Evicted in—and from—Toronto: Walker's Beautiful City at Factory Theatre

Abstract

Defined as a pivotal in career of George F. Walker, 1982 marks a noteworthy shift in Walker's dramaturgy. (1) During 1970s, Walker's occurred in two phases: early, absurdist-inspired works (The Prince of Naples and Ambush at Tether's End), followed by later works that borrowed from and interrogated popular culture (Sacktown Rag, Bagdad Saloon, and Beyond Mozambique). (2) The of both phases were marked by existential and ontological questioning, and were seemingly intended to sow confusion and anxiety in audiences. 1982, though, Walker workshopped at Cornell University an early version of Better Living, a play that would become first of The East End Plays and inaugurate Walker's next phase. Ultimately six plays, including major successes Criminals in Love (1984) and Love and Anger (1989), this collection marks a shift in subject and style in his dramaturgy. As Chris Johnson notes, In these plays, Walker turns for material to working-class Toronto East End of his boyhood and adolescence, material which he had previously explored only in Sacktown Rag, and there only somewhat tentatively. (3) Walker characterizes his from this phase, when he was writing directly about Toronto during 1980s, as becoming increasingly generous, a term that suggests growing accessibility of The East End Plays, all of which approach realism, if somewhat uncomfortably. Likewise, generosity of his suggests something about a vision of future. As Johnson argues, these do something rather un-Walker-like: they introduce not hope, but what he has called 'possibility.' (4) Importantly, this shift toward last phase corresponds with an implicit reassessment of responsibility within Walker's dramaturgy. Before The East End Plays, his were mostly polemical: that is, they shook foundations of beliefs, values, and assumptions in order to highlight anxiety that Walker believed was everywhere in Canadian society. Probably defining concern for Walker regardless of phase, anxiety--which is at once psychological, cultural, and existential--comes from the question posed again and again by Walker's plays as Johnson maintains: Who controls future? (5) During early phases, Walker's dramaturgy sought to induce this anxiety in audiences without advocating any means of confronting or overcoming it: result was pure polemicism. Because of this, no doubt, Johnson concludes that it's impossible to contain Walker's political views neatly within any political doctrine. (6) Johnson is certainly correct insofar as Walker cannot be pigeonholed through traditional isms used to designate political drama--liberalism and conservatism, Marxism and feminism. Nevertheless, The East End Plays demonstrate an increasing awareness of limits of polemicism: of agitation that serves no end itself and, paradoxically, may reinforce status quo by foreclosing possibility of praxis. More notably, these advocate a particular future, though, again, not in ways that would define them under any specific ideology. other words, The East End Plays denote a shift in Walker's dramaturgy from polemical to political: by this, I mean that they advocate a future beyond anxiety, even though they remain skeptical of how easily that future can be realized. While this shift typifies many of six that comprise The East End Plays, my argument addresses Beautiful City, third of to be produced, for two reasons. First, it best demonstrates how Walker's political concerns were distinctly spatialized at time; second, spatialized concerns evident in Beautiful City suggest exigency of shift from polemicism to politics: Toronto during 1980s. Interviewed in 1987, year that Beautiful City debuted, Walker defines nature of this anxious future in relation to loss of his Toronto home: It was like being evicted--from city. …