ABSTRACT
Over the decade that he has been writing for the theatre, Guillermo Verdecchia has earned a reputation as one of Canada’s most exciting and innovative dramatists. His overall work is stamped by a strong distrust of naturalism, which, he remarks, ‘makes it very difficult to talk about structures of domination, or power, or oppression’ because ‘it reduces things to the singular, to the unique, the exceptional, an event’ (quoted in Harvie 1997: 92). While Verdecchia’s plays may begin with a personalised and/or localised event, their canvas is always much broader, sketching not so much the individual experiences of the protagonists but rather the complex social, cultural and political patterns in and through which their everyday life unfolds. The imperative to dramatise the ‘big issues’ has compelled Verdecchia to create theatre that celebrates and activates an audience’s intelligence, that allows people to contend with problems, that implicates both viewers and performers, as well as characters, in the action. This artistic vision is expressed in several experimental works that typically use dialogue, sounds, projected images, music, written text, and/or direct audience address, all bound together to form a rich theatrical matrix through which specific themes are woven. Not surprisingly, such works are marked by a recurrent interest in questions about theatricality itself: how it is understood by audiences, how it mediates our interpretation of a narrative, how it might be used to critique the very processes of representation.
