George Luscombe Directing Chicago ’70 at Toronto Workshop Productions: an insider’s subjective account

This article is a revised and expanded version of a talk prepared for The Art of Directing symposium, “Celebrating Peter Stein” at the University of Toronto, 7 June 2014. “Director as Documentarist / Director as Activist” was the topic of the panel in which I participated. For this panel I talked about the creation of Chicago ’70 at Toronto Workshop Productions (aka: TWP), January to March 1970. This show was developed collaboratively by the ensemble with the direction of George Luscombe who, in many productions and especially this one, showed himself both a “documentarist” and an “activist.” George’s importance in Toronto and in English Canadian theatre Many readers already know a lot or a little bit about George. Here’s a brief backgrounder for those who might not. The late theatre critic and artistic director Urjo Kareda called George “Our Father” (Bush 191). Why? Because George was on the scene first, developing new work from 1959 when the very few professional productions in Toronto were touring shows from elsewhere, reliable classics, and recent Broadway or West End hits. TWP was in operation some ten years before important companies like Factory, Passe Muraille, Tarragon, and Toronto Free appeared. Theatre-makers in other parts of Canada would acknowledge George’s influence. Besides Chicago ’70 his many innovating productions include Hey Rube!, The Mechanic, Che Guevara, Mr Bones, The Good Soldier Schweik, The Mac Paps, Olympics ’76, and of course Ten Lost Years. George was committed to original creation, to new looks at old plays, to strong political content and to building a fulltime paid ensemble of actors who would train as well as perform together. In her review of our book Conversations with George Luscombe: Steven Bush in conversation with the Canadian theatre visionary, veteran theatre practitioner Lib Spry wrote: “I was surprised to discover in these conversations that Luscombe was a fervent believer in Stanislavski. The shows I saw did not have anything in them that I then associated with Stanislavski–they were physical, lively, fun, thought-provoking and even in the most emotional of moments, it was the audience whose guts were being wrung, rather than the actor’s.” Indeed the eclectic mix that was George’s theatre included influences from Joan Littlewood’s understanding of Brecht & Epic Theatre; Rudolf von Laban’s “Efforts”; British Music Hall; Circus; Mime; Commedia; Chinese Opera; and Vakhtangov. And yet his foundation was always Stanislavski. TWP and me My role in the Chicago ’70 project–along with everybody else in the ensemble–was as Actor/ Researcher/Co-Creator. But I also functioned as informal Dramaturge. My tasks included (in close collaboration with George) editing transcripts, organizing units of dramatic material into a playable sequence, and (with fellow actor Mel Dixon) putting our work-script into readable form. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This was the last of the five shows I did as an actor with George and this was the project on which I worked most closely with him until, over a quarter-of-a-century later, we recorded the conversations that eventually became our book. The Activism of the Director George had East Toronto working-class roots. He was an activist who “was on picket lines at 16” (Luscombe, qtd. in Bush 163). He remained on the side of Labour and the Left to the end of his days–though sometimes very critically. And he had five formative years acting with Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl at their politically committed Theatre Workshop in London. He was also the first director in Toronto–to my knowledge–to actively practice “colour-blind casting.” George once said: “I don’t train actors. I train citizens” (qtd. in Bush ix). The Activism of Chicago ’70’s Ensemble-of-the-Moment Who were we? We were actors of diverse experience, training, and cultural backgrounds and most shared George’s artistic values as well as the desire to put our politics onstage.