Intercultural Relations: Direct Audience Address in Contemporary Theatre in Canada

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of direct audience address in contemporary theatre in Canada, focusing in particular on how it informs discussions of theatrical interculturalism. It addresses a dearth of scholarship on this common theatrical device, while arguing that limited mainstream understandings of direct address have contributed to its marginalized position in scholarship. The chapters that follow draw from existing theoretical frameworks in theatre and performance studies and other disciplines in order to map out direct address as a theatrical phenomenon that can extend the dramaturgical work of a theatre piece, and begin to chart its history and contemporary roots in the Canadian theatre scene. The following chapters also establish how the concept of relationality helps to illuminate the work that direct address does, particularly in intercultural contexts.

Chapter one explores direct address in theatre in Canada, drawing from interviews with contemporary theatre artists who employ direct address in their work and existing literature on monologue, solo performance, and a range of performance forms to theorize direct address in a Canadian context. Chapter two explores direct audience address in Tetsuro Shigematsu's autobiographical play Empire of the Son. It draws on media studies conceptions of technological immediacy to investigate Shigematsu's use of multimedia and direct address to illuminate his complicated relationship with his father, which carries implications for how we understand interpersonal and intercultural distance and difference and theatrical immediacy. Chapter three explores how the oppositional gaze of direct address in Cliff Cardinal's Huff challenges settler audiences to examine their complicity and undo harmful conceptual binaries that mar Indigenous-settler relations and perpetuate injustices. Chapter four, a queer feminist reading of Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Evalyn Parry's Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, examines how direct address is part of the show's larger messaging to encourage relational ways of living, and how Williamson Bathory's performance of uaajeerneq mask dance models for spectators this relationality in real time. These varied case studies present an introductory look into direct address' richness, while exploring how the way in which an audience is addressed and who that audience is can have significant impact on a performances meaning-making process.