Found in Translation

Awhile back, I had the unpleasant experience of being cornered by a colleague at a launch party for a multicultural theatre festival. What made it unpleasant was not so much his level of inebriation (maudlin bordering on obnoxious). Nor was it the fact that our conversation was actually a 15-minute tirade to which I could only offer the occasional nod while desperately looking for an excuse to flee the scene. No, the low point of the evening was the description of one of his current projects.

My colleague—whom I’ll call The Former Boy Wonder as he was the director du jour in the mid 1980s and has since settled into a comfortable, if occasionally bitter, existence as a freelance theatre artist—was editing a collection of modern Canadian drama. This anthology hadn’t been updated in about three years. The Former Boy Wonder ruefully noted that in the anthology’s last edition, a play that he had originally directed 20 years ago had been bumped to make way for a...