I’ve just returned from the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. We traveled up there to meet a long-time colleague and artistic collaborator who goes to the festival every first week in August. He had been asking me to go up for a number of years now, and I finally had the time to take him up on the standing offer.
It was a pleasant enough weekend. We did not see shows together due to conflicting schedules, but we had dinner together two nights in a row. The weather was mostly cooperative. We saw wonderful productions of H.M.S. Pinafore and Guys and Dolls, good productions of The Bacchae and The Changeling, and a rather unsatisfactory production of Tartuffe. And yet, by the conclusion of the weekend, a vague feeling that I’ve been having about theatre seemed to become more concrete. I was uncomfortable for most of the trip, as if I were in a foreign country (well, I was in Canada, but that’s not precisely foreign). I found myself surrounded mostly by highly educated, well-off white people, and that unsettled me. By the end of the weekend, I had come to a pretty firm decision — it’s time for me to give up theatre as an active part of my life.