rebellious’ sense of art that Marcuse argues coexists with an affirmative sense, but this sense is more appropriately used in the context of Toronto theatre companies like Toronto Workshop Productions. 9 Stacy Wolf, ‘Civilizing and Selling Spectators: Audiences at the Madison Civic Center,’ Theatre Survey 39, no. 2 (1998): 11. 10 Ibid. 11 Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 14–37. 12 H.D.F. Kitto, ‘The Polis,’ in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. Legates and Frederic Stout (London: Routledge, 1996), 35. 13 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925), 240.

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14 John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 62. 15 Ibid., 77. 16 Ibid., 60. 17 Before amalgamation, the majority of municipal services were provided to city residents by the metropolitan government, but a great deal of urban planning remained in the hands of the individual city government. 18 For historical perspectives on Toronto’s downtown development and urban reform struggles, see Jon Caulfield, City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Graham Fraser, Fighting Back: Urban Renewal in Trefann Court (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972); John Sewell, Up Against City Hall (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1972); David Lewis Stein, Toronto for Sale: The Destruction of a City (Toronto: New Press, 1972). 19 ‘Brutalism’ is the accepted term for the architectural style, most popular in the 1960s and 1970s, where poured concrete exterior walls are left largely in the form that they possess when unmoulded. The style emphasizes mass and angularity, and, though many successful examples exist, poorly designed brutalist buildings can sometimes appear forbidding and impenetrable from street level. 20 Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 11–13. 21 Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 12. 22 For a perceptive analysis of the historical emergence of this discourse in a Canadian context, see Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). The Massey Commission is the popular name used for the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, which was chaired by Vincent Massey. The royal commission’s report, issued in 1951, prompted the creation in 1957 of the Canada Council, an arm’s-length body established to extend national state sponsorship of the arts and scholarship. Though to many the commission’s recommendations represented a welcome call for increased investment in cultural production, its cultural model had a distinctly paternalist air that others resented. 23 Stephen Johnson, ‘St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts,’ in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, ed. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 502. 24 Herbert Whittaker, ‘The Crest Theatre,’ Oxford Companion, ed. Benson and Conolly, 119. 25 Ibid., 120.

142 Notes to pages 36–9 26 Mavor Moore resigned after his nationalist programming proved financially disastrous in the first season, and his replacement, Leon Major, sharply reduced the ‘Canadian content’ onstage. 27 The City of Toronto created a stand-alone, not-for-profit theatre company called Toronto Arts Productions (TAP), to which it then provided an annual subsidy. The City also transferred responsibility for the company’s debts to TAP itself, ending a previous arrangement whereby the City was liable for cost overruns. TAP was renamed CentreStage in 1983, and CentreStage merged with Toronto Free Theatre to form Canadian Stage Company in 1988. Canadian Stage Company (or CanStage, as it has more recently promoted itself) now occupies the SLC’s main theatre space and Toronto Free Theatre’s former premises on Berkeley Street. 28 Gad, ‘Toronto’s,’ 203–7. Gad suggests that the best architectural marker of Toronto’s changing downtown core is the Toronto-Dominion Centre, the Mies van de Rohe–designed skyscraper whose first tower opened in 1967. 29 Ibid., 205. 30 Ibid., 205. 31 Ibid., 206. 32 Patricia McHugh, Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 33. 33 It is interesting to note that the Hummingbird Centre, the 3223 seat auditorium opened in 1960 as the O’Keefe Centre (the O’Keefe Brewery originally built and owned the space), is just west of the Front Street commercial strip at Front and Yonge Streets, but has never seemed to take part in the changes in Front Street. Perhaps this is because its architectural design, a massive block in the International Expressionist style, ensures a high modernist aloofness that is difficult to reconcile with the surrounding area. It also occupies its own small block, sitting on a sliver of land between Yonge and Scott Streets, which physically separates it from the bulk of the developments on Front Street. The building itself, though, has undergone some interesting changes over the years, which suggest that it too has negotiated the transformation from Fordism to post-Fordism. Early in the Centre’s life O’Keefe turned the building over to Metropolitan Toronto. The O’Keefe Brewery no longer exists as an independent company, having been taken over by Molson in the mid-1980s (this is not insignificant economically, since breweries are big business in Canada, and Molson’s purchase of O’Keefe ensured that over 90 per cent of the national beer market was in the hands of Molson and Labatt – a move to duopoly capitalism, at least). Molson has subsequently become part of the Coors empire in a merger that formed one of the world’s largest brewing conglomerates. The name

Notes to pages 41–6

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43

44

143

‘O’Keefe’ became increasingly anachronistic. The metropolitan government renamed the building the Hummingbird Centre in 1994, after a payment of $5 million from a software development company. Perhaps the economic giants of an age can be traced through their inscription on cultural institutions. See P. Filion, ‘Metropolitan Planning Objectives and Implementation Constraints: Planning in a Post-Fordist and Postmodern Age,’ Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 1637–60; and Malcolm R. Matthew, ‘The Suburbanization of Toronto Offices,’ Canadian Geographer 37, no. 4 (1993): 293–306. Peter Gorrie, ‘North York’s Instant Downtown,’ Canadian Geographic April/ May 1991, 70. Lynne Ainsworth, ‘Lastman Deals for No-Cost Centre for Arts,’ Toronto Star, 14 Jan. 1986, N2. Gorrie, ‘North York’s,’ 70. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000). Unlike American cities, Canadian cities are usually prevented by their provinces from issuing bonds to finance infrastructure projects. Ainsworth, ‘Lastman Deals.’ It is worth noting that higher levels of government refused to contribute directly to the cost of the arts centre. The Province’s forms of subsidy, while substantial, operated according to an economic logic similar to that of North York: the land donation was effectively a grant-in-kind to the City of North York that it was unwilling to make directly. Purchasing the density rights at least gave the Province an asset that it could subsequently sell. The cost of the Ford Centre was ultimately met through a combination of City sources that included the density-rights fund, which, due to construction delays, had grown to approximately $30 million; the sale of naming rights to the facility for nearly $8 million (though the rights to name the facility were actually sold to Livent, who resold them at a higher price to Ford); the City’s municipal land acquisition fund, from which $5.5 million was diverted to pay construction costs (again, the City diverting money rather than being seen to spend it); and some private donation. Although private sponsorship of the arts is increasingly common in Canada, the amount of this support that is directed through a network of private foundations remains quite small. Filion, ‘Metropolitan planning,’ 1647. In 1996 Filion stated that 67 per cent of all peak-hour trips into downtown North York where made by car, compared with 36 per cent in the older Toronto core. North York City Centre also ensures that citizens realize that they are on

144 Notes to pages 46–50

45 46 47 48

private property. When I first researched downtown North York, I took a series of photographs inside the City Centre. I was stopped by a security guard, who informed me that the City Centre was private, not public, property, and that if I wished to take pictures I had to request permission from the Centre’s owners, a property development and management company. Gorrie, ‘North York’s,’ 73. Appropriately, the architect of the Ford Centre is Eberhard Zeidler, who also designed the Eaton Centre. On time-space compression as a feature of capitalism, see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 260–307. Quoted in Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles, ‘Herbert Whittaker, Reporting from the Front: The Montreal Gazette, 1937–1949, and the Globe and Mail, 1949–1975,’ in Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, ed. Anton Wagner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 225.

2. Good Times, Inc. 1 Dale Anne Freed, ‘Push Comes to Shove in Assault Crackdown,’ Toronto Star, 5 Aug. 1998. 2 The term ‘Central Industrial District’ was used by the former City of Toronto for planning purposes, and referred to the area between University Avenue to the east, Bathurst Street to the west, Queen Street to the north, and the lakeshore railway tracks to the south. 3 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: King-Spadina’ (City of Toronto, 1977), 11. 4 For a useful summary of the neighbourhood’s historical development in terms of its construction, see McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 44–6. 5 Even with the advent of the railway, a significant residential population remained in the area. In the latter half of the nineteenth century more than half the buildings between Simcoe Street and Spadina Avenue were houses, and by 1890 over 800 houses had been constructed between Bathurst and Simcoe Streets. See Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals,’ 11. 6 Ibid. 7 The present-day shoreline of Lake Ontario is not Toronto’s original lakeshore, which was Front Street (hence the street’s name). 8 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals,’ 12. 9 Ibid.

Notes to pages 50–4 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24

145

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 71. Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of Industrial Land Uses in the King-Spadina District’ (City of Toronto, 1987), 2. The committee defined ‘communications and information technology’ as Film/video (including broadcasting); printing/publishing; and high technology. ‘High technology’ is here understood to comprise the following activities: – Computer services – such as programming, planning, systems work and consulting; – Computer rental and sales; – Data processing; – Software and hardware development and production; – Computer maintenance and repair; – Other office automation-related activity. Toronto, Council, Planning and Development, ‘King-Spadina: Official Plan Part 2’ (City of Toronto, 1996), 5. Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals.’ Ibid. McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 49. Toronto Entertainment District Association (TEDA), Toronto Entertainment District (2000 [accessed 31 May 2000]); available at www.toronto.com/e/v/ toron/0050/02/02/. The area also benefited from the fact that, in the early 1990s, the Toronto Blue Jays won consecutive World Series titles and were one of the most successful teams in professional baseball. This benefited area businesses by extending the season into the playoffs and ensuring that SkyDome was consistently sold out. Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Industrial Market’ (City of Toronto, 1987), 4. It should be noted that making liketo-like comparisons with earlier data is not always possible, since the industrial classifications used in the Metro Employment Survey are not standardized over time. I have made comparisons where categories conform over time or where slight alterations in their composition do not alter pronounced historical trends. Nate Hendley, ‘The Law of Clubland,’ eye online, 29 Aug. 1999. Accessed

146 Notes to pages 55–60

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44

1 June 2000, http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue07.29.99/news/ clubland.html. The closest popular retail strip is along Queen Street West between University and Spadina Avenues. TEDA, Toronto. Adele Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ Toronto Life, August 1999. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), 2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 352. Ibid., 353. Ibid. Paul Moloney, ‘Two Men Go Up Against a Brick Wall,’ Toronto Star, 24 March 1997. TEDA, Toronto. Gayle MacDonald, ‘An Entertaining Kind of Guy,’ Globe and Mail, 13 Nov. 1999. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ 100. Ibid., 102. Bringing malls into the city core has not made them any more ‘urban.’ Toronto’s Eaton Centre, the major example of a mall in the city core, is widely considered to have been a disastrous example of downtown redevelopment The Eaton Centre drained the long block of Yonge Street between Queen Street and Dundas Street of a mix of commercial and pedestrian streetlife, a fact that the Centre’s owners have more recently acknowledged through a (flawed) attempt to re-introduce shop entrances on Yonge Street. MacDonald, ‘Entertaining.’ Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ 104. TEDA, Toronto. Ibid. The claim that Toronto is the third-largest theatre centre in the English-speaking world is made so often and so casually that those who employ it rarely feel the need to provide evidence in support. Whether it is true or not (and, given the substantial number and combination of large commercial productions and smaller not-for-profit shows, it may well be true) is of less concern than the fact that the claim figures so prominently and frequently in civic self-promotion. Herbert Whittaker, ‘Royal Alexandra Theatre,’ in Oxford Companion, ed. Benson and Conolly, 476.

Notes to pages 60–3

147

45 Ed Mirvish, Honest Ed Mirvish: How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate or, 121 Lessons I Never Learned in School (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1993), 77. Richard Paul Knowles illustrates this high-market demographic appeal in his description of a Royal Alex program as containing ‘glossy, full-colour ads for Cadillac and Mercedes Benz and eroticized photographs of scantilyclad (white) women selling Smirnoff vodka.’ Knowles, ‘Reading Material: Transfers, Remounts, and the Production of Meaning in Contemporary Toronto Drama and Theatre,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 51–2 (1994): 283. 46 Robert Crew, ‘A Night of Honest Appreciation,’ Toronto Star, 5 March 1996. 47 Bullseye, ‘Toronto: A Calendar for the Year 2000; Photographs from the 20th Century’ (Toronto: Bullseye, 1999). 48 Mirvish, Honest Ed, xi. 49 Ibid., viii. 50 Ibid., vii–viii. 51 Mirvish is not so much the philanthropist that he is willing to lose money regularly on artistic ventures. He sold the Old Vic because the theatre could not turn a profit consistently. 52 Mirvish, Honest Ed, 7–8. 53 Sarah Hampson, ‘All in the Family,’ (Globe and Mail, 11 May 2000). Mirvish’s son, David, is largely responsible for the family theatre-production company, Mirvish Productions. Hampson’s description of the Mirvishes also somewhat misleadingly implies that there are other competitors for the title of ‘Canada’s premier theatre family.’ 54 Crew, ‘Night.’ 55 One moment that revealed to me who actually controlled the Entertainment District occurred when I phoned the TEDA phone number in February 2000 to request promotional material about the District. In its early days, callers to TEDA who required information were asked to call another number, which, when dialled, was for the King Street Holiday Inn. Furthermore, the paper documents that I was sent promoted the Holiday Inn. For information on the Entertainment District at that time, one could only visit their website. 56 For more on the history of theatre buildings in New York, see Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses: A 250 Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004). 57 Two examples of this anxiety are the public division over Canada’s membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement and attempts by the World Trade Organization to limit the Canadian government’s ability to regulate cultural production to favour Canadian creators.

148 Notes to pages 63–7 58 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 152. 59 Ibid. 60 See Barbara Aarsteinsen, ‘Curtain Rises on Plans for City Core Theatre Area,’ Toronto Star, 20 Jan. 1994. 61 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 101. 62 Ibid., 157. 63 The political power of this coalition, and the municipal government’s eagerness to ally itself with TEDA, was revealed when a resident and a business owner in the Entertainment District protested to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) in 1997 that Festival Hall, then about to be built, would shroud their buildings in darkness for much of the day and create a wind tunnel along the sidewalk (the OMB is a provincial board of arbitration made up of panellists appointed by the province, which can review and overturn municipal land-use decisions). To compensate, they requested that the rear wall of Festival Hall be stepped back from the sidewalk. Festival Hall’s developers objected to the Toronto Star newspaper that it was too easy for citizens to provoke a public review of development projects: ‘All you need is a 45-cent stamp and $125 for the fee ... We’re ready to go. We could have been in the ground eight months ago ... It’s a bloody shame that what are narrow and not credible issues can delay a project like this.’ See Moloney, ‘Two Men.’ When one arbitrator suggested moving the wall back by three metres, the architect responded (appropriately for a District so enamoured of high technology) with a sarcastic space-age metaphor: he said that the question was analogous to NASA being asked to shrink the space shuttle. ‘Would you prefer we take off the guidance system or the propulsion?’ he queried (see Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ 102). City planners strongly supported the development on the basis that it would implement ‘exactly the spirit and intent of the whole planning philosophy’ for the Entertainment District – namely, the construction of leisure complexes – and that it would be ‘a catalyst for other private sector investment’ that would further entrench the District. One city councillor accused the OMB applicants of being ‘whiners and complainers.’ The applicants were aggrieved by the close links between the City and Entertainment District advocates, claiming that District developers ‘basically have the city in their pocket and they can steamroll over you,’ and that the ‘worst apologist’ for the development was the City of Toronto. See Moloney, ‘Two Men.’ The OMB ruled in Festival Hall’s favour. 64 Mirvish, Honest Ed, 176. 65 Ibid., 175–6. 66 Christopher Hume, ‘Bright City Lights,’ Toronto Star, 20 Dec. 1997.

Notes to pages 67–73

149

67 Ibid. 68 See Metropolitan Toronto, ‘Towards an Industrial Land Strategy: A Forum on the Future of Industrial Land’ (Metropolitan Toronto, 1994); Toronto, Council, Planning and Development, ‘King-Spadina: Official Plan Part 2’ (City of Toronto, 1996); Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of Industrial Land Uses in the King-Spadina District’ (City of Toronto, 1987); Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Industrial Market’; Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: KingSpadina’; Toronto, Urban Development Services, ‘Tracking the Kings: A Monitor Statement on the King-Parliament and King-Spadina Reinvestment Initiative’ (Toronto, 1998). 69 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: King-Spadina,’ 70. 70 Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Industrial Market,’ 1. 71 Sewell, Shape of the City, 4. 72 Ibid., 5–10. Sewell’s exceptions to the norm include Morley Callaghan, Hugh McLennan, and Mordecai Richler. 73 Ibid., 10. The nobler response to this conclusion was the ambitious improvements in public services that took place in Toronto under the auspices of Dr Charles Hastings, medical officer of health for Toronto from 1919 to 1929. Hastings oversaw the building of new facilities for water and sewage treatment, government-sponsored housing, and city-owned abattoirs. The less noble response (though much in line with progressive thinking of the time) was the Depression-era Bruce Report’s proposal to raze housing in downtown Toronto in response to the poverty of many of its working-class residents. This impulse, with its focus on so-called ‘slum clearance,’ would be realized in Regent Park, the huge and latterly infamous housing project in the east end of downtown. 74 Moloney, ‘Two Men.’ 75 Saskia Sassen, ‘Identity in the Global City: Economic and Cultural Encasements,’ in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 76 See Paul Moloney, ‘Hall Vows Ed Will Have His Day after Mirvish Week Rejected,’ Toronto Star, 25 Jan. 1996; ‘Thumbs Down on Honest Ed Day,’ Toronto Star, 13 Feb. 1996. 3. Space Administration 1 Ric Knowles and Jennifer Fletcher, ‘Towards a Materialist Performance Analysis: The Case of Tarragon Theatre,’ in The Performance Text, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Legas, 1999), 209n9.

150 Notes to pages 74–83 2 See, for example: Johnston, Up the Mainstream; Don Rubin, ‘The Toronto Movement,’ in Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings, ed. Don Rubin (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996); Renate Usmiani, Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983). 3 Knowles and Fletcher, ‘Towards,’ 210. 4 Alan Filewod, ‘Erasing Historical Difference, the Alternative Orthodoxy in Canadian Theater,’ Theatre Journal 41, no. 2 (1989). 5 Quoted in Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 34. 6 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘A Request for a Contribution towards the Renovation of the New Theatre Passe Muraille for 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto,’ n.d., XZ1 MS A781152, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. 7 Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 31. 8 Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille, 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1976), 201. 9 Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 107. 10 Rubin, ‘Toronto Movement,’ 396. 11 Toronto, Council, ‘Minutes of Proceedings for the Year 1977; Consisting of By-laws Passed during the Year; Appendix B’ (City of Toronto, 1978), 1235. 12 Under the Ontario Heritage Act, cities could refuse to issue permits for demolition or for alterations that modify the architectural or historical character of a designated building. 13 Toronto, ‘Assessment Roll, Ward No. 4, Div. No. 1, 1903’ (City of Toronto, 1903), 233–4. 14 Wilkinson-Kompass relocated to 167 Bentworth Avenue, and Sol Friendly Sheet Metal Works to 797 Sheppard Avenue West. 15 See Filion, ‘Metropolitan’; Gad, ‘Toronto’s’; Matthew, ‘Suburbanization.’ 16 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Arnold, 1973), 168. 17 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 284. 18 Ibid., 285–6. 19 Doreen B. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). 20 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79–80. 21 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Request for a Contribution.’ 22 I mention the ability to drill holes in the floor because of a story of an incident that occurred when Passe Muraille was in residence at Trinity Square with A Company, a group led by Chris Brookes (who would later found the Mummers’ Troupe in Newfoundland). To Passe Muraille’s consternation, A Company cut a hole in the floor of the hall for a production, something

Notes to pages 83–5

23

24

25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33

151

that Passe Muraille would likely have to explain to its landlord. See Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 53. John Reilly, ‘Letter to Theatre Passe Muraille Outlining the Canada/ Ontario Employment Development Program,’ n.d., XZ1 MS A781047, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Funding Profile for the Theatre Passe Muraille Renovation Project,’ 10 Sept. 1983. XZ1 MS A781159, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Theatre Passe Muraille and Leonard Kalishenko and Associates, ‘Renovations to Theatre Building, 1983,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A781047, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Under the Ontario Heritage Act, changes to the interior of a designated building were allowed, but changes to the exterior were required largely to reproduce the aesthetic character of the building at the time of its construction. Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 136. Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Request for a Contribution.’ Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status of Theatre Passe Muraille,’ 18 April 1990, XZ1 MS A781181, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia, The Noam Chomsky Lectures (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991), 54. ‘Banking on Theatre,’ Theatrum, Feb.–March 1991, 6. Even though 16 Ryerson Avenue is not a residential building, its appropriate property-value comparison is with residential property values. The building has little value as a commercial space for a private developer as it is unlikely to be renovated for commercial use. It is as residential space, likely in the form of condominium development, that the building has the greatest potential value. Demand for housing in central Toronto has been strong for many years, and the neighbourhood is already zoned residential, so conversion to housing would be much more straightforward than it would be, say, along Bathurst Street (though some of this difficulty was mitigated by changes to Toronto’s zoning regulations in the mid-1990s that loosened planning restrictions on how properties could be used). Contrary to the Theatrum article, it is not at all clear that the heritage designation depresses the building’s value by placing development restrictions on its exterior. Other industrial-to-residential conversions in downtown Toronto have marketed the heritage status of their buildings as value-added features. Allen Trent Realty, ‘Appraisal Report: Theatre Passe Muraille; a Two-Storey

152 Notes to pages 85–95

34 35

36 37

38 39 40

41

Semi-Detached Warehouse Used as a Theatre; 16 Ryerson Avenue in the City of Toronto in the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Ontario,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A781101, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status.’ There is some discrepancy here in the value of the property. The report discussed by the company in April 1990 refers to a recent appraisal of $890,000. Passe Muraille’s financial statements for the year ending 30 June 1990 place the value of the property at $586,906. If the latter figure is accurate, then Passe Muraille’s financial position was even worse than it appeared in April, since the major asset against which most of its borrowing was secured was worth less than had been previously claimed. See Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Financial Statements for the Year Ended June 30, 1990,’ 29 Jan. 1991, XZ1 MS A781180, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library. Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status.’ The Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), as of its 1999 boundaries, stretches to the western edge of Burlington, the eastern edge of Durham County, and from Lake Ontario north to Lake Simcoe. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 218–19. Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 5. By ‘mid-sized’ I mean companies that largely produce their own work (as opposed to bringing in the work of other companies), and whose main auditorium seats between 200 and 400 seats. All of the theatre spaces occupied by the ‘alternative’ theatres fit into this category. Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 109.

4. A Troubled Home 1 George Luscombe, ‘Statement to Crisis Meeting,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908001, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 2 Neil Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 161. 3 Denis W. Johnston, ‘Rev. of Harlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions,’ Canadian Theatre Review 87 (1996): 66. 4 Ontario Arts Council, ‘Consultants’ Comments,’ 1981, RG 47-11 TB1, Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of Ontario. 5 Urjo Kareda, ‘Our Father,’ Toronto Life, June 1999, 75. 6 Calculating the exact financial position of TWP in the 1980s is difficult. The

Notes to page 95

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company’s record-keeping was inadequate for many years, and the relevant documents that remain in the TWP archives and with its various funding bodies (to whom TWP would report financial data in grant applications) are fragmentary and incomplete. For example, I could locate only a partial set of audited financial statements, and, in one case, these data are contradicted by another document. In this case, I have chosen figures from financial statements, and noted the discrepancy. The archivists at the Archives of Ontario, which should maintain TWP’s yearly grant applications to the OAC (and therefore the financial data enclosed with those applications), were unable to locate these funding requests. No completed grant applications were available from the Toronto municipal archives, and the National Archives of Canada has not, at the time of writing, processed TWPs records from the 1980s. Carson cites a number of deficit figures at different points in Harlequin in Hogtown, but frequently does not provide their original source. This makes confirming his figures difficult, though some are clearly drawn from the sources listed in table 1. The figures that I have compiled in table 1 should be seen as best estimates given the data available. I begin with the financial year 1980 because this is the point at which TWP’s accumulated deficit began to worsen significantly and provoke concern at the funding councils, which had, due to accounting errors, previously believed that TWP was operating in surplus (the company revealed that the deficit had been accruing over the previous few years, but the exact figures are unavailable – see Jack Merigold, ‘Letter to John Salvis,’ 1981, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library). It is less important that the figure in an individual year is absolutely precise; it is more important that the figures demonstrate, over the long term, a trend of unsustainable growth in TWP’s accumulated deficit. 7 Canada Council, ‘Letter to Toronto Workshop Productions,’ 25 June 1982, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 8 These administrators were, in order, Mona Luscombe, Marguerite Knisely, Catherine McKeehan, and Marcia Muldoon. 9 In a letter to Walter Pitman, then executive director of the OAC, theatre officer William Lord noted that ‘when Board members join TWP George demands that they give him, at the time of joining, an undated letter of resignation. I find it absolutely amazing, Walter, that any person would join a Board under that condition.’ See William Lord, ‘Letter to Walter Pitman,’ 21 Nov. 1984, RG 47-11 TB1, Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of Ontario.

154 Notes to pages 95–105 10 Luscombe, ‘Statement.’ 11 Graeme Page Associates, ‘A Management Study for Toronto Workshop Productions,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908001, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 12 Luscombe compresses the time frame slightly here. Toronto did not actually designate 12 Alexander Street a theatre in perpetuity until 1982. 13 Luscombe, ‘Statement.’ 14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), xxxv. 15 Ibid., xxxv–xxxvi. 16 Ibid., xvi. 17 Ibid., xv. Alan Read frames the politics of Bachelard slightly differently: in terms of their ethical potential. Read argues that Bachelard believed in the transformative potential of the ‘imagining consciousness’ of the subject, and that this could be emancipatory. See Read, Theatre and Everyday Life, 84–5. 18 Mira Friedlander, ‘Survivor: George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Productions,’ Canadian Theatre Review 38 (1983): 45. 19 Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre,’ in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1986), 204. 20 Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 8. 21 Alan Filewod, Collective Encounters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 56. 22 Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 42. 23 Ibid., 184. 24 Filewod, Collective Encounters, 55. 25 Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 28. 26 See Robert Rooney, ‘Policy, Aims and Development,’ July 1987, XZ1 MS A916 [unprocessed material], Toronto Workshop Productions, University of Guelph Archives; Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Promotional Document,’ n.d. [after 1982], XZ1 MS A916 [unprocessed material], Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 27 Financial difficulties meant that Penaloza could not fulfil his part of the agreement and so it collapsed. 28 Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 168. Carson draws this description from an interview with Jaffery in 1988. 29 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 3. 30 Kareda, ‘Our Father,’ 78. 31 Toronto Workshop Productions and June Faulkner, ‘Letter to Arthur Gelber,’ 14 March 1968, XZ1 MS A916, Toronto Workshop Productions, University of Guelph Library.

Notes to pages 105–9

155

32 Toronto Workshop Productions and June Faulkner, ‘Fundraising Letter,’ 12 March 1969, XZ1 MS A916, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 33 Ibid. 34 TWP signed an agreement to purchase 12 Alexander Street with Fobasco in 1981 and the deed was eventually transferred three years later. 35 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 17. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 17. 38 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘A Parable: The Year of the Golden Egg,’ 1980, RG 47-11 TB1, Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of Ontario. 39 Ibid. 40 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 91. 41 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meeting,’ 2 Jan. 1986, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 42 George Luscombe, ‘Letter to John Salvis,’ 13 Nov. 1981, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 43 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Report to Council [Unnamed, probably Ontario Arts Council],’ 1985, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 44 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meeting,’ 27 Nov. 1981, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library; Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meeting,’ 13 Jan. 1982, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph. 45 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Transcript from Board Meeting,’ 1982, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 46 Graeme Page Associates, ‘Management.’ 47 Canada Council et al., ‘Joint Response to Toronto Workshop Productions from Representatives of the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, Metroplitan Toronto Cultural Affairs Division and Toronto Arts Council,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908001, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement between the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres and Canadian Actors’ Equity, to

156 Notes to pages 111–17

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

which TWP was a signatory, actors’ salaries rise according to the number of seats in the house. Ray Conlogue, ‘Theatre Sells Its Land to Foundation,’ Globe and Mail, 30 June 1988. Quoted in Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 194. Conlogue, ‘Theatre Sells Its Land.’ Chris Dafoe, ‘TWP-Vari Land Deal Falls Through,’ Globe and Mail, 22 July 1988. Ray Conlogue, ‘Offer to Buy Theatre No Longer Binding, Developer Says,’ Globe and Mail, 17 Sept. 1988. Ibid. Ray Conlogue, ‘TWP Board Turns Down Offer,’ Globe and Mail, 7 Sept. 1988. Ibid. Luscombe and a group of supporters locked out the board of directors, general manager Pam Rogers, and Leon Pownall, the new artistic director. To the fury of Pownall and the board of directors, the police at first refused to intervene. Later, at a meeting between representatives of the Committee, the board of directors, and the board of trustees at the Toronto police force’s 52 Division headquarters, Luscombe again refused to surrender the building. The trustees finally produced legal documentation of their ultimate responsibility for all matters relating to TWP and were allowed to reclaim the building that night. Rick Salutin, ‘Putting George Luscombe Back on the Map Where He Belongs,’ Globe and Mail, 25 Feb. 1999. Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 199. Ibid. Quoted ibid.

5. Movin’ On Up 1 I would not want to diminish the difficult conditions under which many small companies operated during the 1980s, often moving from one modest project grant to another. There is little doubt that the proliferation of small companies was, in part, due to the fact that funding bodies may have given them just enough to live on, but rarely enough to grow. For a useful discussion of the material effects of funding structures – and the cultural values embedded in them – during the 1980s, see Wallace, Producing Marginality, 107–20. 2 Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small Theatres: The Other Housing Crisis; a Brief Submitted to Mr. Arthur Gelber,

Notes to pages 117–19 157

3 4 5

6

7

8

9

Special Advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Culture to Review Demand for Toronto Arts Facilities,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A970006, Theatre Centre Archives, University of Guelph Library. The Small Theatres Caucus of the Toronto Theatre Alliance, at the time of this quotation, consisted of companies in Metropolitan Toronto whose operating budgets were under $150,000 per year. The TTA itself was renamed the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts in 2004. Malcom Burrows, ‘Necessary Theatre,’ Stage Free Press, 3 Nov. 1989. Vit Wagner, ‘Theatre Companies at a Glance,’ Toronto Star, 28 Feb. 1995. At the time of writing, Soulpepper is developing the Young Centre for the Performing Arts as a joint venture with George Brown College in the Distillery District (both the company and the college operate actor training programs, and so an educational imperative informs their alliance). Soulpepper and George Brown own the building together, and lease the land from the Distillery District on a 120-year term lease. The joint venture is a registered, not-for-profit company that is governed by a board of directors and Soulpepper is the facility’s prime tenant. The company also holds the contract to manage the facility, though this is a renewable contract that could be transferred to a third party in the future. I am grateful to Leslie Lester of Soulpepper for providing this information. The Theatre Centre has occupied a number of different buildings over the years, often having been moved on when a landlord could gain a greater return through increased commercial rent or redevelopment for condominiums. While its service to Toronto’s theatre community has been laudable (and its longevity remarkable), the spatial history of the Theatre Centre has been unstable, at best. Although Nightwood has produced a substantial and influential body of work since the company’s inception, its use of performance spaces has largely conformed to the dominant model established during the 1980s: renting out a variety of existing theatre spaces on a short-term basis, sometimes in co-production with larger companies that own their properties. Necessary Angel and Buddies undoubtedly followed this route as well (during some periods more than others), but they are also notable for the ways in which their uses of the built environment turned the unlikelihood of their owning performance spaces into virtues, at least partially. Arthur Gelber, ‘A Personal Assessment of Capital Needs for Facilities Used by the Professional Performing and Visual Arts Community in Metropolitan Toronto and Surrounding Area and Shaw and Stratford Festival Theatres,’ 1986, Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture. Ibid.

158 Notes to pages 120–7 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24 25

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small Theatres,’ Ibid. In 1990, Wallace cited an even higher number of companies in the Small Theatres Caucus: 66. See Wallace, Producing Marginality, 115. Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small Theatres.’ David Harvey, ‘On Planning the Ideology of Planning,’ in Planning Theory in the 1980’s: A Search for Future Directions, ed. Robert W. Burchell and George Sternlieb (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1978), 213. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996), 62. Don Vale is the neighbourhood bounded by St Jamestown to the north, Regent Park to the south, the Don Valley to the east, and Parliament Street to the west. Technically, Cabbagetown begins west of Parliament Street, although now the name is popularly used to refer to both areas and the Don Vale nomenclature appears to be disappearing, at least in colloquial use. Michael McKinnie, ‘The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse, and the Geography of Performance in Belfast,’ Modern Drama 46, no. 4 (2003): 586. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 404–5. Jeff Ellis, ‘All the World’s a Stage,’ Arts Scarborough, March 1989; Sarah B. Hood, ‘The New Worlds of Necessary Angel,’ Toronto Theatre Magazine, Fall 1988; Necessary Angel Theatre, ‘Unique Aspects of Necessary Angel,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A979017, Necessary Angel Theatre Collection, University of Guelph Library; Vit Wagner, ‘Drama Packs Arena with Sex, Plague and Politics,’ Toronto Star, 14 April 1989. While one might argue that the various ‘Shakespeare in the park’ projects that occur each summer in Toronto are the most constant examples of environmental theatre in the city, these do not involve new plays. John Krizanc, ‘Innocents Abroad,’ Saturday Night, November 1984, 35. Ibid. John Krizanc, Tamara (Toronto: Stoddard, 1989), 21. This excerpt from Tamara is taken from the published script, which is based on the 1987 New York production. The passage is still illustrative, however, because this scene was present in all productions of Tamara.

Notes to pages 128–33

159

26 Knowles, Theatre of Form, 187. Knowles argues that this scene reminds spectators of the ‘real limitations on audience freedom’ that the play imposes, and serves as an important check on any romanticization of the terms of their participation in the event. 27 Vit Wagner, ‘Buddies in Big Bucks Move to Centrestage: ‘Queerest’ Play Yet to Open Season at City-Owned Theatre,’ Toronto Star, 8 Oct. 1994. 28 Ibid. 29 Toronto, Council, Executive Committee, ‘Report of the 12 Alexander Street Selection Committee,’ 1 Oct. 1990, City of Toronto. 30 Ibid. 31 Three groups were shortlisted by the committee: The 12 Alexander Street Project, Théâtre Français de Toronto, and The EDGE (an alliance of Buddies, DNA Theatre, Platform 9 Theatre, Augusta Company, Cahoots Theatre, and Native Earth Performing Arts). Sky Gilbert’s autobiography, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory, contains a fuller account of the process by which Buddies ultimately came to be the lead company at 12 Alexander Street. See Sky Gilbert, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory: A Memoir (Toronto: ECW Press, 2000). 32 The renovations were budgeted at approximately $3 million, which Buddies raised from a combination of public and private sources. 33 Robert Wallace, ‘Theorizing a Queer Theatre: Buddies in Bad Times,’ in Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama, ed. Per Brask (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1995), 140–2. 34 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, ‘The Alexander Street Update,’ n.d., XZ1 MS A135021, Sky Gilbert Collection, University of Guelph Library. 35 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, ‘Promotional Brochure, 1994–95 Season,’ 1994, XZ1 MS A135021, Sky Gilbert Collection, University of Guelph Library. Conclusion 1 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1997), 119–97.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 100 affluence, 11, 29 agency, historical, 12, 14 Agnew, Jean Christophe, 10 AKA Performance Interfaces, 118 alternative theatre movement, 74 Althusser, Louis, 133 anti-urbanism, 68–9 architecture, theatre, 15 Autumn Leaf, 118, 126 avant-garde, 85, 126 Bachelard, Gaston, 87, 99–100, 104–5, 106, 107, 154n17 Bennett, Susan, 87 Brecht, Bertolt, 100, 101 Brooks, Daniel, 85 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre: 17, 20, 114, 116, 118–19, 124–5, 128–32, 157n7; acquisition of 12 Alexander Street, 125, 129–30; and higher and better use, 130–2; self-promotion by, 131; and urban planning, 131. See also 12 Alexander Street built environment: monopoly claims on, 119, 124–5, 132; and Toronto, 27

built form, 20 Burrows, Malcolm, 117 Cabbagetown, 124, 158n18 Canada Council, 35, 36, 45, 95, 96, 102, 108–9 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 49, 56, 67, 70 Canadian Crest Players, 35 Canadian Players, 34, 35 Canadian Stage Company (CanStage), 40, 74, 75, 142n27 Canon Theatre, 66. See also Pantages Theatre CanStage. See Canadian Stage Company Capital, 81–2. See also Marx, Karl capitalism: operations of, 10; role of theatre within, 10–11, 29, 41, 42 Carlson, Marvin, 29–30 Carson, Neil, 91–2, 97, 103, 104, 113, 153n6 Casa Loma, 127 centennial, Canada, 5, 25–7, 32 Central Business District (Toronto), 26, 49

172 Index Central Industrial District (Toronto), 49–51, 144n2 CentreStage, 142n27 citizenship, 29, 30 civic: development, 19, 26–8; harmony, 59–66, 70; ideology, 29–31; performance economy, 49; pride, 64; self-fashioning, 19, 49 civic theatre: 20, 123; and consumption, 49; and Ford Centre, 44; ideologies of, 28–32; and state, 28–9, 133; St Lawrence Centre as, 27 class: and Entertainment District, 66–8, 69–70; and St Lawrence Centre, 37–9 CN Tower, 48, 52, 53–4, 56, 67 cognateness trap, 15, 135 Cohen, Nathan, 35 collective creation, 77, 78, 88 commemoration, 76, 87–90, 113 consumption: as civic practice, 59, 66–9; and Entertainment District, 56–9, 66–9, 70; role of theatre in promoting, 19, 38, 49; of space, 56–7; urban, 21, 56, 69, 70 Crest Theatre, 6, 34, 35, 36, 93 criticism, theatre: analysis of space within, 14–15; English-language Canadian, 12, 13–15; and interdisciplinarity, 12, 14–16; materialist, 12–14, 99; methodologies of, 12–16 Desrosier Dance Theatre, 63 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 29 Don Vale, 124, 158n18 downtown (North York), 41–7, 144n44 downtown (Toronto): as civic ideal, 18, 26, 28, 29, 31–2, 122, 123; and economic change, 7, 17, 37–40,

48–55; relationship of theatre to, 31–2, 45–6, 123, 131–2 Drabinsky, Garth, 63, 65, 66 dramaturgy, 128, 132 Eaton Centre, 47, 144n46, 146n39 economy: of downtown Toronto and North York, 31–2; and leisure, 55– 9, 69–70; market, 9–11, 30–1, 32, 41, 64, 70, 93, 104–10, 112, 113–15, 134; sentimental, 9–11, 31–2, 41, 64, 70, 93, 104–10, 112, 113–15, 131, 134; transition from Fordist to postFordist, 7–9, 38–40, 63, 79–80 EDGE, The, 129–30 edifice complex, 20, 73–5. See also Juliani, John effect, measuring, 133–4, 135 Elgin Theatre, 66. See also Wintergarden Theatre Entertainment District: 7, 17, 19, 20, 48–70, 147n55, 148n63; as Business Improvement Area, 65; and civic affirmation, 59–70; and civic corporatism, 64–6; and class anxiety, 66–9; development of, 53–5; Festival Hall, 55–6, 58, 59, 148n63; geography of, 48; and historical revisionism, 66–9; and hygiene, 66–9; and play economy, 55–9; role of theatre in, 58–70 environmental performance, 15, 119, 125–8, 131 equity, cultural, 21, 118–19, 124–5, 131–2 Expo 67, 5, 25–6, 33 Factory Theatre, 73, 74, 75, 112 Faulkner, June, 105 Filewod, Alan, 74, 101, 103

Index financial district (Toronto), 37, 39 flâneur, 38, 39, 46 flexible accumulation. See Post-Fordism Fobasco, 104 Ford Centre for the Arts: 18, 19, 27–8, 32, 40–7, 49, 59, 63, 140n5; built form of, 45–6, 144n46; financing of, 43–4, 143n41; ownership of, 44; Ragtime, 27, 45. See also North York Performing Arts Centre Fordism: 7, 138n5; and downtown Toronto, 37–9, 51, 79; and Entertainment District, 63; and St Lawrence Centre, 28, 38–40 Fox, David, 88 Freedman, Adele, 55, 58 Free Trade Agreement, 42 Front Street: economic transformation of, 26, 37–40, 48, 142n33; and flâneur, 46 Gad, Gunter, 37, 142n28 Garrard, Jim, 75–6, 77, 88 Gass, Ken, 112 Gelber, Arthur, 119–20 gentrification, 9, 124 geography: cultural, 15; and dramaturgy, 132; economic, 121; materialist, 13, 81–2, 87, 90; physical, 16; theatrical, 3–4, 18, 19, 121–3, 131–2, 135; urban, 4, 6, 13 Gilbert, Mallory, 112 Gilbert, Sky, 129, 130 global city, 70. See also world city Griffiths, Linda, 88 growth machine, 5, 30–1 guardianship, 93–7, 110, 111. See also ideology Harbourfront Centre, 18

173

Harvey, David, 7, 10, 63, 80, 87, 125, 126, 137n1, 138n6 Healey, Michael, 88 heritage, 75, 79, 86–90, 150n12, 151n26, 151n32 higher and better use, 123–32 historiography: and role of retrospective testimony, 14; and space, 16, 92–3 history: and agency, 12, 14; of Canadian theatre, 13; spatialization of Canadian theatre, 16 Holiday Inn, 49, 63, 70, 147n55 home: and other housing crisis, 119– 23; and Theatre Passe Muraille, 75, 79, 105; and Toronto Workshop Productions, 91, 98, 104– 10 Horkheimer, Max, 100 Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees Union, 70 Hume, Christopher, 67, 68, 69 Hummingbird Centre, 18, 142–3n33. See also O’Keefe Centre ideology: aesthetic, 93, 99, 100–1, 103; civic, 19, 20; domestic, 106; guardianship, 93, 97–110, 111; proprietorship, 110–15; theatrical, 10, 16, 75–6, 99, 100, 103 industry (Canada): historical changes in, 8; manufacturing sector, 8; service sector, 8–9 industry (Toronto): manufacturing sector, 50–2, 54, 55–6, 68–9, 75, 79–80, 90; service sector, 54, 55, 64, 145n16; suburbanization of, 51, 75, 79–80, 90, 122 industry, theatre (Toronto): demography of, 120–1; facilities in, 119–22;

174 Index mid-sized sector, 88, 123; relationship between commercial and notfor-profit sectors, 19; relationship to Fordism and post-Fordism, 7–9; relationship to property development, 117; small-sized sector, 116–23, 124, 129, 131–2 institutions, cultural: building of, 7, 20; economic role of, 10–11 Jacobs, Jane, 137n4 Jaffery, Karl, 104 Johnston, Dennis, 28, 33, 92 Jones, Tim, 130 Juliani, John, 20, 73, 74, 75 Kareda, Urjo, 92, 105, 117 King-Spadina: and class anxiety, 66–9; economic history of, 49–55, 66–9; and hygiene, 66, 68–9 Kirkland, Michael, 58 Kitto, H.D.F., 30 Knowles, Ric, 13, 73, 128, 147n45 (Richard Paul), 159n26 Krizanc, John, 125, 127, 128 labour: and Entertainment District, 66–70; instruments of, 81–4; process, 10, 81–4, 90 Lastman, Mel, 42–4 Layton, Jack, 54 Lefebvre, Henri, 15, 56–7, 82, 87 legitimacy, theatrical, 21, 78, 83, 105–6, 117–19, 124–5, 126–8, 130–1 leisure, 53, 54, 55, 57–9, 70 Litt, Paul, 141n22 Littlewood, Joan, 94, 100 LivEntertainment Corporation (Livent), 27, 44–5, 65, 140n5 Logan, John, 30–1

Lord, William, 153n9 Luscombe, George, 35, 92, 93–4, 95, 97–8, 100, 101, 103, 107–10, 112, 113, 154n12, 156n59 Major, Leon, 35 Manitoba Theatre Centre, 73 manufacturing industry. See under industry (Toronto) Marcuse, Herbert, 29, 100–1, 140n8 Marx, Karl, 12, 81–2 Massey, Doreen, 82 Massey Hall, 65 Massey Report (Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences), 34, 73, 141n22 materialism, 12–14, 99 Meyerhold, Vsevelod, 100 Mirvish, Ed, 52–3, 60–6, 67–8, 69, 70, 147n51 Mirvish Productions, 60, 64, 147n53 Miss Saigon, 60, 62 Molotch, Harvey, 30–1 Montreal, 5, 7 Moore, Mavor, 26, 34, 35, 142n26 nationalism (Canadian), 13, 25, 26, 27, 36, 78 nation-state, 6, 19, 28 Necessary Angel Theatre: 3–4, 19, 20, 116, 117, 118–19, 124–9, 132, 157n7; environmental productions, 126, 128; Newhouse, 3, 125, 126, 128; Tamara, 3, 125–8, 132; and urban planning 126–9, 132 Nightwood Theatre, 116, 118, 156n7 Noam Chomsky Lectures, The, 85 North American Free Trade Agreement, 42, 147n57

Index North York, City of, 27, 40–1, 42–4, 80, 143n41 North York (downtown), 27, 32, 41–7, 144n44 North York City Centre, 46–7, 143n44 North York Performing Arts Centre, 27. See also Ford Centre for the Arts nostalgia, 87 O’Keefe Centre, 34, 142n33. See also Hummingbird Centre Old Vic Theatre, 62, 63, 67, 68 Ontario, Province of, 42–3, 94, 119, 143n41 Ontario Arts Council, 45, 92, 97, 108–9, 112, 153n9 Page, Graeme, 97, 108 Pantages Theatre, 66. See also Canon Theatre Paramount Corporation, 55, 63 Penaloza, Domingo, 104, 154n27 performance: ideology, 75–6; sites, 75–7 Pirenne, Henri, 30 Piscator, Erwin 100 Pitman, Walter, 112, 153n9 place, 4–5, 98–104. See also space place patriotism, 30–1 play: as civic act, 59; as type of economy, 55–9, 69–70 Playdium, Sony, 49, 63, 55, 58 political economy: and Canada, 71, 91, 95, 98, 109, 111; and geography, 15; and theatre studies, 16; and Toronto, 6, 7–9, 74–5, 79–80, 81, 90, 110, 133; and transnationalism, 7–9 Poor Alex Theatre, 112 post-Fordism: and Entertainment District, 56, 63, 65–6; and Ford

175

Centre, 28, 40–7; and St Lawrence Centre, 38–40; and Theatre Passe Muraille, 86, 87, 89; and Toronto, 7–9 Potter, Miles, 88–9 Pownall, Leon, 97, 156n59 Princess of Wales Theatre, 59–60, 62–3, 67 property: and Buddies in Bad Times, 128–32; and Ford Centre, 42–4; ideologies of, 80–1, 83, 110, 119; market, Toronto, 76, 95, 121–3, 124; and Necessary Angel, 125–8, 131–2; ownership patterns of, 74–5, 83, 116–23; and Theatre Passe Muraille, 74–90; and theatrical legitimacy, 78, 117, 131–2; and Toronto Workshop Productions, 92, 93, 110–15; value of, 9, 30–1, 43–4, 75, 85–6, 86, 120–3, 131 Read, Alan, 154n17 real estate market: deflation in, 64, 65, 85–6; inflation in, 85–6, 93, 104, 110, 121, 131–2; and North York, 43–4; and Toronto 9, 20, 79, 110, 112, 114–15, 116, 134 Red Barn Theatre, 34 regional theatres, 20, 73–4, 75, 77 rent gap, 123–4 Rochdale College, 77, 83 Rockwell, David, 58, 59 Rogers, Pam, 111, 156n59 Rogers Centre, 48. See also SkyDome Rooney, Robert, 95, 97, 110 Rose, Richard, 3–4, 127, 128, 129, 132 Rosselli, John, 64 Royal Alexandra Theatre, 34, 52–3, 59–60, 62–3, 67–8, 147n45 Royal Commission on National

176 Index Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. See Massey Report Roy Thomson Hall, 52–3, 67 Rubin, Don, 78 St Lawrence Centre for the Arts: 5, 16, 19, 25–40, 44, 45, 46, 47–8, 49, 59, 73; built form of, 36, 38, 39–40; and municipal state, 36; and urban planning, 28–9 Salutin, Rick, 77–8, 113 Sassen, Saskia, 42, 70 Savage God, 20 service industry. See under industry (Toronto) Sewell, John, 32, 68–9 site-specific performance. See environmental performance 16 Ryerson Avenue: 76, 78–90; administration of, 76; built form of, 78–9; and fundraising, 84; and heritage, 79, 84, 86–90; as instrument of labour, 81–4; purchase of by Theatre Passe Muraille, 76; value of, 85–6, 151n32, 152n35. See also Theatre Passe Muraille SkyDome, 42, 48, 53–4, 55, 58, 67, 145n22. See also Rogers Centre Smith, Adam, 9–10 Smith, Neil, 123–4 Soja, Edward, 13, 15 Sol Friendly Sheet Metal Works, 79–80 Soulpepper Theatre, 18, 117, 157n5 space: and aesthetics, 93, 99; conceptualizing, 4–5; of consumption, 56–7; and historiography, 92–3; as instrument of labour, 82–4; monopoly control of, 79–80, 119, 124–5; and ontology, 93, 99, 102–3,

106; and performance ideology, 75–6; and physicality, 93, 99, 104; in theatre studies, 14–15; and Toronto Workshop Productions, 92–3; and sacredness, 99, 103–4 spectatorship, 49, 60 state: Canada, 6, 25–8, 41–2; Toronto, 42, 44, 45, 133 Strachan House, 125, 126–28 synechdochic fallacy, 135 Tarragon Theatre, 16, 17, 19, 73, 74, 75, 112, 122, 123, 139n24 Taylorism. See Fordism theatre: and affluence, 11; and capitalism, 10–11; and economic development, 55; and everyday life, 100–1, 103; relationship to the civic, 28–32; relationship to transnationalism, 28, 38–47; role within Entertainment District, 58–70; and social relations, 10–11 theatre (Toronto): geography of, 4, 17–19, 121, 124; industrial structure of, 34 Theatre Calgary, 73 Theatre Centre, 118, 121, 157n6 Theatre Columbus, 116 Theatre Passe Muraille: 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 73–90, 91, 107, 110, 123, 124, 150n22; The Drawer Boy, 88–90; 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt, 77–8, 88; The Farm Show, 77, 88; Futz, 77, 78; and financial crisis, 76, 85–6; I Love You, Baby Blue, 78, 88; and labour process, 81–4, 90; and property ownership, 76–7, 78; Tom Paine, 77. See also 16 Ryerson Avenue Theatre Toronto, 35 Theatre Workshop, 94

Index Thompson, Paul, 75–6, 77, 78, 88 time, 5 Toronto: and civic self-fashioning, 18; and downtown, 7, 17, 18; and suburbanization, 7, 9, 17–18, 79– 80; theatrical geography of, 3–4, 120–3, 131–2; urban economy of, 120–3; urban geography of, xi, 119 Toronto, City of, 27, 51–2, 54, 66, 68, 94, 97, 98, 107, 113–14, 116, 127, 129, 130, 148n63 Toronto, Metropolitan, xi, 27, 31–2, 42, 51, 68, 119, 145n23 Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts. See Toronto Theatre Alliance Toronto Arts Council, 45, 97, 108–9 Toronto Arts Foundation, 26, 34, 35, 36 Toronto Arts Productions, 142n27 Toronto Blue Jays, 54, 56, 145n22 Toronto Centre for the Arts, 27–8. See also Ford Centre for the Arts Toronto Entertainment District Association, 48–9, 60–1, 66, 147n55, 148n63 Toronto Free Theatre, 73, 74, 142n27 Toronto Theatre Alliance, 17, 116–17, 120, 121, 157n2 Toronto Workshop Productions: 6, 16, 20, 21, 34, 35, 91–115, 116, 117, 129, 130, 140n8; finances of, 95, 96, 97, 104–11, 114, 152n6; and guardianship, 97–110; Hey, Rube! 94, 101–3; and historiography, 91–2, 93; politics of, 94, 109, 111, 112; and property, 92, 93; and proprietorship, 110–15; purchase of 12 Alexander St, 94, 95, 96, 155n34 tourism, 9, 45, 57–9 transnationalism: economics of, 7–9,

177

19, 133; and Entertainment District, 63, 70; and Ford Centre, 28; and St Lawrence Centre, 40–7 12 Alexander Street (Buddies in Bad Times): acquisition of, 129–30; as home, 125, 130–1; as queer space, 130–1; renovations to, 130; role in promotion of Buddies, 130–2; 12 Alexander St Project, 129–30 12 Alexander Street (Toronto Workshop Productions): as aesthetic space, 99; condition of building, 97–8, 105, 107, 108–9; as domestic space, 99, 104–10; as home, 91, 98, 104–10; as ontological space, 99, 106–7; and physical space, 99, 104; as property, 91, 92, 93, 94, 110–15; purchase of by City of Toronto, 97; purchase of by TWP, 94, 95, 96, 106, 110, 155n34; as sacred space, 99, 103–4; value as real estate, 97, 99, 104, 108–9, 110–15 Union Station, 48 urban development: 3, 4, 16, 20–1, 133; and Central Industrial District, 50–5; and cultural institution building, 29, 32–47; and Entertainment District, 49; and leisure, 65; and North York, 41–7; and recession, 64, 65; and regeneration, 7; and St Lawrence Centre, 27; and urban reform movement, 5–6, 26 urban planning: and consumption, 56; and higher and better use, 123– 32, 133; and St Lawrence Centre, 28–9; and Toronto, 28–9, 51–5, 151n32 urban reform movement (Toronto), 26, 31, 36

178 Index Wagner, Anton, 13 Walker, Craig Stewart, 13 Wallace, Robert, 13, 130 welfare state (Canada), 5, 25–8, 33, 38, 40, 42 Whittaker, Herbert, 47, 60, 103 Wilkinson and Kompass, 79–80 Wintergarden Theatre, 66. See also Elgin Theatre

Wolf, Stacy, 29 world city, 9. See also global city Yonge Street, 41–4, 45–7, 59, 65–6, 146n39 York, Town of, 50 Zeidler, Eberhard, 144n46

CULTURAL SPACES Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theoretical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of autonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations, regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world. Series Editors: Richard Cavell, University of British Columbia Imre Szeman, McMaster University Editorial Advisory Board: Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University Hazel V. Carby, Yale University Richard Day, Queen’s University Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto Heather Murray, University of Toronto Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto Books in the Series: Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization Michael McKinnie, City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City