Multicultural Politics at the Stratford Festival: Birgit Schreyer Duarte’ Nathan the Wise and Antoni Cimolino’s Birds of a Kind

Abstract

In 2019, the prestigious Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, paired productions of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Wajdi Mouawad’s Birds of a Kind to explore intersections of cultural identity and politics. In this article, we analyze the productions and their reception through the theoretical lens of multiculturalism, referencing conceptions grouped along a continuum between liberal universalism and hard pluralism. We argue that the productions and their reception by artists, critics, and audiences provide evidence for, and contribute to, a Canadian multiculturalism that, far from a homogeneous ideology, constitutes a complex, shifting discursive field and politics.