Whittaker, Robin C.

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

been largely defined by the fall that marked its beginning, Cesare Schotzko provides us witha unique space to land. TONY NARDITWO LETTERS … And Counting!Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2013. 387 pp.ROBIN C. WHITTAKERYou know a Canadian theatre scene when you see one …… where actors whisper ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’, realizing there’s no respect foractors in a country with no respect for culture … (Letter Two 173)At the heart of Tony Nardi’s TWO LETTERS … And Counting! are the texts to three soloperformances—Nardi calls them “documentary monodramas” (321)—written and read byNardi in Toronto and Montreal between 2006 and 2008. Letter One is based on a fourteen-page email he wrote to a casting director who wanted him to audition for a racially stereo-typed character in a television sitcom set in Toronto’s Little Italy; Letter Two is based on aseventy-five-page email he wrote to two prominent theatre reviewers about a Torontoproduction of Carlo Goldini’s The Amorous Servant in 2006; And Counting! is “an actor’s letterto himself ” (321) evaluating Canada’s arts funding. These three works are surrounded bysundry supporting material: a “Thank You!” by Nardi, a brief introduction by his friend andhigh-profile constitutional law lawyer Rocco Galati, two selected reviews of Nardi’s Letters,a fifty-page essay by Nardi glossing the Letters, an afterword by Galati, Nardi’s biography,and five pages comprised of fourteen selected quotations from critics and peers. To aid thereader in approaching the performance text, innovative QR codes tagged to each play andon the back cover lead to YouTube clips of Nardi performing brief segments of his work (atechnique that might be used to great effect in future play publications).Taken together, this is a magnum opus, a tour de force by an actor turned Siminovitch-nomi-nated playwright featuring three exhaustive performances set in curated conversation withcritics, artists, audiences, and Nardi himself that is meant to unsettle Canada’s theatre, film,and television professions, force reexamination, and instigate renewal. Throughout, Nardirejects a hierarchical orthodoxy in which producers, directors, publishers, and critics makepawns of actors. He then places all of them in a field of his own anecdotes, assigns blame tothem (only the critics are named), and plays them for fools. Here, the theatre community isa disciplined Bourdieusian ecology, with agents—Nardi calls them “ghosts”—trading infor-mal knowledge (gossip) of their restricted field of cultural production in order to commitcareer position-taking.Swaddled beneath Guernica Editions’ cover, featuring Francis Ellington Nardi’s markerand crayon sketch entitled “Mr. Multipants,” these three first-person pieces amount tosustained actor polemics the likes of which we have hardly seen in this nation. (Think ArtaudTRIC / RTAC •  37.1 / 2016  •  PP 129-138 131BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUSTRiC37#1x15.qxp_TRiC'16  2016-04-26  8:58 AM  Page 131unabridged.) They are meant to be read to an audience by Nardi. But on the page they func-tion as an archive of invectives aimed at institutionalized racism toward Italian-Canadianactors at the hands of our “two solitudes,” with Nardi as his own case study.Thus, Nardi takes aim at wrongheadedness in the Canadian entertainment professions.Canadians have been creating and engaging with cultural activity all wrong, in some casestoo harmfully, in others too passively. Readers are cast among scholars, critics, actors, direc-tors, and producers who are Nardi’s “ghosts,” signifying that we haunt Nardi in perpetuity.At one point, some of these ghosts find him in a bar and ask him for names: “I thought theirquestion more interesting and revealing than anything I had written” (106).Nardi’s hyperactive language bounces between reminiscence and critique. His voicevengefully relishes its own omnipotence, trapping its prey before the fact and bewilderingthe reader into a constant state of accessory after the fact. The language is often defensive,redundant, and fatiguing. Moreover, the emphatic typography seems to infer that the reader’sinner voice could hardly approach Nardi’s powerful, emotive craft without its assistance. Ashe says, “I will never be a cold recorder of what I see and hear” (111). Indeed, he will not: “Ata banquet … an Editor of The Canadian Theatre Review [sic], made me an offer … to edit anentire issue … on ‘directing’. She was sober” (157). Subsequently, CTR published an issue ofmanifestos.Nardi’s scripts might be taken as notes leading to an unwritten version of a “backstage”play like Frayn’s Noises Off or French’s Jitters. But far from tightly structured, escapist farce,we find twisting, unforgiving polemics aching to reach the level of manifesto. Yet “TheLetters simply sound the alarm,” he writes in his essay “Still Counting!” (338). There are noenumerated Artaudian treatments, no Nardilian solutions, for Canadian theatre’s cankers.In this sense one feels better off for having had the water brought to a boil, yet empty forhaving little else to bring to the table.Nevertheless, Nardi is surely accurate: “there’s no respect for actors in a country withno respect for culture” (173). Is this the alienating consequence of what John Juliani oncecalled Canadian theatre’s “edifice complex,” the eventual result of recommendations fromthe 1949-51 Massey Commission Report in which arm’s length funding prioritized brutalistconcrete theatre buildings over audiences and practitioners? Mistreated, specialist artistsemploying typographical miasma to remind their indifferent, unworthy audiences that thelatter cannot possibly understand the depths of a craft now viciously disciplined by theProfession, the Industry? Like Artaud, Nardi seeks to pick at the cicatrix to make us feel apain we are too late in feeling; unlike Artaud, Nardi believes that more culture, not less, isthe cure, whatever that might look like in Canada.All of this and more is fodder for Nardi in his three letters, and the title implies that heis not done yet. (In fact, his film of And Counting, called Third Letter, appeared at the ItalianContemporary Film Festival in 2014.) But I digress, lest the present review of Nardi’s threeletters provides seed for a fourth.BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS132 PP 129-138 • 2016 / 37.1 • TRIC / RTACTRiC37#1x15.qxp_TRiC'16  2016-04-26  8:58 AM  Page 132

TONY NARDI TWO LETTERS … And Counting!

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TONY NARDI TWO LETTERS … And Counting!

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University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals