(Cultural Spaces) Michael McKinnie - City Stages - Theatre and Urban Space in A Global City-University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division (2013)

C I T Y S TA G E S :
T H E AT R E A N D U R B A N S PA C E I N A G L O B A L C IT Y
This page intentionally left blank
MICHAEL MCKINNIE
City Stages
Theatre and Urban Space
in a Global City
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9121-5
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McKinnie, Michael
City stages : theatre and urban space in a global city / Michael McKinnie.
(Cultural spaces)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9121-5 (bound)
1. Theater – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. 2. Theater and
society – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. 3. Theaters – Social
aspects – Ontario – Toronto – History – Textbooks. I. Title. II. Series.
PN2306.T6M33 2007 792’.09713541 C2006-907011-3
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to

its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Material has been reprinted from the following articles written by the
author: ‘Space Administration: Rereading the Material History of Toronto’s
Theatre Passe Muraille.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (2000): 19–45; material
reprinted with permission of the journal. ‘Urban National, Suburban Trans-
national.’ Theatre Journal 53, no. 2 (2001): 253–76. © The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press. Material reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press.
I sat one morning by the Moore, off to the west
ten yards and saw though diffident my city nailed against the sky
in ordinary glory
It is not much to ask. A place, a making,
two towers, a teeming, a genesis, a city.
Dennis Lee, ‘Civil Elegies’

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Nomenclature xi
Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto 3
PART ONE: CIVIC DEVELOPMENT
1 Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the

Urban Development of Toronto’s Downtowns 25
2 Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Enter-

tainment District 48
PART TWO: THE EDIFICE COMPLEX
3 Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe

Muraille 73
4 A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop

Productions 91
5 Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography

of Theatrical Legitimacy 116
viii Contents
Conclusion 133
Notes 137
Works Cited 161
Index 171
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of labour that is more than just my own. I am
indebted to a large number of colleagues, friends, and organizations
for their contributions to this project. These are too numerous to list in
their entirety, but some deserve special mention. I was fortunate to
learn from some exceptional teachers and scholars at the universities I
attended while a student. At the University of Guelph, I am grateful to
Alan Filewod and Ann Wilson, and particularly to Harry Lane (from
whom I took my first class in Canadian theatre) and to Ric Knowles
(from whom I first learned – and am still learning – about materialist
approaches to theatre). At York University, I am particularly indebted
to the late Norman Feltes, who was a leader in Marxist scholarship in
Canada and political activist in Toronto, and who also became a friend
and neighbour (I still vividly recall sweating through the rigours of
Norman’s graduate seminars, an experience from which I continue to
benefit enormously). At Northwestern University, Henry Binford and
Bernie Beck generously offered their expertise in urban history and
cultural sociology, respectively, and, as part of my doctoral thesis
supervisory team, graciously extended their knowledge and sharp
insight to a project that needed their specialist expertise. Tracy Davis
was, and still is, my toughest critic. In her capacity as supervisor for
the doctoral thesis that was the genesis of this book, she consistently
challenged me to press my own thinking further, to ask harder and
more precise questions, and to assume nothing. She still encourages
me to do these things, and for this encouragement (past and present), I
owe her an enormous debt.
Present and former colleagues – from both universities and the the-
atre industry – have supported this book at key moments. I would like
x Acknowledgments
to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Drama and The-

atre Arts at the University of Birmingham, along with Peter Glazer,
David Grant, Jen Harvie, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Anthea Kraut, Lisa
Sloniowski, Daniel Moser, Sophie Nield, Amy Partridge, Lionel Pilk-
ington, Mark Phelan, Nicholas Ridout, and Joanne Tompkins. In the
theatre world, Richard Rose provided me with a hugely valuable edu-
cation in dramaturgy and new play development (upon which I con-
tinue to rely), and he helpfully clarified some of the historical events
discussed in chapter 5. Sky Gilbert and Leslie Lester also provided
important details, for which I thank them.
A number of organizations, institutions, and publications have
assisted the research on which this book is based. Research for City
Stages was initially supported by doctoral fellowships from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Northwest-
ern University, the completion of the book was made possible by a
Study Leave Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of
the United Kingdom, and its publication was assisted by the Aid to
Scholarly Publishing Program of the Canadian Federation for the
Social Sciences and Humanities. I am particularly indebted to the staff
of the outstanding theatre archives at the University of Guelph and,
equally, to those who work at the Toronto city archives. I am fortunate
to have been permitted to develop some of the ideas found here in a
variety of settings, to these ideas’ undoubted benefit: at the Associa-
tion for Canadian Theatre Research, the American Society for Theatre
Research, Roehampton University, the London Theatre Seminar, and
in the pages of Canadian Theatre Review. Chapters 1 and 2 are devel-
oped from articles first published in Theatre Journal and Essays on Cana-
dian Writing, and I thank these journals for their permission to
elaborate upon those pieces further here. The comments of anony-
mous readers for the University of Toronto Press have undoubtedly
made this book better, and I am grateful to the editors at UTP for their
patience, and for their skill in ushering this book through the publica-
tion process.
In direct and indirect ways, my family has been hugely important
through the initiation, development, and completion of this book. I
cannot thank Bill, Sheilagh, and Meghan McKinnie enough for their
support. Finally, Ruth Fletcher has been a part of this project from its
inception, and it has benefited from her particular combination of
tough-mindedness and curiosity in more ways than she can know, or I
can articulate. City Stages is for her.
Nomenclature
A number of historical events in this project involve municipal bodies

that have since been abolished. It is important to clarify that, in prac-
tice, there are several Torontos. There is the older, former City of Tor-
onto, which was surrounded by five newer and smaller municipalities:
North York, East York, York, Etobicoke, and Scarborough. Together this
geographically conterminous urban area constituted Metropolitan Tor-
onto until 1998. As of 1 January 1998 the city governments were amal-
gamated into a unified Toronto and the metropolitan level of
government was eliminated. Throughout this text I have attempted to
distinguish as clearly as possible between ‘Toronto’ in its present geo-
graphical boundaries and the former City of Toronto and other indi-
vidual cities (and their governments) that existed prior to municipal
amalgamation.
I also refer throughout this book to ‘downtown’ Toronto. Downtown
Toronto commonly refers to a large area in the core of the city that
extends north from Lake Ontario to the CPR tracks near Dupont Street,
and from Spadina Avenue east to the Don Valley. Downtown North
York, which I discuss in chapter 1, stretches along Yonge Street from
Sheppard Avenue north to Finch Avenue. (See figure 1.)
All dollar figures cited throughout are in Canadian dollars.
xii Nomenclature
1 Harbourfront complex 12 Distillery District

2 Rogers Centre 13 Theatre Passe Muraille
(formerly SkyDome) 14 Elgin and Wintergarden Theatres
3 CN Tower 15 Canon Theatre
4 Factory Theatre 16 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre /
5 Princess of Wales Theatre Toronto Workshop Productions
6 Royal Alexandra Theatre (1967–1989)
7 Roy Thomson Hall 17 Panasonic Theatre
8 Hummingbird Centre 18 Tarragon Theatre
9 St Lawrence Centre 19 Toronto Centre for the Arts /
10 Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Ford Centre
Young People 20 Four Seasons Centre for the
11 CanStage Berkeley St. Performing Arts
Figure 1 Key performance and entertainment sites in downtown Toronto and

North York
C I T Y S TA G E S :
T H E AT R E A N D U R B A N S PA C E I N A G L O B A L C IT Y
Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis
of Theatre in Toronto
If it is true that theatre has become an important part of Toronto over

the past four decades, it is equally true that Toronto has become an
important part of theatre during this time. In fact, popular narratives
of the city’s transformation and the theatre’s transformation since the
late 1960s are remarkably similar: the story opens in a comfortable but
parochial setting, the lead character grows restless with this staid envi-
ronment and begins an awkward growth spurt, and, finally, a mature
and vibrant mise-en-scène emerges. That this story does little justice to
the historical complexities of both theatrical and urban development in
Toronto almost goes without saying. But if Toronto’s urban and theatri-
cal histories should not be reduced to the same simplistic narrative
tropes, the connections between them should not be diminished either.
These histories are intertwined in more ways than have previously
been imagined or examined.
The purpose of this book is to examine historically the urban condi-
tions of contemporary theatrical production in Toronto. As is often the
case with academic research, the genesis of this project was unex-
pected, and lies in an off-hand remark made by a colleague. For two
years in the mid-1990s I worked for Necessary Angel Theatre Com-
pany in Toronto. As I will discuss further in chapter 5, Necessary
Angel rose to prominence during the 1980s partly because of environ-
mental productions like Tamara and Newhouse, both of which trans-
formed non-theatrical buildings into performance spaces. Although
Necessary Angel staged its productions predominantly in conven-
tional theatre spaces, then artistic director Richard Rose still liked to
maintain the option of mounting work outside existing theatre build-
ings, and so we toured a variety of former commercial premises
4 City Stages
throughout the central city. One building in the old port lands south of
Eastern Avenue, just over the Don Valley at the base of the Riverdale
neighbourhood, seemed promising initially. But after surveying the
space Rose commented that he didn’t believe that a theatre audience
would come there. A theatre audience might be drawn to such a space
west of the Don Valley, he suggested, but theatre in Toronto – summer
productions of outdoor Shakespeare aside – was difficult to sustain
outside a downtown area.
I do not doubt that Rose was correct in his analysis of the ‘local mar-
ket,’ at least in that time and place. For me, however, his comment
prompted a series of questions potentially larger and more significant
than whether one show could be staged profitably in south Riverdale.
Was the calculus of how theatre in Toronto could be staged informed by
assumptions of where it could be staged? Did the particular urban
geography of Toronto itself play a part in theatrical production in the
city? And, inversely, did theatre play a part in the urban development
of Toronto?
I argue in this book that the answer to each of these questions is
affirmative. I also argue, however, that while theatrical and urban
development have intersected in Toronto over approximately the last
four decades, the forms and consequences of that intersection have
been many, and often unanticipated. As the case studies that follow
illustrate, ‘theatre’ and the ‘city’ describe constantly changing social
practices and artefacts. The terms of their intersection are different
over time and space partly because the entities themselves are ambigu-
ous, complex, and, at times, internally contradictory.
Critical Concerns
Nonetheless, there are a number of concepts and themes that recur

throughout this investigation. These include the problematic relation-
ship between space and place. Conceptualizing space and place can be
difficult, not in the least because there is no consensus in the critical lit-
erature on the distinction between one and the other. Some critics, like
geographer David Harvey, see place as referring to certain manifesta-
tions of space in time.1 In this way of thinking, places are formed in
moments where distinct arrays of spatio-temporal relationships come
into being (before, of course, they dissolve and new arrays emerge).
Other critics, like cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, invert the con-
ceptual pairing: space refers to the moment where a more fluid and
elusive place becomes arrested.2 Like Harvey and de Certeau, I accept
that space is not an independent, ahistorical entity – space does not

simply exist but has to be made through social practice. But I employ
Harvey’s framing of space as something that can only be known
through the forms it takes over time. Those forms include ‘place’ in a
broad sense – as a socio-spatial product created in difference – and,
more precisely, the specific shapes that places assume.
The case studies examined here reveal that the places negotiated by
theatre in Toronto have been numerous and complex. Some places
encountered are not surprising, because they take a shape that accords
with vernacular, physical manifestations of space: parcels of land, built
form like buildings and architectural features, and the networks of
structures and areas that constitute what geographers call the built
environment. Other places are created through familiar ideological
constructions of physical space that enable capitalist economic transac-
tions, such as private property and real estate. Still more places are
defined, at least in part, through imagination, representation, ontology,
and urban and civic ideology. These places may be more difficult to
grasp initially, but have been no less consequential for theatre in
Toronto.
The corollary of this spatial concern is a temporal one. The places,
people, and events discussed in this study are not only spatially but
temporally placed. Indeed, their spatial and temporal inscriptions are
inextricable; without a temporal register it is impossible to mark geo-
graphical transformation historically. Like all historical analyses, this
inquiry chooses a point in time at which to begin: in the case of this
study, that time is 1967. My investigation begins in 1967 because sev-
eral historical events occurred in this year that are not usually consid-
ered to have much to do with each other, but are, in actuality,
connected. This year is best known in Canada as the centennial year
and the time of Expo 67 in Montreal. To commemorate the centennial,
the federal government sponsored building projects across the country,
extending the built form of the national welfare state by a substantial
measure. One such project was the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts in
Toronto, the city’s first civic theatre building. Demolition for the St
Lawrence Centre occurred in 1967, when part of an old block of whole-
salers on Front Street East fell to the wrecking ball. That same year,
however, campaigners ensured that the acceptability of knocking
down old buildings at the behest of the local growth machine could no
longer be assumed. A nascent urban reform movement won its first
major victory by halting the planned demolition of Old City Hall, and
thereby inaugurated an (admittedly anxious) coalition of downtown
6 City Stages
progressives and uptown Red Tories that would change the political
and urban landscape of Toronto in the 1970s. Toronto Workshop Pro-
ductions, the small not-for-profit theatre company that was the only
consistent alternative to ‘high culture’ operations like the Crest Theatre
in Toronto at the time, also moved into a 300-seat theatre space down-
town, having outgrown its 100-seat basement in the old city’s work-
ing-class west end. This project begins in 1967, therefore, since that
year marked, for the first time, a confluence between what the state
could do economically in the urban sphere, the shape Toronto’s urban
form should take, and where and how theatre could (and should) be
practised in the city.
Theatre History, Geography, and Political Economy
Despite beginning in the centennial year, this investigation is con-

cerned with theatre and its relationship to the state, more than to the
nation. The nation and nationalism have tended to figure prominently
in scholarship on English-language Canadian theatre. This is not sur-
prising, since the historiography of contemporary English-language
theatre has frequently hinged on the late 1960s and 1970s, when an
expansion of the theatre industry coincided with a surge in cultural
and political nationalism. Studies of contemporary theatre in Toronto
have often used nationalism to explain this work’s origins, and have
measured the analytical and social significance of this work by trans-
posing its value to a national level.
While not discounting the importance of the nation and national-
ism in English-language Canadian theatre, this project argues that
they only inform the urban geography of theatre in Toronto to a
limited degree. Instead of using nationalism as an explanatory cate-
gory, I attempt, in a limited way, to ‘bring the state back in’ (to quote
the title of a well-known collection in political economy).3 Moreover,
instead of employing an ill-defined ‘regionalism’ or ‘localism,’ this
project attempts to account for the demands made on theatre practice
that are specifically urban and specific to Toronto. While concerns
about property and the built environment do not only arise in cities,
the fact that they are mediated through cities circumscribes their
negotiation. The forms that this urban negotiation has assumed in
Toronto during the last four decades make it possible to speak of the-
atre as having contributed to the distinct urban geography of Toronto
itself.
One reason that such a geography exists lies in the particular urban
political economy of Toronto. It is easy to forget that, for most of Can-

ada’s existence, Montreal was the country’s most populous city and its
largest economic motor. In a national context, the expansion of Tor-
onto’s theatre industry through the 1970s coincides with a time when
Toronto overtook Montreal as Canada’s largest city, both in terms of
population and as a centre of finance and industry. Theatre in Toronto
– as an industry – was, therefore, not only part of a cultural transfor-
mation taking place in the city, it was part of an economic one taking
place nationally as well. Furthermore, in a North American context,
downtown Toronto did not ‘hollow out’ in the way that the centres of
many large American cities did. The suburban communities that con-
stituted the majority of Metropolitan Toronto grew rapidly after the
Second World War, but this was not accompanied by a depopulation or
dereliction of the old city core.4 As a result, cultural institution build-
ing in Toronto has not had the imperative of urban rehabilitation to the
same degree that it has had in American cities like New York or Chi-
cago (in spite of the reclamatory narrative that advocates for Toronto’s
Entertainment District have constructed to justify the enterprise, as I
will discuss in chapter 2).
Toronto’s changing place in the national and continental economy
was also accompanied by a shifting role in the transnational economy.
As both an urban and theatrical environment, Toronto was implicated
in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist political economy that
accelerated in the 1970s. In using the language of Fordism and post-
Fordism I draw on a conceptual framework established by Marxist the-
orists of economic, urban, labour, and artistic transformation: the Reg-
ulation School of French economists, the urban geography of David
Harvey, the labour sociology of Harry Braverman, and the cultural
criticism of Fredric Jameson.5 Fordism, as its name implies, arrived
when the assembly line became the dominant method of organizing a
production process for the purposes of mass-producing standardized
commodities. Fordism denotes a system of economic production orga-
nized on the basis of routinized, manufacturing labour, where interna-
tional trade occurs largely between Western nation-states. In most
Western countries, this period stretched from the 1920s to the late
1960s. Post-Fordism, or, to use David Harvey’s more precise term,
‘flexible accumulation,’ occurs when international capital floats freely
across national borders, structuring production, labour, and trade
according to the needs of transnational financial speculation.6 This
shift is generally marked historically by the oil shocks and abandon-
ment of the Bretton Woods system of international financial gover-
8 City Stages
80
70
60
50
Per cent
40
30
20
10
0
1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001
Service Manufacturing
Figure 2 Proportion of Canada’s national workforce in manufacturing and

service industries.
Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Historical Review, vol. 2004 (Ottawa: Statistics
Canada, 2005); Statistics Canada, Census and Household Statistics Branch, Highlights:
1981 Census of Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1984); ibid., Industry and Class of
Worker: The Nation, 1991 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1991).
Note: ‘Manufacturing’ means commodity manufacturing and construction. The three
major service industries comprise trade; finance, insurance, and real estate; and commu-
nity, business, and personal service.
nance in the early 1970s, after which the exchange rates for most
tradable currencies floated freely.7
There is an extensive literature on this model as a representation of
historical transformations in Western political economies, and a fierce
debate about its merits.8 A comprehensive discussion of this literature
would require a book in itself, so I can only say that I agree with the
paradigm as a broad model of historical transition, while suggesting
several ways in which Toronto’s urban and theatrical development are
implicated in post-Fordist change. Statistically, labour-force surveys
demonstrate that the proportion of the Canadian workforce engaged
in manufacturing has slowly declined since the 1960s, and the propor-
tion engaged in service-related industries has risen (see figure 2).
Gunter Gad and David Nowlan both show that this trend away
from manufacturing and towards the service industry has been even
more pronounced in Toronto than nationally, and the growth of Tor-
onto’s theatre industry is one part of that shift.9 In a purely quantita-
tive sense, the present-day scale of Toronto’s theatre industry is of a
completely different order than it was four decades ago, in both a
national and an international context. Although the popular claim that
Toronto is now the third-largest urban centre for English-language the-

atre in the world (after New York and London) is more often asserted
than substantiated, there is little doubt that the city’s theatre industry
has become a part of the local and, through its role in generating tour-
ism, transnational service economy to a degree that it simply was not
in the 1960s and 1970s. Insofar as any city can be thought a ‘world city,’
Toronto’s theatre industry provides one persuasive reason for includ-
ing it in that category.
Urban post-Fordism also became visible, in part, through the subur-
banization of manufacturing and the abandonment of industrial sites
in the older city core – this study demonstrates that suburbanization
and theatre practice have become connected in Toronto over the past
four decades. A post-Fordist political economy has also involved a
greater concentration of private finance capital in the downtown core;
theatre, in turn, has negotiated Toronto’s transformation from a city
where regional and national firms had their headquarters to one where
transnational companies participate in global capital flows. Still
another feature of post-Fordism has been long-term property value
inflation (and its counterpart, gentrification) on a scale that the city did
not experience before the early 1970s. As I show, theatre in Toronto has
been implicated in these phenomena as well.
The political economy of Toronto, then, is both urban and cultural.
But if the spatialization of these economies has been complicated, their
theatricalization has proved no less complex. In large measure this is
because theatre has both market and sentimental imperatives, and, at
times, these may be in conflict with each other. Despite the fact that
most of the theatre enterprises discussed in this study are not-for-profit
corporations that derive some of their revenues from public funding,
all of them operate through a market economy at some point. Their
most persistent preoccupation in an urban context may have been with
the local real estate market, but concerns about ticket sales, advertis-
ing, and increasing corporate revenues have arisen frequently. Those
who produce theatre in Toronto have been, and remain, keenly aware
of the market economy in which they operate.
The vicissitudes of the property market and the box office do not,
however, wholly explain the relationship between Toronto’s urban and
theatrical economies. Theatre is not only a market activity but also a
sentimental one, valued as a way to create social bonds between peo-
ple and their environment. In this use of the term, ‘sentimental’ does
not indicate the popular, affective use of the word. Instead, it refers to
Adam Smith’s conception of the term in his Theory of Moral Sentiments,
10 City Stages
where he attempts to theorize how social bonds between people are

created under capitalism.10 Smith’s analysis is a helpful corrective to
the vulgar conception of capitalism that is sometimes deployed as
shorthand within Left politics, in which the market is a rapacious
machine that systematically feeds upon the resources and peoples of
the planet. The reality is much more complicated, and far less efficient.
Smith undertook his inquiry partly because he recognized that mar-
kets are inherently unstable. When Jean-Christophe Agnew contextu-
alizes Smith’s theory of sentiment within the ‘social psychology of
market society,’ he concisely points to the way that Smith naturalizes
the preparatory work needed to make capitalist relations function:
sentiment (or what Smith also calls ‘sympathy’) is what makes eco-
nomic contracts possible.11 But there is a latent anxiety in Smith’s
thinking – a fear that unsympathetic subjects will throw the system
into crisis – and so some social logic must be created to help the mar-
ket appear natural, or, at least, the ideal option.
Marxist analyses often share a similar interest in the instability of
markets. David Harvey argues that capitalism contains contradictions
that always threaten its viability and demand that it continually be
remade. Harvey identifies two points of conflict: first, the tension
between individual action and collective action often overrides the
ability of any ‘hidden hand’ to ‘correct’ the market; second, the disci-
plining of men and women into a constantly changing labour process
(their submission as labour to capitalist-determined wages, time, and
space) is a volatile ‘mix of repression, habituation, co-optation and co-
operation, all of which have to be organized not only within the work-
place but throughout society at large.’12
It is possible to say, then, that sentiment is a necessary concern of
market-dominated societies because marketization is always clumsy
and never entirely successful. Social subjects are frequently disobedi-
ent, the market consistently encounters social relations that do not
exist because of and for itself, and economic crisis periodically
results. To posit the implication of theatre practice in this process is
to question the ideological and market work it performs within a
capitalist social formation.
One reason that theatre might play a sentimentally affirmative role
in a market economy is that cultural institutions and objects may com-
pensate for the upheavals of economic change, particularly when they
appeal to ideals of timelessness and universality (effectively negating
time and place in order to distract attention from the fact that these
things are tendentious). That being said, theatre does not necessarily
perform the cognitive work that the mode of production requires for
its reproduction. In fact, theatre is so fascinatingly ambivalent because
it often tries to do exactly the opposite: holding out the promise of
social bonds outside or against a capitalist economy, and encouraging
its participants to imagine ideals that they might otherwise have not.
Theatre also provides a way to coordinate certain types of social rela-
tions and make these relations visible through the co-presence that the
event usually involves. Marvin Carlson argues that a key feature of the
theatre event is that it offers a particular time and physical space
through which sentiment can be experienced through spectatorship.
Carlson states that theatre-going is a ‘social occasion’ where ‘the pres-
sure of audience response can coerce individual members to structure
and interpret their experience in a way which might well not have
occurred to them as solitary readers.’13 This argument can be extended
further: it is not only the experience of theatre-going that can produce
sentiment, but the existence of theatres as cultural institutions that can
create sentiment in a city’s life. But because the theatrical activity con-
sidered in this study has an ambivalent relationship with the market,
the sentimental relations encouraged can be a perplexing combination
of the economically affirmative and subversive.
I argue, however, that contemporary theatre in Toronto has affirmed
the market economy more often than it has resisted it, though this affir-
mation has often been unintentional and unexpected. In part, this is
because theatre in Toronto has become affiliated with sentiments of
urban affluence. Affluence not only denotes a relative economic posi-
tion or a quantity of accumulated capital, it also implies a state of
‘well being’ – indeed, a pleasure – that is associated with the market but
that supersedes a strictly economistic explanation (such a sense of
affluence may be important when trying to attract private capital to a
city, for example, but securing it may involve actions based on ideals of
public benefit that are not wholly market-based). An affluent city is
different from a rich city; whereas the latter depends on a quantitative
calculation of capital and the nature of the social subject’s relationship
with the city is irrelevant, the former implies that the subject sees the
city, and its place within it, in a more comforting and pleasurable
way once a degree of economic security is reached. As I will discuss,
theatre – whether as cultural institution, artistic practice, or ideology –
has come to be seen in Toronto as a way to achieve this ideal of urban
affluence.
12 City Stages
Critical Practices
Accounting for such a variety of issues raises significant methodologi-

cal challenges, and, as will become apparent at various points in this
project, the critical inheritance of Canadian theatre studies, and of the-
atre studies writ large, only partly equips the analyst to confront them.
As a response to this problem, my inquiry is both materialist and inter-
disciplinary. There is no more a single materialist analysis than there is
a single feminist analysis or a single Canadian analysis. Nevertheless,
there are certain assumptions and, more importantly, methods, that
materialist analyses tend to share. The central premise informing all
materialist analysis must surely be Karl Marx’s statement, ‘Men make
their own history, but they do not make it ... under circumstances cho-
sen by themselves.’14 Marx’s assertion is deceptively simple, but it
implies some assumptions that are analytically fundamental to materi-
alist analysis. The first assumption is that history, like place, is some-
thing that is ‘made,’ and, by extension, is always remade. Materialist
analysis negotiates a tension between a theoretical need to define the
object of inquiry and a desire to track how that object is constantly in
formation and re-formation. An interdisciplinary approach assists this
negotiation, since, even if theatre studies offers useful disciplinary
methods, theatre practice itself is a composite object of inquiry, consist-
ing of a range of activities whose significance extends beyond the artis-
tic. Interdisciplinarity reminds the researcher that accounting for the
full range of ‘borrowing and influence that occurs between practices
and their theories’ may require epistemologies and methodologies
from outside theatre studies.15 The second assumption of materialist
analysis is that human subjects ‘make’ history, but, because they do
not have the luxury of determining the circumstances under which
they do so, ‘making history’ is always an untidy – but not random –
process. A third assumption of materialist analysis is that human
beings may be social agents, but their exercise of agency is always cir-
cumscribed by forces beyond themselves. As a result, theatre history is
littered with unanticipated results that were not commensurate with
agents’ intent, something that the case studies considered here demon-
strate repeatedly.
Materialist analysis should also not be reduced to a crude econo-
mism, though this project does not divorce artistic from economic (and
geographical) questions. If cultural materialism has tended to insist on
the political and economic inscription of cultural objects, this is not
because it attempts a crude restoration of the economic ‘base’ to art’s

‘superstructure’ in the ‘last instance.’ This focus, rather, attempts to
redress the aestheticism and cultural affirmation that still dominates
criticism about art. As Imre Szeman comments, ‘If materialist criticism
is ... often concerned with matter, the materiality of social and cultural
forces, and with political economy, it is not just because it is “material-
ist” but also because these are the elements most commonly “left out”
of typical examinations of cultural objects.’16
Moreover, an urban geography of theatre encourages the critic to
observe the lessons of materialist geography in order to avoid the
implication that these places are merely locations where theatre hap-
pens to occur (a fallacy that has its aesthetic counterpart in the use of
history as a ‘backdrop’ to cultural artefacts). On the contrary: material-
ist geography suggests that space is not simply the pre-existing context
for theatre practice (or its ‘geological container,’ to use Edward Soja’s
term), but a series of places through which theatrical and spatial forms
are mutually constituted.17
Szeman argues that cultural criticism in Canada remains largely unin-
formed by materialist analysis, and the same could be said, to some
degree, about histories of theatre in what is euphemistically called
‘English-speaking Canada.’ There has been important and nuanced
materialist analysis of English-language theatre in Canada, as the work
of Ric Knowles, Ann Wilson, Robert Nunn, Jennifer Harvie, Alan File-
wod, Robert Wallace, and Denis Salter illustrates. Of the work that may
provisionally be called ‘theatre history,’ however, only Filewod’s and
Salter’s work is in a materialist vein. English-Canadian theatre studies
since the 1970s has instead been predominantly nationalist, federalist,
and sometimes unsettlingly patriotic: as Anton Wagner’s introduction
to Establishing Our Boundaries illustrates, analysts may position them-
selves – consciously or not – as the critical wing of a national unity cam-
paign.18 Wallace argues that English-Canadian theatre studies has also
tended to focus on the ‘good’ (read: dramaturgically familiar) work of
‘successful’ individual playwrights (or, by extension, of individual the-
atre companies that helped produce a body of dramatic literature).19
While there are welcome signs that this critical practice is changing to a
limited degree (as the historicized dramaturgical analysis of a book like
Knowles’s The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning indicates),20
I would argue that Wallace’s characterization remains predominantly
true today, fifteen years after he offered it (as a book like Craig Stewart
Walker’s The Buried Astrolabe indicates).21
14 City Stages
A further historiographic problem one encounters when writing

about theatre practices that have occurred relatively recently is the role
that the testimony of individual practitioners should be given in the
historical narrative, and, as data, the weight that their views should be
granted when undertaking critical analysis. A number of people who
participated in the events discussed in this book are still alive, and it
has been a relatively common practice in Canadian theatre history to
use the views of individual participants as historical evidence of what
went on at a given time, and to incorporate these perspectives into a
calculus of historical significance. But readers of this book will likely
observe that the terms on which individual testimony appears here are
tightly bracketed, and that I give less ‘voice’ to individual participants
than others might. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, in a materi-
alist vein, the individual practitioner is only one agent in a much
larger historical formation, and that individual is not always (or even
predominantly) the best index by which to understand and critique
the historical events I examine. Second, while there is nothing inher-
ently problematic historiographically with using the testimony of indi-
vidual participants, I have strong reservations about retrospectively
gathering and employing it as evidence of past intention, aspiration, or
explication when data related to these things already exist from the
time of the events themselves. To be clear, I do employ individual testi-
mony at many points in City Stages, often as a way to highlight the ten-
sion between the proclaimed intentions of participants and the actions
that the conditions in which they worked ultimately allowed. But I
usually consider these intentions as they were articulated at the time; to
recuperate these significantly after the fact – say, through personal
interviews in the present day – would run the risk of collating data
that are temporally incommensurate within the context of this histori-
cal narrative. While such retrospective testimony may be interesting, it
is more reliable evidence of participants’ views now, and less reliable
evidence of their intentions and aspirations then.
One of the goals of this investigation is to broaden the critical inter-
ests of Canadian theatre studies and bring new approaches to bear on
the issues and historical artefacts examined. To a large degree, this
involves bringing the ‘spatial turn’ in theatre studies to bear on Cana-
dian, and particularly urban, case studies. But it also involves using
those case studies to ‘talk back’ to the modes of spatiality predomi-
nantly employed within theatre studies, and in this sense it explores
broader conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues arising from
the intersection of theatrical and geographical inquiry. In theatre stud-

ies today, it seems, space is everywhere, and the evidence for a height-
ened interest in the broad problematic of theatre and space is easy to
find. Since the mid-1990s there have been books by David Wiles, Gay
McAuley, and Una Chaudhuri, among others.22 Theatre Journal pub-
lished a special issue on theatre and the city in 2001 and, in 2004, Mod-
ern Drama published a special issue on what it called the ‘geographies
of the theatre.’ Whether or not this interest constitutes anything more
than a recent peak in the long waves of theatre scholarship is open to
debate. More interesting, however, is whether the use of geographical
categories of analysis by theatre studies actually changes what theatre
scholars do, and how they do it.
It is all too easy for theatre studies to fall into the cognateness trap:
the (often unwitting) assumption that certain case studies are inher-
ently more cognate than others for a spatial analysis emerging from
theatre studies, and that certain geographical concepts and methods
(primarily those of cultural geography) are more cognate to the analy-
sis of these case studies than others. Theatre studies has tended to be
most interested in spatial case studies when they appear to demand
attention explicitly, as in the analysis of theatre architecture or environ-
mental performance. It has also been uncertain about spatial thinking
that clearly emerges from – and speaks primarily to – the social sci-
ences. Theatre studies has often been unsure how to translate quantita-
tive geographical findings into useful material for theatrical analysis;
even when geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja are
invoked, their citation tends to be of more conceptually reflective
material, and not the quantitative analysis that buttresses such reflec-
tion – say, Soja’s examination of land use in Los Angeles in Postmodern
Geographies. And in a final but related issue, theatre studies hasn’t
seemed to know what to do with the strong streak of political economy
informing much contemporary spatial analysis. It is difficult to ignore
the importance of political economy in contemporary geography, but
also difficult to find political economy in contemporary theatre studies.
I cannot claim that this book successfully resolves all of these prob-
lems. Indeed, many of these issues are not problems at all – they are
simply the logical result of the types of intellectual training that theatre
scholars tend to receive, and of the critical practices that the discipline
tends to valorize. But the case studies I examine here offer the opportu-
nity to complicate this inheritance by bringing together data, concepts,
and methods in distinct ways. Sometimes this involves reading extant
16 City Stages
materials against the grain: considering companies like Theatre Passe

Muraille or Toronto Workshop Productions is hardly novel in the con-
text of Canadian theatre studies, but spatializing their histories throws
them into a different light than they have usually been viewed in, and
helps us understand the complex conditions informing their actions.
Other times this involves bringing together diverse empirical and the-
oretical materials to explore links between practices that are often not
imagined to be related, whether in Canadian theatre studies, or in the-
atre and cultural studies in general: the relationships between political
economy and programming, real estate and performance ideology, or
urban development and theatrical legitimacy, to name a few. The
result, I hope, makes the familiar strange, and the strange unexpect-
edly familiar.
The Project
This book examines a number of theatrical sites and enterprises, both

large and small, and it does so within the context of investigating
wider problems arising from the intersection of theatrical and urban
space. These problems, then, inform the selection of the case studies
discussed throughout; I do not attempt to survey a wide range of ven-
ues (or theatre companies or individuals associated with those ven-
ues), but, rather, explore how particular sites, enterprises, and
practices elaborate the key concerns that feature in each part and in
each chapter. As a result, the collection of case studies that I consider
may, at first, look a little unusual: why the St Lawrence Centre but not
Harbourfront? why Toronto Workshop Productions but not Tarragon?
why mix not-for-profit and commercial theatres? and why discuss
material that isn’t theatrical? As I will discuss below, however, my
rationale for including (and excluding) certain case studies and histor-
ical data is tied to the particular theatrical and urban problems that
these sites and enterprises elaborate in exemplary ways.23 Employing
a geographical axis when writing theatre history may sometimes result
in an unexpected arrangement of historical material and case studies,
but, I hope, it also helps makes apparent connections between both
performance and cultural practices that have been present, but not
always visible.
This being said, all of the case studies discussed in this project – and,
arguably, most of the theatre sites in Toronto – are conditioned by a
general physical, economic, and ideological topography of the city. I
will address this issue in greater depth in chapter 5, but it is worth not-
ing that the physical geography of theatre in Toronto has remained
remarkably consistent over the past four decades. As figure 1 (p. xii)
illustrates, most of the key theatre sites discussed in this book (along
with other, related performance and entertainment venues) are located
in downtown Toronto, within relatively well-defined boundaries: a
four-kilometre-by-four-kilometre district bounded by Queen’s Quay to
the south, Dupont Street to the north, Bathurst Street to the west, and
the Don River to the east.24 This physical distribution of sites is only a
snapshot of a larger picture; of the fifty-five performance venues in
Toronto identified by the Toronto Theatre Alliance as either occupied
by its members or suitable for its members’ productions, forty-five are
located within the Queen’s Quay–Dupont–Bathurst–Don district (and
several of the remainder, like the Theatre Centre, sit just on its edge).
This is not entirely surprising, since the area is served by the city’s best
public transportation links, and its density means that it can sustain
the larger service economy (such as restaurants and bars) of which the-
atres are often a part. The extent to which performance and entertain-
ment sites remain concentrated in the city core is still intriguing,
though, given that much of Toronto’s population growth has been out-
side the older, central area, and that the majority of the city’s popula-
tion lives in suburban areas some distance from this area. Moreover,
the intensification of these sites within the central city has actually
increased over time, and the links between sites and neighbourhoods –
and sites and other sites – have deepened. Theatre companies like The-
atre Passe Muraille, Buddies in Bad Times, and Tarragon have become
embedded in their respective neighbourhoods, and their urban loca-
tions have often informed their self-presentation: a hip, slightly scruffy
part of Queen Street (Passe Muraille), the vibrant gay and lesbian com-
munity at the intersection of Church and Wellesley Streets (Buddies),
and the leafy, bourgeois domesticity of the Annex, adjacent to the Uni-
versity of Toronto (Tarragon). But the designation of urban zones like
the Entertainment District, which crosses the southern portion of the
city core, also proposes relationships between theatre and other sites
that are equally persuasive and efficacious. Spatially, there is a vertical
axis of affiliation and a horizontal one, and both have material effect.
There are a number of complications arising from this spatial organi-
zation, however, and, at the risk of engaging in excess list-making,
these become important at different points in this book. Some can be
described succinctly. First, there has been little suburbanization of the-
18 City Stages
atre sites in Toronto, so when it has happened on any significant scale

– as with the Ford Centre in North York – it is of historical interest. Sec-
ond, if there has been little suburbanization of theatre sites, theatre has
still been implicated in the process of suburbanization; indeed, a the-
atre site like that of Passe Muraille depended on suburbanization for
its creation. Third, theatres are an effective index of civic self-fashion-
ing in Toronto, and reflect cultural investments in the ‘downtown’ as a
physical, ideological, and economic space. Fourth, theatre sites operate
in a complex relationship with the downtown economy: at times their
presence reflects dominant economic trends and models, but, at other
times, their presence seems to defy market pressures in interesting
ways.
Other complications require more elaboration. Some performance
sites have, historically, fit uneasily within Toronto’s urban environ-
ment. This requires acknowledgment, even if these sites do not feature
as case studies within my project. The Harbourfront complex of the-
atres is a good example of such unease (as is the Hummingbird Centre,
which I note in chapter 1). The Harbourfront theatres are located on
Queen’s Quay, and, like the Harbourfront area itself, have had an awk-
ward relationship with the theatrical geography of Toronto since the
area’s construction started in the mid-1970s. One might suggest that
the urban history of Harbourfront is actually a history of thirty years
of trying to suture the area into the fabric of downtown, since it was
conceived and (badly) planned entirely by the federal government,
with little local involvement. The performance venues at Harbourfront
are of high quality, but they have historically been expensive to rent
and there has been a perception among theatre practitioners – right or
wrong – that audiences are difficult to attract to the area (Soulpepper’s
recent tenancy at Harbourfront may mitigate this perception some-
what, but even it has moved to new facilities elsewhere downtown).
The fact that its longest-standing tenant is a biennial international the-
atre festival (the du Maurier World Stage) also suggests that Harbour-
front has been more successful in representing itself as a transnational
venue than a local one. Habourfront is undoubtedly an interesting
story, since it illustrates how performance venues that reside within
the urban core may still have difficulty becoming fully integrated into
the theatrical geography of the city (since this relies on more than just
physical location). But it should not distract attention from more mod-
est, individual sites like the St Lawrence Centre, which helped estab-
lish the terms on which the contemporary theatrical geography of
Toronto was founded in the first place, and which continue, subtly, to
articulate changes in its shape.
By extension, some local theatres, while hugely important to the his-
tory of theatre in Toronto, are not necessarily as exemplary in an urban
context as one might first imagine. If one were employing a dramatur-
gical axis, Tarragon would be front and centre in any historiography of
new play development in Toronto. But if one is investigating the way
patterns of theatrical ownership have been established, legitimated,
and negotiated, Tarragon is less exemplary than companies like The-
atre Passe Muraille and, in a different way, Necessary Angel. This does
not devalue Tarragon’s work, it simply illustrates the fact that any the-
atre company is more illustrative of certain historical processes than
others.
Finally, focusing on the urban environment offers a way to make
links between the not-for-profit and commercial theatre sectors in Tor-
onto visible. This is not to say that the distinction between these sectors
no longer matters, whether in legal, economic, administrative, cultural,
or aesthetic terms. But the urban geography of theatre in Toronto is
dependent on the presence of both sectors, and increasingly encour-
ages their affiliation. Canadian theatre scholarship has focused almost
exclusively on the not-for-profit sector, but an urban analysis encour-
ages us to think about ways in which, in an urban context, these sectors
have become mutually constitutive and have interpenetrated.
The chapters that follow, then, are organized into two parts. The
first, ‘Civic Development,’ explores instances when theatre in Toronto
has contributed to the city as a civic space since the late 1960s. Since the
completion of the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts in 1970, civic theatre
buildings have been linchpins of urban development in Toronto. The-
atre has also provided a logic used metaphorically to describe, and
practically to justify, certain types of economic consumption that are
imagined to be civically affirmative. The case studies examined in part
1 – the St Lawrence Centre for the Arts, the Ford Centre for the Arts,
and the Entertainment District – reveal that the dominant civic ideol-
ogy of Toronto in the late 1960s was different from that of today, and
that theatre has been implicated in this change. Put simply, at the time
of the centennial, Toronto saw itself primarily as part of the nation.
Today, Toronto sees itself primarily as part of the globe, and its civic
self-fashioning has changed to reflect this fact. Theatre in Toronto is an
effective index of the city’s attempts to adapt geographically and
ideologically to economic forces over which it has had decreasing
20 City Stages
influence, while attempting to construct a plausible, if not always con-

sistent, civic narrative.
Part 2, ‘The Edifice Complex,’ suggests that if civic ideology in Tor-
onto has come to be theatrically inflected, the urban environment has
not been the preoccupation of large theatres alone. The title of this sec-
tion is taken from a phrase used by John Juliani, who formed the
experimental performance company Savage God in Vancouver and
was a prominent nationalist advocate for Canadian theatre (he infa-
mously challenged Robin Phillips to a duel upon Phillips’s appoint-
ment as artistic director of the Stratford Festival in 1975). Juliani
witheringly described the Canadian high-culture industry of the 1960s
and 1970s as suffering from an ‘edifice complex,’ in that the regional
theatres and other major arts institutions appeared to be more con-
cerned with the construction of grand buildings that testified to their
own importance than with the vagaries of artistic development.25 But
the case studies examined in this section illustrate that the edifice com-
plex afflicted not only the regional theatre network, but also the small
and mid-sized theatre industry that grew up alongside it. Fittingly,
these case studies also illustrate that the condition has been rather
more ‘complex’ than Juliani imagined. Companies like Theatre Passe
Muraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, Necessary Angel, and Bud-
dies in Bad Times show that, in Toronto, the edifice complex has
involved not simply a preoccupation with massive architecture but
also a preoccupation with the difficult juncture between theatre space,
built form, and property in a rapidly changing local real estate market.
Part 1, then, focuses on urban performance networks, in which
larger theatrical sites contribute to the greater organization, under-
standing, and presentation of Toronto itself. Part 2 inverts this focus: it
examines smaller, individual theatrical enterprises, and asks how their
sites are conditioned by the larger urban environment of which these
sites are a part. Thus, theatre contributes to the city, and the city con-
tributes to theatre. The through-line that links both parts, however, is
the way in which the city comes to be conceived and represented as
theatrical, while, at the same time, theatre comes to be conceived and
represented as urban.
As I indicated previously, each chapter is organized around particu-
lar problems arising from the intersection of theatre and the city. Chap-
ter 1, ‘Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the
Urban Development of Toronto’s Downtowns,’ examines the role of
civic theatres in urban development, and, by extension, the way that
this development has been part of the city’s adaptation to economic

change. Chapter 2, ‘Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Econ-
omy in the Entertainment District,’ explores the way in which theatre
functions as both physical and ideological linchpin in the creation of
zones of urban consumption that are imagined to be civically virtuous.
Chapter 3, ‘Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of The-
atre Passe Muraille,’ asks how a performance site – and its affiliated
company – can serve as indices of a changing urban political economy.
Chapter 4, ‘A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto
Workshop Productions,’ considers how a theatrical enterprise can
become a locus for competing systems of spatial value. Chapter 5,
‘Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography of
Theatrical Legitimacy,’ investigates the way in which a spatial calculus
has been incorporated into the determination of theatrical legitimacy
in Toronto, and theorizes certain companies’ responses to a tightening
real estate market.
Theatre has long been practised in Toronto, but the past four decades
are particularly interesting because they constitute the first period in
which Toronto theatre has actively and consistently engaged its urban
environment. Moreover, the city itself has come to see theatre as part of
the civic enterprise in ways that it did not before 1967. As this book
shows, the relationship between theatre and the city in Toronto has
often been fraught and filled with unexpected twists, both great and
small. These complications and surprises, however, are what make the
geography of that relationship so intriguing.
PART ONE
Civic Development
1 Urban National, Suburban
Transnational: Civic Theatres and
the Urban Development of
Toronto’s Downtowns
After nearly two decades of continental economics and the recurring

threat of federal dissolution, it is sometimes hard to imagine just how
celebratory Canadian nationalism was in the late 1960s. Canada com-
memorated its one hundredth birthday in 1967, and the optimism
embodied in projects like Expo 67 seemed to signal that the country
had achieved national maturity and international stature. Centennial
celebrations implied – indeed, shouted – that the Canadian federation
was confident, modern, and secure, and that the able steward for the
national project was a benevolent state. As in many Western countries
in the late 1960s, Canada’s economic expansion was accompanied by
legal liberalization, greater immigration, and an increasingly generous
welfare state. In contrast to many Western countries in the late 1960s,
however, the counter-cultural corollary to this modernization project
did not seek to challenge significantly the supremacy of the national
state. If anything, the centennial best illustrates how the ascendancy of
Canadian cultural nationalism was secured by a kind of benevolent
dirigisme. As one popular commentary observes: ‘The great Canadian
Centennial love-in was definitely a top-down affair: an officially legis-
lated, publicly-sponsored, impeccably choreographed national debu-
tante ball. Compulsory attendance notwithstanding, we loved it
anyway: it was probably the most fun the country ever had doing
something it was told to do.’1
If that kind of national celebration seems unimaginable in Canada
now (leaving aside the question of its desirability), everyday life in
Canada remains equally unimaginable without the physical legacy of
that time. Centennial projects married a familiar practice of pork-barrel
beneficence with an Oedipal rationale for cultural institution-building:
26 Part One: Civic Development
the country would throw off its colonial inheritance (seen as a kind of
infantile disorder) by constructing ‘something for everyone, every-
where in Canada.’ Scores of public schools, ice arenas, and swimming
pools built across the country would contribute to personal develop-
ment, while ‘concert halls, museums, art galleries, libraries and cul-
tural centres’ would, at the local level, redress a perceived lack of
collective cultural development.2 Expo 67 may have been the grandest
national symbol of the centennial, but the many smaller civic building
projects funded in the name of the centenary remain the most endur-
ing and useful local benefit of national patronage.
The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts (SLC) was one of the centen-
nial’s major cultural projects, and was built as Toronto’s first civic the-
atre facility on the eastern edge of the city’s Central Business District
(CBD). The $5.2 million complex housed two performance spaces (an
830-seat auditorium and a 480-seat auditorium) and was the first the-
atre facility built in Toronto specifically for a resident company, one
assembled by a not-for-profit, city-governed agency called the Toronto
Arts Foundation. Construction began in 1967 after demolition of a row
of nineteenth-century buildings on Front Street East, and the SLC
finally opened in 1970 under the directorship of Mavor Moore, a long-
time advocate for theatre in Canada and a prominent supporter of
the SLC project. Four of the five plays staged that first season were
Canadian, a nationalist programming practice for which many theatre
practitioners had agitated, but which was only beginning to gain legit-
imacy among Toronto companies at the time.3
While the construction of the SLC marked the beginning of pro-
found changes in theatrical production in Toronto, 1967 also heralded
the first major victory for Toronto’s nascent urban reform movement.
The Friends of Old City Hall helped prevent the sale and demolition of
the former city hall, thereby inaugurating a powerful political constit-
uency whose focus was the preservation and streetscape-sensitive
development of downtown Toronto. Since 1967 a significant number of
the most fractious political struggles in Toronto have been over what
former mayor John Sewell calls ‘the shape of the city.’4 Well-organized
political coalitions and their allies on city council have consistently
ensured that city form in general, and the downtown in particular, are
central preoccupations of Toronto’s local political imaginary.
The intersection of these events – one theatrical and one urban – is
more than just chronological. If 1967 is the year when urban develop-
ment assumed a prominent position in Toronto’s political conscious-
Civic Theatres and the Development of Toronto’s Downtowns 27
ness, the centennial also marks the last moment that the national state
built cultural institutions in a systematic fashion (and here I mean
‘built’ both administratively and physically, in the sense of creating
what geographers call a built environment). Though the SLC was a
metonym of national cultural development, it was also an act of civic
development, and its construction illustrates how a civic discourse
may help cement a link between theatre-building and urban develop-
ment after the nationalist impulse that first brought them together has
faded. Furthermore, if the meaning of the civic in Toronto after 1967
often signified a struggle over the development of the city’s built envi-
ronment, then it is worth asking if the SLC, as a civic theatre, played a
role in that struggle. Does the ‘civic’ in ‘civic theatre’ signify a theatri-
cal intervention in Toronto’s urban development?
It is also worth asking if the other, more recently developed, civic
theatre in Toronto played a role in the urban development of its neigh-
bourhood, and, if so, how this civic theatre interprets the relationship
between theatre and the city. The North York Performing Arts Centre
(NYPAC) was completed in 1993 in downtown North York, a suburban
city built after the Second World War north of the old city core. Like the
City of Toronto, North York was an autonomous municipality within
the Metropolitan Toronto federation until Metro’s constituent cities
were amalgamated into a single city in 1998. NYPAC was built by
North York at a cost of approximately $30 million, and was renamed
the Ford Centre for the Arts when the Ford Motor Company purchased
the right to name it soon after opening. North York built the Ford
Centre as the artistic component of its downtown development
scheme, through which the municipality attempted to create a city cen-
tre along a four-kilometre stretch of Yonge Street by building public
facilities, shopping centres, condominiums, and commercial office
blocks. The Ford Centre is a much larger facility than the SLC, and
comprises a main theatre auditorium that seats 1800 spectators, a con-
cert hall, an art gallery, and a small black-box theatre.
Though owned by the City of North York, the Ford Centre was oper-
ated by the LivEntertainment Corporation (Livent) until Livent’s bank-
ruptcy in 1998, and was the first home to productions of Sunset
Boulevard, Ragtime, and Showboat that later transferred to Broadway.
Confusingly, the facility was renamed again in 2000 as the Toronto
Centre for the Arts (TCA). Unified Toronto, which assumed ownership
of the complex after amalgamation, chose not to retain the Ford Centre
name once Livent was no longer the resident producing company.5 The
TCA is now marketed as a rental facility, though without a resident

commercial producer it is dark many nights and incurs significant
losses. The TCA may be a civic arts facility, but meeting its high oper-
ating costs was always predicated on its occupation by a major for-
profit theatre producer, and without such a producer the complex has
struggled to find firm economic and artistic footing. My analysis
focuses primarily on the period when the complex functioned as the
Ford Centre for the Arts, since it is in this guise that the facility best
articulates the civic and urban aspirations of a transnational down-
town (although its present situation is not without significance in this
context either).
‘Civic theatre’ means different things at different historical
moments, and comparing the SLC and the Ford Centre as urban devel-
opments reveals various materializations of the designation in Toronto
since 1967. As the title of this chapter implies, the SLC is a form of
national urban development and the Ford Centre a form of transna-
tional suburban development. By this I mean that the SLC is a last
gasp of cultural and urban planning by the Fordist nation-state. But
the SLC is also a civic bridge to the transnational, post-Fordist under-
standing of the relationship between theatre and cities that the Ford
Centre represents (somewhat ironically, given its name). These civic
theatres, then, have helped mediate macro-economic transformation at
the local level through the socially affirmative values they bear, and
the built form they embody. Each centre is an index of how civic the-
atre-building can be used strategically as part of urban core develop-
ment to soften the upheavals that this development may bring or
represent, and to reinscribe the civic ideal of downtown that is dear to
many Torontonians.
Ideologies of Civic Theatre
Civic theatres can provoke the response that theatre and local politics
are not, or should not be, compatible. Denis Johnston, in his analysis of
theatre in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s, argues that the SLC
‘was conceived by civic planners, unlike most Canadian theatres, and
has been cursed with civic politics ever since.’6 The implication that
the SLC was the brainchild of city planners is not altogether histori-
cally accurate, and neither is Johnston’s claim that it was cursed by city
politics. As Johnston himself admits, the SLC was the ‘Holy Grail of
local professional theatre’ during the 1960s.7 Theatre practitioners
were as much in favour of the St Lawrence Centre as city planners

were, and the involvement of city planners in a civic theatre project did
not necessarily mean that their urban concerns were in conflict with
the theatrical desires of the time. Johnston assumes that civic politics
are opposed to and, he implies, taint theatre projects, but this is untrue
both in a broad historical sense and in the specific case of the SLC.
Civic theatres, and cultural institutions generally, have historically
contributed to the civic as a social and urban ideal. These contributions
can be grouped in three ways. First, art’s ‘strong affirmative tendencies
toward reconciliation with the established reality,’ as Herbert Marcuse
puts it, reinforce civic ideals of citizenship within an idealized public
sphere.8 Second, cultural institution-building often affirms the eco-
nomic dominance of capitalist urban development within the city.
Third, theatre-building in Toronto affirms the centrality of the down-
town – as both a physical and imaginary space – in creating a sense of
civic well-being. Together these affiliations create a sense of urban
affluence, where civic theatre-building offers an ideal of civic accord
that compensates for the anxieties of economic change.
Stacy Wolf points out that the affiliation of theatre with the civic has
not usually been dissonant in Western societies. In her perceptive anal-
ysis of the civic arts centre in Madison, Wisconsin, Wolf argues that
cultural institution-building plays an important ideological role in cre-
ating affirmative civic ideals of citizenship, whether or not people
actually attend the theatre: ‘Rather than constituting a daily social
practice for most people, “the arts” remain in the realm of values. Still,
they carry an ethical force, not unlike religion or moral goodness. “The
arts,” a general, undifferentiated, seemingly unpoliticized notion, are
assumed to be significant and positive. Art, in theory, creates good citi-
zens.’9 Wolf cites Rosalyn Deutsche’s observation that cultural produc-
tion frequently buttresses the civilizing impulse of modern urban
development: ‘The presence of “the aesthetic” – whether embodied in
artworks, architectural style, urban design, or museums – helps give
redevelopment democratic legitimacy, since, like “the public,” “art”
often connotes universality openness, inclusion.’10 Examples of this
occur repeatedly in Western theatre history; for example, the city
Dionysia – a type of civic performance – is often at the core of historical
narratives about Western performance. Carlson argues that Western
theatre practice and cities have frequently constituted a mutually legit-
imating symbolic economy (particularly in the Middle Ages and the
early Renaissance), or have intersected as oppositional spaces through
which civil society might be formed (particularly in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries).11
Urban theorists have also been concerned with how cultural produc-
tion and urbanization might be linked to create good citizens, some-
thing that is not surprising considering these theorists emerge from an
intellectual tradition that frequently considers urbanization a civilizing
force in itself. H.D.F. Kitto, whose work has been studied within both
theatre and urban studies, argues that the Greek polis exemplifies a civ-
ilized social formation because it attempted to be ‘an active, formative
thing, training the minds and characters of the citizens’ through their
participation in an urban public sphere. The city, Kitto claims, has been
more important as an ideal of ‘common cultural life’ than as a ‘political
unit,’ and ‘the drama’ played a crucial role in establishing the notion
that ‘the polis [was] open to all.’12 Henri Pirenne suggests that cities
and cultural products together helped create an ideal of social mobility
in late medieval Europe, one that would later inform the egalitarian
principles of liberal democracy. He argues that cultural production was
the corollary to European urbanization; the development of cultural
products helped create an urban laity where ‘the burgher was initiated
... long before the noble.’13 Aesthetic and civic discourses have often
been mutually affirmative, and so it is necessary to be sceptical of
claims, implicit or explicit, that civic politics taint theatre projects. On
the contrary, theatre and the arts have helped form the social ideals that
civic politics promote more often than not.
While the affiliation of arts projects and cities has helped create affir-
mative ideals of citizenship, this affiliation may also help create a
chauvinistic sense of the civic that is economically affirmative. Urban
sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch advance the concept of
‘place patriotism’ to explain this process. They argue that place patrio-
tism occurs when property-value inflation is linked with cultural insti-
tution-building to create sentiments of local well-being. Logan and
Molotch make a compelling case for the building of cultural institu-
tions in the city as part of an urban ‘growth coalition’ of capitalists and
their allies in city governments. In their formulation, cultural institu-
tions marshal localist sentiments in favour of projects that can then be
used as levers for private capital investment in the areas surrounding
them:
The growth machine avidly supports whatever cultural institutions can

play a role in building locality. Always ready to oppose social and political
developments contrary to their interests ... rentiers and their associates

encourage activities that will connect feelings of community ... to the goal of
local growth ... We do not mean to suggest that the only source of civic pride
is the desire to collect rents; certainly the cultural pride of tribal groups pre-
dates growth machines. Nevertheless, the growth machine coalition mobi-
lizes these cultural motivations, legitimizes them, and channels them into
activities that are consistent with growth goals.14
Logan and Molotch note that arts centres were used as ‘development
leverage’ during the 1980s in downtown Miami, Tampa, and Dallas, and
cite a Dallas newspaper comment that ‘[t]he feeling persists that the arts
have been appropriated here primarily to sell massive real estate devel-
opment.’15 One could make the same statement about the Ford Centre in
Toronto, the 42nd Street development in New York City, and the State
Street development in Chicago. Logan and Molotch argue that the
encouragement of place patriotism links arts projects with sentiments of
civic well-being, while simultaneously enriching private developers
and salving the anxieties provoked by economic change.16
If Logan and Molotch allow us to see how arts projects are inserted
into an urban cash economy, they also point to (but do not expand on)
the way that those projects might contribute to a sense of local well-
being. In Toronto, place patriotism and civic theatres meet downtown.
Toronto’s civic theatres help define and entrench capitalist land-use
areas that are called downtowns and their presence becomes evidence
of an ontological ‘downtown-ness’ that pleases the local urban subject.
This practice is not confined to theatre spaces – it is relevant to the
function of cultural institutions in downtown redevelopment in gen-
eral – but civic theatres are particularly useful from an urban planning
and security perspective, since, unlike art galleries or museums, they
tend to attract affluent citizens to an area at night.
Downtown may be an area where legitimate economic transactions
take place (and illegitimate economic transactions are nervously
accommodated), but it is also an ideal to which many Torontonians are
fiercely dedicated. For proof of this attachment, one need only look to
the contemporary history of urban activism in Toronto, much of which
has been focused on the downtown core. An early victory was stop-
ping the extension of the Spadina Expressway through old neighbour-
hoods in Toronto’s core. A more recent example is the vocal opposition
by many residents of the former City of Toronto to the provincial gov-
ernment’s amalgamation of the metropolitan federation into a unified
municipal government in 1998. Many downtown residents feared that

the suburban cities would collectively impose more market-led plan-
ning regulations after amalgamation, effectively eliminating the ideal
and form of downtown to which many Torontonians subscribed.17 The
fight was undoubtedly over who would control, in John Sewell’s
phrase, ‘the shape of the city.’18
An allegiance to downtown should not, however, be viewed strictly
as the preserve of residents of the former City of Toronto. Downtown
North York was built by the City of North York to achieve the sense of
civic distinctiveness that seemed to be missing as a result of its low-
density, post–Second World War suburban planning. North York was
Toronto’s second city in terms of population, but, in terms of urban
planning, was practically indistinguishable from Scarborough and
Etobicoke, the other large suburban communities that make up Tor-
onto. North York thought that building a downtown would differenti-
ate it from Toronto’s other suburbs and give the city a distinct civic
identity. For many years North York had promoted itself as ‘the city
with a heart,’ and the construction of a downtown gave an advertising
slogan physical and sentimental form. North York could point to its
downtown as evidence of its civic identity and self-confidence.
Throughout Toronto, then, downtowns are sites where the invest-
ment of capital produces both money value and sentimental value that
exceed the boundaries of downtown. The benefits of downtown invest-
ment accrue beyond its borders and beyond any purely cash measure.
But the ways in which theatre became involved in such civic invest-
ment were historically specific. For the SLC, the major impetus came
from a then small and financially precarious profession of local theatre
practitioners, and it is germane that the SLC was proposed and built
during a liminal period in Toronto’s professional theatre economy. For
the Ford Centre, the major impetus was as much urban as it was cul-
tural; it was conceived as part of North York’s checklist of civic, com-
mercial, and artistic developments through which the City hoped to
inscribe an uninspiring stretch of Yonge Street with the economic and
symbolic resonances of a downtown. In the cases of both civic theatres,
however, theatrical and urban motives proved amenable to each other.
The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts
The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts was adopted as the City of Tor-
onto’s official centennial project, and was conceived on a much larger
scale than what was finally built. The complex was originally planned
as a community centre that would not only incorporate larger audito-
ria than were actually constructed, but also include meeting spaces for
community groups, space for ‘town hall’ gatherings, and extensive
facilities for technical theatre production. It was one of many such
projects across Canada: other theatre complexes built with centennial
money and styled in the poured-concrete vernacular of Brutalist archi-
tecture include the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg (1969) and
the National Arts Centre in Ottawa (1970).19 The SLC was bound up
with centralized national macro-economic planning – centennial
projects were perhaps the most organized and concentrated extension
of the welfare state through physical form that Canada has seen.
It is important to emphasize that the welfare state should not be seen
as antithetical to capitalism, but, rather, as the means through which
public and private capital investment is coordinated at the local level.
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel chart the relationship between
increasing levels of welfare-state provision and rapid economic growth
among industrialized countries during the 1960s and 1970s, and their
data show that Canada was no different in this regard.20 As an element
of welfare-state provision, the SLC was part of the national state’s
desire to fuel economic growth through a country-wide building pro-
gram. But the SLC also illustrates how the sentimental overtures of
centennial projects resonated locally: centennial projects linked
national patriotism to local place patriotism. A civic theatre be-
queathed by the nation-state implies that cultural institution-building
plays an important role in celebrating that nation. The fulfilment of
this role by cultural institutions is also predicated on these institutions
being granted in the name of the local community, binding national
celebration to civic boosterism through state investment.
Plans for the SLC, however, were greeted with enormous political
and public scepticism. Johnston notes:
As debates raged and cost estimates rose ... the scope of the enterprise was
steadily whittled down to overcome vehement political opposition at City
Hall. In fact, the Centre had become a political football: it was a major issue
in two successive mayoralty campaigns, was subjected to innumerable revi-
sions, and was cancelled entirely at least twice. By 1967, with no agreement
in sight, the St Lawrence Centre had become (to many Torontonians) a sym-
bol of the city’s short-sighted stinginess in cultural matters, especially when
compared to Montreal’s glorious Expo.21
Debate over the SLC frequently split along lines that had become well-
defined through public responses to the Massey Commission Report
in 1951: a high-minded call for state patronage and cultural progress,
contrasted with a denunciation of perceived social elites.22 In fact, it
was Toronto’s artistic elite, led by Toronto Arts Foundation director
Mavor Moore, that persuaded the City to push through the SLC
project later in 1967; by that point many members of city council were
embarrassed at the possibility of Toronto’s civic undertaking being left
out of the centennial building boom, and Moore had managed to
recruit some private funding for the project. The final result, though,
was significantly watered down, and, at a cost of $5.2 million was ‘far
less than other centennial projects of comparable stature.’23 The meet-
ing space for community groups was eliminated entirely, along with
the technical facilities. The only remnants of the original plan were two
multipurpose auditoria, both of which, when opened in 1970, turned
out to be concrete boxes whose poor sightlines and dismal acoustics
barely acknowledged that performance was their intended use.
Toronto’s theatre professionals, however, had won a victory by per-
suading a reluctant city that cultural institution-building was worthy
of national and civic sponsorship. By being built downtown, the SLC
provided visible evidence that the professional theatre industry in Tor-
onto occupied a prominent place in the city’s urban consciousness,
and made the arts a significant concern of the municipal state in Tor-
onto for the first time (though the SLC’s civic alliance with that state
also unwittingly symbolized a cultural coziness against which new,
smaller companies would later define themselves). This embodiment
of theatrical and municipal confidence was particularly important con-
sidering the precarious economic condition of much of the profes-
sional and semi-professional – by which I mean waged and part-
waged – theatre in Toronto in the mid- to late 1960s. Toronto’s profes-
sional and semi-professional theatre industry through most of the
1960s could be divided into three broad groups: the commercial sector,
dominated by Broadway and West End touring shows at the Royal
Alexandra Theatre and the O’Keefe Centre; the ‘serious drama’ stock
companies, the most prominent of which were the Crest Theatre, Red
Barn Theatre, and the Canadian Players; and, finally, a tiny and eco-
nomically (if not artistically) marginal small-theatre sector that mostly
consisted of one company, the leftist Toronto Workshop Productions.
Because of its emphasis on touring shows, the commercial sector
employed relatively few local theatre practitioners, and the size of the
small-theatre sector at this time was simply too modest to provide

much work.
This left the stock companies to claim the mantle of ‘Toronto theatre,’
if for no other reason than they provided local practitioners with the
most employment and best embodied an Arnoldian ideal of theatre
practice that dominated Toronto’s aspirant high culture at the time: the
presentation and celebration of the theatrical touchstones of Western
cultural development. But the case of the Crest Theatre illustrates how
this sector was faltering in the mid-1960s. The Crest was the leading
stock company in Toronto during the 1950s and for much of the 1960s,
mandated to ‘provide repertory theatre in Toronto comparable with
the best of British repertory companies.’24 The Crest’s mandate, then,
was both high cultural in its aims and derivative in its repertoire, and
though it produced more plays than any other local company in the
1950s and 1960s, its work was increasingly seen as dramaturgically
stale and unimaginatively staged. Nathan Cohen, the influential Tor-
onto Star newspaper theatre critic, waged a lengthy campaign against
what he believed to be the Crest’s smug mediocrity; Cohen saw the
work of George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Productions, with its
roots in agit-prop and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, as chart-
ing a much more promising path for theatre in Toronto. Even the Can-
ada Council, the national foundation that had been established by
Louis St Laurent’s Liberal government in 1957 to fund the type of high
culture that the Crest represented, called the Crest’s work ‘indifferent’
and withdrew its subsidy in 1964.25 The company lurched along for
two more seasons, merged with the Canadian Players in 1966, and
finally collapsed, debt-ridden, before the amalgamated company pro-
duced a single show. Apart from a few shows presented by Theatre
Toronto, a company formed out of the ashes of Canadian Crest Players,
the stock sector in Toronto was exhausted by 1966. The stock compa-
nies’ artists, however, were still strong local advocates for professional
theatre, and the two directors of the Toronto Arts Foundation, Mavor
Moore and Leon Major, were Crest veterans. The SLC provided an
opportunity to assume the mantle of high culture in Toronto, but under
the new rubric of a civic theatre company.
However grudging the final result was politically and physically, the
SLC provided two badly needed performance spaces downtown and a
home for a new theatre company that would take up the gauntlet of
‘mainstream’ drama from the stock companies. The theatrical motives
behind the SLC also engendered a shift in the relationship between
high culture, the national state, and the municipal state in Toronto: the
SLC allied one important stream of Toronto’s professional theatre
industry much closer with the municipal state than it had been previ-
ously. The changes to the built form of the SLC through the planning
process indicate that, in the creation of Toronto’s civic centre, theatre
space was privileged over space for community groups. One possible
explanation for this is that the theatre spaces were not anticipated by
the municipal government to be politically dissonant, whereas the
community-use space could easily be just that. Toronto’s urban reform
movement was gaining ground by organizing neighbourhood groups
to oppose the actions of the municipal government at the time the SLC
was being planned, and it is not surprising that, given the political
anger directed at city politicians, the municipal state would be reluc-
tant – consciously or unconsciously – to extend civic sponsorship to
building space that could be used to organize against it. The theatre
spaces, by contrast, posed no such threat, and this is best illustrated by
the fact that the smaller auditorium was named the ‘Town Hall.’ Its
name demonstrated that theatre space was conceived as civically affir-
mative space.
The SLC also signalled a shift in the way that different state apparati
in Canada structured their patronage of high culture. If the Canada
Council grew impatient with the artistic work of the Crest, the Council
still had an institutional desire to fill Toronto’s ‘regional theatre’ quota
(the Canada Council has historically provided funding to larger com-
panies that it considers to have an appeal beyond their immediate
locality). Toronto lacked a regional theatre until the Toronto Arts Foun-
dation formed its company, and the creation of a civic company
backed financially by the city lent the project an institutional legiti-
macy that its artistic predecessors lacked. Moreover, the abandonment
of a nationalist programming philosophy after the first season symbol-
ically weakened the artistic connection between the civic theatre and
the nation-state.26 Inching towards the civic did not necessarily mean
that theatre was wholly embraced by the municipal state – the city
government, responsible for the Foundation’s deficits, divested itself
of the production company and retained control over the SLC as a
physical plant – but even in its ambivalence towards the civic theatre
project, the implications of the theatrical and urban form of the civic
theatre company increasingly registered within a municipal context.27
Insofar as that municipal context meant a changing downtown, the
built form of the SLC straddled the national and the local, but was
more important in stressing the importance of the civic at a time when

downtown Toronto was starting to shed its Fordist features. The part
of downtown immediately adjacent to the SLC illustrates this transfor-
mation best. The SLC is located at the southeastern corner of Front
Street and Scott Street on the eastern border of Toronto’s financial dis-
trict, an area stretching from Front Street north to Queen Street, and
from Simcoe Street east to Scott Street. The SLC was built at the same
time as a major development boom in the district, when, according to
Gad, a growing property-development industry financed intensive
skyscraper-building in the city core on a scale previously unknown.28
Extrapolating Metropolitan Toronto employment data, Gad argues
that it was only in the 1960s that the downtown business core actually
became a financial district:
In 1951 the present financial district was still the general office district of the
metropolitan area. Soon afterwards, however, various offices began to relo-
cate, including several life insurance company head offices, the offices of
architects, consulting engineers, advertising agencies, publishers, the head
and sales offices of manufacturing companies, and others. Only at this stage
did the label ‘financial district’ become justified. Office employment figures
for 1970 and 1989 show a continuing trend toward specialization. Jobs in the
finance, insurance, and real estate group of industries and in business ser-
vices have more than doubled in the financial district and have significantly
increased their shares of employment.29
Gad claims that ‘[t]his small part of Toronto is undoubtedly the focal
point of the Canadian financial system,’ and notes that, of the one hun-
dred largest financial institutions listed by the Financial Post in 1989,
thirty-nine had their head or executive offices in the financial district
(and eleven more had their head offices somewhere in Toronto). These
financial institutions include ‘the majority of Canada’s chartered
banks, foreign banks, and trust companies.’30 The dominance of finan-
cial services and real estate development contrasts with the subordi-
nance of manufacturing companies: of the thirty-nine head offices in
the financial district in 1989, only three were in manufacturing-based
industries, and two have since left.31
The urban corollary to the financial district’s development is the
stretch of small, upmarket retail shops along Front Street that begins at
Scott Street and ends, two blocks east, at the St Lawrence Market. This
part of Front Street, which was redeveloped in the 1970s, can be seen as
the local compensation for the increasingly transnational development

next door. The SLC, in terms of its built form and the audiences it
attracts, helped smooth the neighbourhood’s transition from one
where mercantile wholesalers supplied regional businesses to one
where retailing was geared to upscale shoppers and sidewalk flâneurs
(many of whom worked in the towers next door). As a facility, the SLC
is wedged into a lot at the corner of Front and Scott Streets. Architec-
ture critic Patricia McHugh comments that the complex is in the style
of ‘[a]rchitectural Brutalism, with musty-coloured, right-out-of-the-
mold concrete slabs weightily pronouncing a message of 1960s avant-
garde vigour.’32 Its form is contextually contrapuntal: neighbouring
buildings are rehabilitated Renaissance Revival commercial buildings
constructed in the 1870s, and their architecture emphasizes mercantile
exchange through large display windows, strong vertical lines, and
fine decorative embellishment. They are the confident physical articu-
lation of late-nineteenth-century petty-bourgeois capitalism in Tor-
onto. The concrete exterior of the SLC, however, fits within the
architectural vernacular of the post–Second World War Canadian wel-
fare state. But unlike other examples of Brutalism in Toronto – such as
the isolated and forbidding John Robarts Library at the University of
Toronto – the SLC is not indifferent to it surroundings. The site demol-
ished to allow for the SLC was small, and so the Centre squeezes up
against its neighbours and opens directly onto Front Street. The SLC
only offers a minimal amount of parking in a privately operated lot
behind the building, and the public entrance to the Centre is from the
sidewalk on Front Street. Though constructed of massive materials, the
SLC eschews the stereotypical modernist disdain for the streetscape
and maintains both a contrapuntal and complementary relationship to
its surroundings.
The SLC and Front Street articulate the change from Fordist to flexi-
ble-accumulation capitalism through built form. If much of the down-
town core was devoted to offices during the 1950s and 1960s, Front
Street provided the wholesale goods that the nearby offices distributed
or required. Front Street started to decline as a wholesaling area when
the offices on the street started to disappear, and the public sector’s
investment helped generate use value by encouraging a new kind of
petty-bourgeois consumption (the SLC has always housed theatre
companies that attract affluent audiences – ticket prices for its current
tenant, Canadian Stage Company, are mostly in the $60–$70 range at
the time of writing). Five addresses were demolished to make way for
construction. These housed a grocery wholesaler, a tea and coffee mer-

chant, a textile supplier, an asbestos installer, and a business furniture
manufacturer. None of these business categories is represented in the
Central Business District anymore; the SLC was constructed as many
of these types of companies vacated the financial core.
The SLC was, and remains, a city-owned theatre complex housing a
not-for-profit theatre company, but it smoothed the transition from a
Fordist to post-Fordist urban economy by helping to train the populace
for a new type of commodity consumption. The Centre helped estab-
lish the pattern of affluent, individual consumption that transformed
Front Street into a strip of artisanal, boutique, and recreational shop-
ping, thereby ensuring the presence of flâneurs in the central business
district as it evolved first into a truly national, and then into an interna-
tional, financial district. The attraction of such people was key, since
their activities were consumption-driven and theatrically analogous:
flâneurs represent a highly desirable type of affluent social activity in
the maintenance of vibrant city districts, since they both consume and
spectate, something akin to what a theatre-goer does.
The SLC also responded to the neighbourhood’s changing use
through modifications to its own built form. The City of Toronto closed
the SLC in 1981 for major renovations and reopened it two years later
after a $5.8 million refurbishment. The Centre had suffered from the
familiar problems of multipurpose auditoria built in the 1960s: a spar-
tan, concrete lobby and auditorium, a marked architectural division
between audience and stage in the main theatre, and poor acoustics
and sightlines. But the renovations reveal the SLC’s increasing antici-
pation of an urban economy that linked local and transnational con-
sumption. The façade of the building was opened up somewhat to
Front Street, with larger display windows punched through the con-
crete that could feature promotional materials for the resident theatre
company, and that better incorporated the SLC into the commercial
landscape of the street (a renovation in 1999 dispensed with opaque
exterior walls altogether in favour of a solid glass façade, further dis-
mantling barriers between the Centre and its neighbourhood).33 The
renovated lobby, with its cream-coloured walls, wood trim, brass rails,
and potted plants, now resembles the interior of an early-1980s trans-
national hotel such as a Hilton or a Sheraton. The SLC’s lobby suggests
that renovations were undertaken for an urban subject who is comfort-
able with both the locality of Front Street and the transience of a tran-
snational hotel chain. Furthermore, the shops on Front Street are
beginning to mix the local with the transnational: Starbucks and Block-
buster Video have opened outlets amid Front Street’s boutiques and
outdoor-equipment suppliers. The SLC and Front Street are now part
of a financial and service-sector economy that attempts to link local
and transnational political and cultural economies seamlessly.
This link, however, is not as easily made as Front Street’s affluent
streetscape implies, and the SLC’s marquee can sometimes draw these
tensions sharply into relief: when the Canadian Stage Company pro-
duced Stephen Sondheim’s Passion in 1997 on the main stage, the Jane
Mallet Theatre (as the Town Hall was renamed in 1985) hosted a public
forum on the effects of neo-liberal economics entitled ‘Workers’ Rights:
How Low Can Standards Go?’ The affluent civic theatre, which pro-
duces an increasingly transnational repertoire, coexists with a political
forum trying to deal with the economic effects of transnationalism, in
whose name neo-liberal governments in Canada have dismantled pro-
tections that were at the heart of the post-war Canadian welfare state.
The SLC implies that it is a space in which tensions between these two
events can be accommodated. But the civic reconciliation it attempts
effaces the resident theatre company’s own participation in a transna-
tional theatre economy through which Sondheim circulates, and takes
place against the urban backdrop of a solid wall of banking towers,
whose occupants have been some of the most powerful advocates for
transnationalism. The SLC offers the hope of a sentimental accord
that the transnational economy does not. The realization of this con-
sensus, however, is at best a daunting challenge, and at worst a naive
aspiration.
The Ford Centre for the Arts
The Ford Centre, in contrast, has no anxieties about transnationalism.

It articulates the relationship between economic investment, urban
form, and theatre practice very differently from the SLC: if the SLC
nervously attempts to bridge the Fordist and post-Fordist city, the
Ford Centre culturally embraces an urban capitalism based on inter-
national flexible accumulation. The Ford Centre may have been the
cultural component of a massive downtown creation (and not re-
development, or renewal) scheme for North York. It may also have
been funded solely by the City of North York. But the profits generated
by the Ford Centre were always intended to accrue to a transnational
theatrical production company. As with the SLC, imperatives of urban
and cultural development intersected in the construction of the Ford

Centre, but the facility is a transnational complex in both motivation
and result.
Of the suburbs within the former Metropolitan Toronto, North York
emerged as the second city in the metropolitan federation, in terms of
both population (563,000) and economic activity.34 In 1981 the city
began to plan the creation of a downtown on Yonge Street between
Sheppard and Finch Avenues, in an attempt to transform the geo-
graphic centre of the city into its economic and symbolic heart. Urban
analyst Peter Gorrie describes the neighbourhood before its develop-
ment as downtown North York: ‘The area remained little more than a
local shopping street despite an influx of hundreds of thousands of
people ... The newcomers did not consider it an attraction, or the centre
of their community. Most worked elsewhere and travelled to down-
town Toronto or the growing number of regional malls for shopping
and entertainment.’35 A massive development project knitted together
new office construction, a subway station, city hall, central public
library, board of education offices, aquatics centre, skating rink, shop-
ping mall, and art gallery around a central square on Yonge Street. The
development also included a new performing arts centre. As Bob Yuill,
the North York controller, said at the time, ‘If we’re going to be a city
like we say we are, we’ve got to get some culture out here.’36
Gorrie characterizes this frenzy of building, begun in 1984 and
largely completed in 1993, as a ‘high-speed attempt to re-establish the
basic physique of the city.’37 This is an intriguing comment because a
city cannot ‘re-establish’ an urban form that it never assumed in the
first place; so downtown North York’s attempt to instal an older urban
pattern should be seen as civically nostalgic rather than rehabilitative.
Furthermore, by stating that there is a ‘basic physique of the city,’ Gor-
rie denotes the way in which North York invoked a supposedly
agreed-upon urban ideal, for which the old City of Toronto served as a
local model. By centralizing a checklist of civic, commercial, and cul-
tural projects, North York hoped to inscribe an urban area with the eco-
nomic and sentimental resonances of downtown that the older city
core privileged.
The Ford Centre also illustrates a change in the relationship between
the state and capital between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. By the
time the Ford Centre was built, local growth had largely ceased to be a
concern of national economic development. Growth had become,
instead, an issue largely of municipal development. There are several
reasons for this. The federal government shed its stake in the shape of
Canadian cities when it abolished the Ministry of State for Urban
Affairs in 1979, and though there have been more recent attempts to re-
establish national participation in urban affairs, these moves have
been tentative at best (and have largely been driven by pressures from
the cities themselves, rather than initiated at a national level). At the
same time, the burgeoning wealth of the cities that made up Metropol-
itan Toronto made sole funding by local government of large-scale eco-
nomic development increasingly possible during the 1980s. Moreover,
if the Canadian welfare state once sought to provide social benefits on
a universal basis (however haphazardly), the election of a Conserva-
tive federal government in 1984 signalled the end of universalism as a
state ideal and severed the link between local growth and national eco-
nomic planning. The 1989 Free Trade Agreement between Canada and
the United States, and the 1992 North American Free Trade Agree-
ment, which included Mexico, made such planning nearly impossible.
Finally, as Saskia Sassen points out, global migrations of capital, com-
modities, and people are increasingly focused on urban, not national,
destinations.38 In the hope of capturing capital investment (and indi-
vidual capitalists), Canadian cities now have little choice but to pro-
vide elaborate infrastructure out of local funds, infrastructure that
once would have been provided mostly by provincial or federal gov-
ernments.
North York did not simply finance the Ford Centre through the
municipal tax base, as Canadian cities normally funded infrastructure
projects during the Fordist period.39 Instead, the City largely financed
the Ford Centre through a complex land deal that depended on the
increasing value of the area’s commercial real estate market. When the
Conservative provincial government of Bill Davis decided to build a
domed sports stadium (later named SkyDome) in the old downtown
south of Front Street West, Mel Lastman, then mayor of North York (a
Conservative and subsequent mayor of the amalgamated Toronto),
extracted a parcel of provincial land next to North York city hall in
1985 as his political price for the government’s failure to build the sta-
dium in North York. This parcel of land was the northwest corner of a
larger, provincially owned block at 5000 Yonge Street, and it was here
that the City of North York proposed to build a new arts centre. The
portion of land the Province kept, however, was potentially more valu-
able than the one given to the City; unlike the North York plot, it bor-
dered Yonge Street and so would fetch a higher price from private
developers if sold for commercial office development. The Province

looked like the clear winner in this arrangement: it kept the most valu-
able piece of real estate, while appearing generous to an important
local politician, Lastman. The ostensible benefit for North York,
though, was that its site retained building density rights that the pro-
posed arts centre, which would only be a few storeys high, would not
use. These density rights could then be sold to any developers of the
Yonge Street plot, who could, in turn, build taller towers than other-
wise would have been permitted under the City’s official plan. The
more inflated the local commercial property market became, the more
these rights were worth, and the City of North York initially valued
them at $12 million, and later at $17 million. The City intended to use
this development income to pay for the proposed arts centre, the cost
of which had first been estimated at $16 million.
The City of North York got its money, though not quite in the way it
anticipated. A new, Liberal provincial government was elected shortly
after the land deal was brokered. The new government, however, was
not interested in joint sales to developers that involved both provincial
land and municipal density rights. Instead, it wanted to have the abil-
ity to develop 5000 Yonge Street on its own, and as a complete package
– land plus increased density rights. As a result, the Province pur-
chased North York’s surplus density rights for itself, and did so at their
then market value: $17 million.
The funding of the arts centre relied, therefore, on the increasing
value of the local commercial real estate market. There was little
chance of it being built without this development revenue, since the
City was, arguably, engaged in a financial shell game to make the
project politically palatable and consistent with the fiscal image it
wanted to promote of itself. Although the City of North York was a rel-
atively wealthy municipality, the political climate had become very
sensitive about expenditure from the property tax base. Lastman, fur-
thermore, encouraged the idea that North York could be both parsimo-
nious with the City treasury but beneficent with civic projects. The key,
then, was to spend municipal money, but make it appear as though no
cost accrued to the City. This became particularly important for the arts
centre, a controversial project whose estimated cost was rising rapidly
(the project’s final budget turned out to be $48 million, four times the
initial estimate). Lastman gloated that the arts centre would not cost
North York a penny: ‘Anybody can go out and build things that cost
millions of dollars, but to do it without spending taxpayer’s money is
something else again.’40 This claim was plausible only because the City
had kept the proceeds from the density sale in a separate, interest-
bearing account, and had not counted them as part of general munici-
pal revenue. It was also an economic fiction – these proceeds undoubt-
edly belonged to the people of North York and were being spent
without having been accounted for financially or politically. And it
conveniently elided the fact that the whole scheme had been made
possible in the first place through a provincial land donation and by
spending provincial taxpayers’ money – which included contributions
from the residents of North York – at commercially determined rates.41
Funding a multi-million-dollar arts project through ear-marked
development revenues usefully mystified the sponsorship of cultural
institution-building. It not only appeared as though the complex were
being built with free money, it also made the terms on which the local
population could claim symbolic ownership of the civic theatre more
problematic. Though North York legally owned the Ford Centre, the
City of North York played no direct role in overseeing its financial
administration, and the facility’s elaborate design specifications were
largely dictated by Livent, which had been awarded its management
contract. Like the SLC, the Ford Centre was owned by the City. Unlike
the SLC, though, the Ford Centre was financed entirely by the City,
which then contracted its operation to a transnational theatre produc-
tion company that subsequently operated Ford Centres in Vancouver,
New York, and Chicago. It is not hard to imagine the appeal of the
Ford Centre to Livent: it avoided the substantial costs of building a
theatre, and, in return for a management fee to the City of North York,
it gained a rent-free home for its productions and the income gener-
ated by rental fees for the Centre’s venues. Thus, the construction of
the Ford Centre not only made civic cultural institution-building
dependent on rising commercial property values (while obfuscating
the terms of state sponsorship), the facility also served as a medium
through which North York paid an indirect subsidy to a transnational,
for-profit theatre production company. This suggests that civic theatre-
building had become preferable, and perhaps only permissible, when
the municipal state effaced the terms of its own participation in the
sponsorship process, or effectively subsidized the costs of a for-profit
company to enable the theatre’s construction.
As a for-profit enterprise, Livent sat outside the institutional net-
work of national, provincial, and municipal arts agencies that the
SLC’s tenants always have. This institutional network, in which many
Toronto not-for-profit theatres reside, includes the federal Ministry of

National Heritage, the provincial culture department, and funding
bodies like the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Tor-
onto Arts Council.42 Different state apparati were more interested in
the Ford Centre as a lure for American tourists: television advertise-
ments about Toronto’s ‘arts scene’ aired in Chicago in the late 1990s
featured the Ford Centre prominently; notably, none of Toronto’s not-
for-profit theatre companies was represented, in spite of the fact that
they account for a large part of the city’s theatre scene. Whereas the
SLC is largely adjunct to urban capital formation – it buttresses invest-
ment in an urban area but generates no surplus value itself – the Ford
Centre was designed to create surplus value within itself, and reveals
the city’s role in supporting transnational capital flows. A civic theatre
like the Ford Centre may have been a sign of urban affluence, but, inso-
far as it was built by the municipal state, it was always intended to be
governed by a private corporation that generated surplus value
through theatrical commodities that circulated internationally.
The Ford Centre is a multi-level structure that occupies the southern
edge of North York’s downtown core, set far back from Yonge Street
and surrounded by a large parking lot. If one looks at the Ford Centre
from Yonge Street, the building serves as a giant billboard, with much
of its exterior surface intended to be devoted to large-scale advertising
of the show that is in performance. There is a small electronic marquee
over the front entrance that flashes messages about the show in perfor-
mance, but it is illegible from the street. The marquee is a nostalgic
architectural reference, albeit a high-tech one, but its urban function is
uncertain because it does not acknowledge the streetscape. Viewing
the Ford Centre from Yonge Street, the dominant image is one of cor-
porate logos surrounded by automobiles: when Ragtime played at the
Ford Centre, there was an eerie continuity between the Ragtime bill-
boards (with their unintentionally acontextual image of the Statue of
Liberty’s torch furled in the stars and stripes), the Ford logo over the
entrance, and the cars surrounding the complex. From the street, the
only fragmentary object was the theatre building itself. Its skin punctu-
ated by corporate logos, the Ford Centre’s self-advertisement fractured
a holistic view of the theatre building (and this view has become even
more fractured since the belated completion of the Aegon Place towers
at 5000 Yonge Street in 2004, which partially obscure the view of the
arts centre from Yonge Street). The civic theatre could not contribute to
the traditional conception of downtown that North York wanted to
invoke: an urban space of related but relatively autonomous urban

forms. Here urban forms existed only insofar as they referred to the
transnational theatre commodity (and, ultimately, only insofar as they
physically and symbolically took a backseat to the offices of one of the
world’s largest insurance companies).
In spite of North York’s attempt to mimic an older ideal of down-
town, the city still privileges trips into its core by car. As Filion demon-
strates, ample parking and easy road access mean that North York is
particularly welcoming to trips by car, and a boulevard directly to the
Ford Centre’s entrance encourages cars to drive to the door to deposit
passengers.43 The Ford Centre not only fails to bring people onto the
sidewalk, it makes them less likely to become flâneurs by providing
even more parking space in downtown North York, and by sitting
back so deeply from the Yonge Street sidewalk.
The Ford Centre can be approached without a car, but the most
agreeable way to gain access on foot, whether from the sidewalk or via
public transit, means travelling through private commercial space.
Insofar as it permits access by flâneurs, this access privatizes their con-
sumption and spectating to a much greater degree than accessing the
SLC does. Being a flâneur on Front Street involves negotiating both pri-
vate and public spaces. The Front Street flâneur may gaze at and enter
private shops, but does so from the public street. The presence of pub-
lic street space is part of what makes being a flâneur pleasurable: one
looks at displays, one is on display, and consumption is encouraged
but not mandated – the public street has a social value above and
beyond its role in assisting consumption. The best pedestrian access to
the Ford Centre, in contrast, allows little recourse to public space. In
order to get from the North York Centre subway station to the Ford
Centre, one must travel through the City Centre. Though its name
implies public space, the North York City Centre is, in fact, a privately
owned and operated shopping mall. This mall provides the easiest
access to most municipal buildings in North York, including the city
hall and the main public library, whose entrances open into the mall as
though they were any other retail store.
The North York City Centre encourages citizens to engage civic
space and private commercial space as though they were transposable,
and this transposability extends transnationally.44 Whether shopping
or going to the theatre, one moves through a retail centre that is domi-
nated by ‘the same chain stores and franchises found in any suburban
mall.’45 Even when reaching the Ford Centre, one enters a lobby domi-
nated by an atrium that evokes the one lighting the City Centre and
two other well-known Toronto sites that anticipate transnational
exchange: the atrium of the Eaton Centre shopping mall and that of
Terminal Three at Pearson International Airport.46 Downtown North
York suggests that commercial and cultural consumption are the same
thing, and when the products consumed are transnational commodi-
ties that could be found in Chicago, New York, or Vancouver, the civic
becomes placeless. Downtown North York and the Ford Centre betray
a paradoxical post-Fordist desire: to create a unique ontological space
in a historical moment of increasing time-space compression using
transnational urban and cultural tools.47 Downtown North York and
the Ford Centre finally, and ironically, achieve the goal that Herbert
Whittaker identified for Canadian theatre in the 1960s. ‘We want to
have a culture unmistakably our own,’ Whittaker commented. ‘We
want to be different, the same as everybody else.’48
Conclusion
If the civic theatre in Toronto initially sustained the link between cul-
tural institution-building and urban development first made by the
nation, it now anxiously attempts to insert theatres into a transnational
urban political economy. The SLC and the Ford Centre suggest two dif-
ferent ways in which this interjection has been possible. The SLC posi-
tions itself as a culturally affirmative broker, easing the urban
transition from a national to a transnational economy and nervously
reassuring Torontonians that a civic reconcillation between theatre and
capital is still possible under transnationalism. The Ford Centre, in
contrast, recognizes that post-Fordism has made the relationship
between urban and cultural development reliant on a flow of money
that circulates throughout the world. Attracting this capital may pro-
vide a useful rationale for building new civic theatres at a time when
there is little political appetite for state enterprise, but it also creates
new relationships of dependence: as the building’s present vacancy
demonstrates, when the civic theatre’s transnational operator disap-
pears, the theatre’s cultural and urban appeal fail as well. Post-Fordism
has placed cities and cultural institutions in the shadow of transna-
tional capital, and theatres register both its towering presence and its
sudden absence.
2 Good Times, Inc.: Constructing
a Civic Play Economy in
the Entertainment District
Moving west from the St Lawrence Centre along Front Street, the
streetscape narrates Toronto’s transformations. The glass and steel core
of the financial district stretches north from Front Street, with its heart
on Bay Street. So synonymous with money has this part of Toronto
become that the name ‘Bay Street’ now serves as a geographical
metonym for Canadian capitalism in general. Union Station, stretching
along the south side of Front Street, recalls an earlier type of capital-
ism, where goods and people relied on the railway to move. This rail-
way, in turn, was connected to a once-thriving port on Lake Ontario,
with links to other Great Lakes cities and, later, to the St Lawrence Sea-
way and the Atlantic Ocean. Two blocks west of Union Station stand
the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome), the retractable-roofed
sports stadium, and the iconic CN Tower. The CN Tower has become
so much a feature of Toronto’s skyline and public image that it is easy
to forget that it was built only in 1976.
When looking north from the foot of the CN Tower, it is also easy to
forget how this part of downtown Toronto looked as recently as the
late 1980s. Then, the area was mostly a jumble of aging manufacturing
buildings, parking lots, and disused land. Now, the area is the Enter-
tainment District, a busy, flashy neighbourhood of theatres, television
studios, leisure complexes, restaurants, cinemas, nightclubs, and
hotels. The Entertainment District covers roughly three square kilome-
tres, extending north from the Gardiner Expressway to Queen Street,
and east from Spadina Avenue to Yonge Street (though it initially
extended only as far east as University Avenue). The Toronto Enter-
tainment District Association (TEDA) comprises over one hundred
area companies as members, including small-business owners, Crown
Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Entertainment District 49
corporations like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and tran-

snational operations like Sony and Holiday Inn. The District proved
immensely popular within a short time of its creation in the early
1990s, quickly drawing an estimated 30,000 people to the area on
weekends.1
As the SLC and the Ford Centre show, theatres have participated in
Toronto’s civic self-fashioning and changing patterns of production
and consumption. The Entertainment District demonstrates, however,
that Toronto’s civic performance economy does not only include those
theatres to which the term ‘civic theatre’ conventionally applies. The
District undoubtedly contains theatrical venues, and the area benefits
from their reassuring physical presence, the profitability of the enter-
prises they house, and the quantity and quality of the spectators they
attract. The District does not, however, want to be seen as merely
another shopping zone in the city. It offers exciting entertainment com-
modities, but wants the consumption of those commodities – and the
urban redevelopment necessary to make that consumption possible –
to be seen as civically virtuous. Theatre is central to achieving this goal,
in that it offers the District a grammar that fuses commodity consump-
tion and civic aspiration: as a noun, theatre is a commercial enterprise
that contributes to the area’s profitability; as a verb, playing is an act of
both spectatorship and consumption, something theatre-goers do and
which the District wants its customers to do; as an adjective, the
description of various activities as theatrical enables their assembly
into a designated urban zone; and, finally, as an object, theatre’s physi-
cal presence helps justify the redevelopment of the District in the name
of civic health, anxiously supplanting an urban history of the area
based on work with one based on play. The Entertainment District has
appropriated theatre to make the consumption of entertainment com-
modities a civically virtuous, and historically necessary, form of urban
development.
From Factories to Fun: Spatializing the History of King-Spadina and

the Entertainment District
The Entertainment District now pulses with the sound of dance music
and glows with neon light, but it is worth recalling the neighbourhood
as it existed before the District’s creation. The Entertainment District
incorporates the western edge of Toronto’s Central Business District
(CBD), and its heart is the eastern half of what was formerly the city’s
Central Industrial District (CID).2 But even before the CID emerged at
the turn of the twentieth century, the area south of Queen Street
between Simcoe and Bathurst Streets was a well-developed mix of
‘houses, manufacturing buildings, and institutions ... built side by
side.’3 The land between Simcoe and Peter Streets supported the first
major expansion of the Town of York (as Toronto was originally called)
beyond its original boundaries on the western side of the swamp that
would later become Yonge Street. By the 1830s ‘New Town’ was York’s
premier residential neighbourhood. As military needs diminished in
the 1830s, garrison land was released so that the area could expand
westward, often in the shape of fine houses along new squares and the
town’s widest boulevards. Upper Canada College, the lieutenant-gov-
ernor’s residence, the general hospital, the provincial parliament, and
a number of government offices were situated between Simcoe and
Peter Streets.4 The arrival of the railway in the 1850s halted the elabo-
rate Victorian residential schemes planned for the area by slicing
through the neighbourhood, but it also heralded the first wave of Tor-
onto’s industrialization.5 By the 1890s the area’s occupants included
carriage factories, a saw factory, a lead factory, a silverplate company, a
stove foundry, a cabinet works, and a machinery.6 Lake Ontario was
progressively filled in to accommodate the foundries, gasworks, and
lumber yards that fuelled the city’s economic growth.7
The area that became the CID was built up in the first three decades
of the twentieth century as public institutions moved out and factories
and warehouses moved in. A major fire levelled chunks of the area in
1904, opening up more space for manufacturing industry. Five- to
eight-storey brick buildings, frequently designed by the best architects
of the day in the modern vernacular of large windows and open floor
plans, lined the streets around King-Spadina and grew taller as Tor-
onto’s economy boomed through the 1920s. Indeed, the CID was the
hub of manufacturing and warehousing for Toronto and much of
Ontario in its heyday, from the 1920s to the end of the Second World
War.8 The area became an intense hive of industrial activity, providing
thousands of jobs for the working-class residents of adjacent neigh-
bourhoods.9 Downtown residents produced goods that exited the city
on ships from the nearby harbour and trains from the nearby railway.
The area anticipated manufacturing growth to such a degree that,
when Brant Street elementary school was built in the CID’s west end
in 1926, it was designed according to ‘specifications which would
allow it to be converted to a factory.’10 Social provision might need to
be subsumed under an expansion of manufacturing at any moment,

and, until the end of the Second World War, this seemed like entirely
sensible economic preparation.
Starting in 1950, however, ‘there was a major decline in industrial
activity in the City [of Toronto].’11 Instead of building up, companies
moved out. Firms moved to the suburbs in search of large greenfield
sites that were cheap to buy and that could accommodate huge one-
storey buildings; this was the new urban geography and architecture
of the post-war economy. Between 1950 and 1971, the number of peo-
ple employed in manufacturing in the City of Toronto fell from 156,000
to 82,000. Many of these jobs migrated to the new suburbs – like North
York and Scarborough – within Metropolitan Toronto. In 1950, the City
of Toronto boasted 83 per cent of the manufacturing workforce in the
area that would be federated as Metropolitan Toronto in 1953. By 1971,
the City of Toronto’s share of the metropolitan manufacturing work-
force had fallen to 34 per cent.12 The decline of manufacturing in the
heart of the city was significant, therefore, in both absolute and relative
measures. A network of new superhighways linked the factories with
recent suburban housing developments like Don Mills, and companies
‘no longer needed to locate within walking distance of residential areas
in order to attract employees.’13 Trips to work would now be made
largely by car, and the link between living and working in the same
downtown neighbourhood was diminished.
The CID faltered over the decades following the war, even though
the City of Toronto worked hard to sustain it. In 1977 City planners
admitted that industrial activity had been slowly declining for almost
thirty years, yet they still claimed that ‘the central issue in King-Spa-
dina is the future of industry.’14 The planners declared that ‘the area
should be maintained and planned primarily for industrial firms,’ and
by this they meant the same firms that had previously dominated the
area: principally garment manufacturers and commercial printing
companies.15 In a last gasp of municipal Fordism, the City’s official
plan continued to reserve most land and buildings in the King-Spadina
area for manufacturing use until 1996. To the City of Toronto, the mass
production of goods was the most desirable mode of economic produc-
tion, the rising tide that would lift all boats. Its planners believed that
Toronto’s economic growth would be led by expansion in industrial
manufacturing and it was simply a matter of providing the right spa-
tial fix for that type of economic activity to continue downtown.
Change happened anyway, despite restrictive controls on use. In
1977 City planners could scarcely imagine the significant role that
communications and high technology would play in the area’s de-
velopment less than a decade later. In 1986 the City’s economic devel-
opment committee noted that communications and information tech-
nology firms were now the second-largest employers in the area after
fashion (itself now focused increasingly on clothing design rather than
manufacture).16 The garment industry continued to decline and the
area’s character changed further; the City reported in 1996 that ‘[t]radi-
tional industrial uses were being replaced by light industrial and busi-
ness activities, vacancy rates had increased, and numerous fine old
buildings had been demolished for surface parking lots.’17 The east
end of the CID showed signs of developing in a way that planners had
not anticipated, changing from a Fordist urban space of commodity
mass production into a post-Fordist space of service provision.
The industries on which the neighbourhood had been built – most
importantly, garment manufacturing – were in long-term decline
(though, as I will discuss later in this chapter, the area was hardly an
urban wasteland). For many years the City of Toronto clung to the
naive belief that the presence in the area of manufacturing firms like
Dover Elevator could be preserved through zoning restrictions on
emerging types of development (such as financial services and office
projects) that were transforming other parts of downtown.18 But it was
increasingly clear by the late 1980s that hopes for reviving the manu-
facturing base of the city core were unlikely to be realized simply
through zoning, and planners expressed some doubt whether manu-
facturing could play any substantial part in downtown economic
development.19
Scattered amid the factories and warehouses were a few entertain-
ment venues: the Royal Alexandra Theatre (commonly called the
Royal Alex), Roy Thomson Hall, and the CN Tower. There was little
sense of the area offering entertainment attractions in any coordinated
way, however, or of betraying much in the way of spectacle at street
level. For example, the Royal Alex is Toronto’s longest-serving com-
mercial theatre venue, but the building itself, completed in 1907, is a
modest procession of three graduated boxes (lobby, auditorium, stage)
stepping back from King Street. Its balustraded windows and pilasters
project an air of shabby beaux-arts elegance rather than glittering
excitement. For many years, owner Ed Mirvish reserved a kind of ret-
rograde glitziness for the advertising on the façade of his restaurants
next door, which offered patrons a steady diet of roast beef dinners to
accompany the touring shows at the Royal Alex. But much of this pro-
motion consisted of faded posters from old Royal Alex shows and slo-
gans featuring the same kitschy (and savvy) self-promotion that made
Mirvish’s fortune at his bargain store on Bloor Street: ‘How Cheap Can
a Guy Get? Come In and Find Out!’
While the Royal Alex at least acknowledges the streetscape, its
neighbour opposite disavows the street altogether. Roy Thomson Hall
might best be described as an inverted glass cupcake squatting smugly
in a concrete moat. From its completion in 1982 as the home of the Tor-
onto Symphony Orchestra, the Hall’s design has often been derided:
This is one of the city’s most arrogant buildings, a Neo-Expressionist extrav-

aganza that integrates with the urban streetscape not at all. It could be
argued that buildings designed for entertainment – ‘theatrical’ buildings –
have reason for not blending in, witness the grandiose opera houses of
Europe, or even New York’s Lincoln Center. But to be successful, exhibition-
ist buildings require harmonious shape and ceremonial setting. Arthur
Erickson’s hall suggests neither ... Its siting, smack on the sidewalk along a
side-street entrance and defending itself behind a moat-like sunken court on
the main street, is anything but grand and inviting.20
The two performance venues in the area could hardly acknowledge

each other, let alone demonstrate an awareness of their neighbourhood
as an entertainment destination. Any attempt to develop an entertain-
ment district would have to acknowledge their proximity to a much
greater degree than they did themselves, and find a way to integrate
them into a larger urban leisure project.
Changes were taking place that made such a scheme imaginable, but
not for the reasons popularly promoted. Advocates for the Entertain-
ment District have boasted that the ‘success of the Toronto Entertain-
ment District is due to the confidence and participation of many
business owners and their employees who have worked steadily
together over the past two decades, always knowing that they had
something special to showcase to the rest of the world.’21 This procla-
mation puts a rather romantic spin on the history of the District’s
emergence. The twin catalysts for the District were actually govern-
ment decisions taken in the 1980s for reasons that had nothing to do
with premonitions of an urban leisure zone. The first impetus was the
Ontario government’s decision to build a sports stadium (subse-
quently named SkyDome) downtown on a vacant site beside the CN
Tower. This decision had important urban planning resonances, since

it overturned dominant post–Second World War planning ideology
which dictated that major sports facilities should be located on the
edges of cities, not in their cores. With seating for over 50,000 specta-
tors and offering eighty-one home games a season for the Toronto Blue
Jays baseball club alone, SkyDome regularly brought tens of thou-
sands of new visitors into the area after opening in 1989.22 Rock con-
certs, Toronto Argonaut football games, and corporate exhibitions only
boosted these numbers further.
SkyDome also assisted the development of the neighbourhood’s ser-
vice economy through the early 1990s, as an increasing proportion of
the labour in the area no longer worked in manufacturing but in ser-
vice sectors like office work and retail. There was a clear long-term
reduction in the manufacturing workforce in the area between the
mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. In 1985 manufacturing workers consti-
tuted the majority of the employment in King-Spadina, with the gar-
ment industry alone accounting for 58 per cent of jobs. By 1996
manufacturing’s share of the workforce had dropped to approximately
14 per cent. The office sector, however, was now the same size as man-
ufacturing had been in earlier years: it had mushroomed to 58 per cent
of the labour force, with retail services and shopping combining to
make up another 21 per cent.23 The opening of SkyDome signalled that
downtowns were legitimate locations for large-scale leisure venues
and encouraged the expansion of the service industry of which those
venues would be a part.
The second major impetus for change in the area occurred when the
City of Toronto rezoned the neighbourhood to accommodate large
dance clubs in the early 1990s. City councillors and their constituents
had been battling with club owners in the late 1980s over noise and
large crowds in residential areas of the city; in response, then city
councillor Jack Layton persuaded council to relax the zoning restric-
tions around the King-Spadina intersection to permit dance clubs
(since existing zoning largely prohibited anything other than manufac-
turing facilities) while restricting them elsewhere in the city. ‘I said that
big clubs were good,’ Layton later recalled. ‘People were having fun,
dancing up a storm. I looked around at old industrial buildings,
mostly empty, in the old garment district around Richmond, Adelaide,
John and Peter. There was little housing there, so it wasn’t likely to run
into residents objecting.’24 The zoning change had the desired effect
and helped concentrate the city’s clubs in the area. Moreover, many of
the buildings now available were much larger than vacant properties
in other parts of the city core, often allowing the clubs to accommodate
several thousand patrons each on a given night. As with SkyDome, the
clubs proved successful at attracting large numbers of consumers into
the area and making it a ‘fun’ destination in itself, rather than simply a
place to work or pass through to a more interesting shopping area
nearby.25
The Entertainment District as a Play Economy
SkyDome and the dance clubs helped remake the area east of King-
Spadina for a service economy based on leisure activities. The Enter-
tainment District built on this foundation, and, in doing so, mimicked
a familiar historical pattern that has occurred in many Western indus-
trial economies during the past thirty-odd years: an area in the centre
of the city formerly devoted to manufacturing goods was transformed
into one area offering services. But the distinctiveness of Toronto’s
Entertainment District lies in the particular ways it uses theatre to help
remake economic production along post-industrial lines. In doing so, it
mimicks a familiar language of economic and theatrical production,
but transforms the meaning of that language – the District retains the
vocabulary of manufacturing and theatre while redefining the product
of both.
Instead of garments being produced in King-Spadina, the Entertain-
ment District manufactures ‘fun.’ TEDA claimed, ‘Locals and visitors
alike know that when they choose the “entertainment district,” they’re
going to have fun.’26 For example, Festival Hall, the giant entertain-
ment complex that contains Paramount cinemas, restaurants, a book-
store, a Starbucks, and a Sony Playdium (video-game complex),
announces (tautologically) on its façade that ‘FUN IS PARAMOUNT.’
This suggests that fun is synonymous with the interests of a transna-
tional media conglomerate. When Festival Hall opened, staff sported
shirts that read ‘FUN SECURITY,’ suggesting that fun was best
achieved under the surveillance of the building’s corporate occupants.
The District makes fun the output of a tightly organized urban and
transnational mode of production, but demonstrates a latent anxiety
that the product does not entirely suit the process. As architecture critic
Adele Freedman argues: ‘If there’s anything off-putting about all the
fun for grabs in the old warehouse district, it’s that it seems so manu-
factured.’27 Freedman’s use of the word ‘manufactured’ identifies,
rather ironically, one of the basic contradictions of the Entertainment

District: in spite of the District’s unease about the manufacturing his-
tory of its neighbourhood, producing fun requires a production pro-
cess no less structured than that required for the elevators once
manufactured where Festival Hall stands. Because fun still bears the
whiff of manufacturing, it must not only be an issue of production, but
one of containment through visible security.
To compensate for this anxiety, the District attempts to remake plan-
ning as an economic ideal of urban consumption rather than industrial
production. Under a Fordist political economy, planning was some-
thing that nation-states undertook at the macro-economic level and cit-
ies practised rigorously at the micro-spatial level. The Entertainment
District, however, offers planning as a consumer ideal, as a form of
self-gratification that organizes and integrates a variety of forms of
entertainment consumption into the shopping day. One ‘chooses’ the
Entertainment District as though one were ‘choosing’ a toothbrush,
which suggests that urban space has been commodified and that its
selection makes possible a chain of further consumption. A day in the
Entertainment District might go something like this: in the morning a
tour of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre, lunch on King
Street, a matinee at the Princess of Wales Theatre, a trip up the CN
Tower, an early dinner at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant, a Blue Jays
baseball game, a late film at Festival Hall, a rush to a club for a last
hour of dancing, and then back to the Holiday Inn to collapse into bed.
A final, and for me most notable, reason for the Entertainment Dis-
trict’s distinctiveness is that the District justified its creation through
theatrical models and metaphors, explicitly representing consumption
in the District as ‘playing’ in the sense of theatrical performance. The
District’s belief that its commodities were ‘playful’ provided the ratio-
nale for grouping them together, and in this assembly the District fig-
ured consumption as a theatrical act of individual and imaginative
self-pleasuring. Theatre, therefore, became the guarantor of the Dis-
trict as a post-Fordist civic leisure economy.
As John Urry points out, leisure is a recreational activity whose
value is always tethered to what it is not: work. Urry argues that lei-
sure ‘presupposes its opposite, namely regulated and organised work’
and that leisure and work ‘are organised as separate and regulated
spheres of social practice in “modern” societies.’28 More precisely,
Henri Lefebvre argues that a leisure economy marks the point where a
space of consumption gives way to the consumption of space. The space of
consumption ‘coincides with the historical locations of capital accumu-

lation, with the space of production, and with the space that is pro-
duced; this is the space of the market.’29 The space of consumption is
quantitative, and is concerned with how resources may be consumed
in order to generate surplus value through commodity production and
exchange. The consumption of space, by contrast, is ostensibly unpro-
ductive and qualitative; it is the ‘moment of departure – the moment of
people’s holidays,’ where the ‘materiality and naturalness’ of ‘sun,
snow, [and] sea’ are ‘rediscovered in their (apparent or real) immedi-
acy.’30 In Lefebvre’s formulation, one consumes space for its use value
alone, and pleasure results because there is no anticipation of exchange
by the user.
A contradiction can arise, however, when the consumption of space
occurs. While space may be economically unproductive for those who
consume it, that does not mean that its consumption is unproductive in
toto. Some of the productive benefits–the exchange value – arising
from spatial consumption may be displaced, accruing as profits to
those capitalists who coordinate it. Though the consumption of space
may be imagined as an escape from the market, it is frequently a mar-
ketized activity, albeit one where the economic benefits of its qualita-
tive properties accrue somewhere, or to someone, else. As Lefebvre
puts it:
The quality and the use of space retrieve their ascendancy – but only up to a
point. In empirical terms, what this means is that neocapitalism and neo-
imperialism share hegemony over a subordinated space split into two kinds
of regions: regions exploited for the purpose of and by means of production
(of consumer goods), and regions exploited for the purpose of and by means
of the consumption of space. Tourism and leisure become major areas of
investment and profitability, adding their weight to the construction sector,
to property speculation, to generalized urbanization.31
The implication of Lefebvre’s argument is not only that ‘subordinated

space [is] split into two kinds of regions,’ but that, in a leisure econ-
omy, the space of consumption and the consumption of space intersect
within one region. A distinguishing feature of a leisure economy is that
it insists on the presence of both relationships between space and con-
sumption at the same time, in the same place.
The Entertainment District enacts this phenomenon in a defined
urban zone, spatializing the means through which leisure activities are
coordinated and marketized by capitalists and their allies. And from

the time the District was first mooted, theatre was identified as one of
the three major agents in the leisure economy that its advocates hoped
to create in King-Spadina. The general manager of the SkyDome Hotel,
for instance, supported the plan because of the way it would bring
tourism, shopping, and theatre together. ‘The concept of state-of-the-
art theatre and shopping activities are the kind of things tourists are
looking for,’ she said.32
Beyond this quantitative use of performance, the qualitative appeal
of the Entertainment District was articulated through the appropria-
tion of a theatrical language. The District’s promotion relied on theatri-
cal metaphors from its inception, with TEDA claiming that the District
was ‘quickly creating a presence on the world stage.’33 David Rock-
well, the architect of Sony’s Playdium, which is part of Festival Hall,
claimed inspiration for his design from the theatre, crediting ‘his
mother, a dancer who toured in vaudeville with Abbott and Costello,
for imbuing him with his love of anything that smacks of live the-
atre.’34 The year that Rockwell spent as a lighting technician on Broad-
way provided further inspiration.35 Moreover, patrons of Playdium
were modelled on theatre spectators. Customers were supposed to
‘check reality at the door,’ recalling the popular theatrical notion that
spectators must suspend disbelief in order to successfully experience a
performance event.36 In the words of one commentator, it was the
‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that allowed fun to become ‘the
modus operandi’ of consumption.37 Even detractors of the District
used a theatrical language to attack the area. Freedman took up a the-
atrical simile to drive home her criticism that Festival Hall was not the
urban jewel its proponents claimed it to be: ‘Architect Michael Kirk-
land, who designed the guts and framework of the structure, sounded
like Macbeth soliloquizing about “nothing is but what is not.”’38
Theatre also helped secure the Entertainment District’s disavowal of
particular urban and class anxieities. The District, its advocates
claimed, was neither a manufacturing area nor a suburban shopping
mall – both places where the working class gathered. The SkyDome
hotel manager’s use of the term ‘state-of-the-art theatre and shopping
activities’ was revealing, not only because it linked theatre with the
creation of a new retail and tourist economy, but also because it identi-
fied theatre as a way to mark out the District’s contemporeneity and
divorce it from the neighbourhood’s scruffy past. By extension, Play-
dium’s use of theatrical language and cutting-edge imagery helped
suppress the memory of the seedy Yonge Street video arcades that
popularly characterized local electronic gaming establishments. Festi-
val Hall’s developer insisted that the project was ‘very urban’ because
it was ‘not a mall that traps people inside an indoor street’ and ‘sucks
[the life] out of the rest of the city.’39 For him, shopping malls connoted
poor planning and urban alienation, but the theatricality of Festival
Hall and the District made them urban, and therefore good. Play-
dium’s chief executive officer also linked theatre with enticing an afflu-
ent consumer: ‘We’re building this foundation, a premium brand, and
we’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the project. We’re developing
theatres for play, and [Rockwell] understands that.’40 This emphasis on
building ‘a premium brand’ reveals that theatricality was a means to
secure the class elevation of the District, a fact that was only amplified
when one of the developers behind Festival Hall claimed in the media
that the services in the District were intended to ‘draw a high level of
postgraduate people.’41 The video arcade and the shopping mall had to
be disavowed because, in both geographical and normative senses,
they were seen as sub-urban and working class. Theatre, by compari-
son, could be embraced because it was ostensibly urban, forward-look-
ing, and prosperous.
Playing at Civic Harmony
To paraphrase Edward Soja, theatre provided a particularly effective

way for the Entertainment District to make the city the content, rather
than just the container, of the playful consuming experience. But the-
atre’s efficacy in the District was not limited to its market benefit or
metaphorical utility. The Entertainment District suggested that urban
play was a civic act by representing consumption as simultaneously
pleasurable for the individual and beneficial at a civic level. The fact
that this consumption was imagined to be theatrical allowed the Dis-
trict to trade on some of Toronto theatre’s civically affirmative charac-
teristics. Theatre buildings and practices located in the Entertainment
District may not have formally been designated as civic in the conven-
tional sense that the SLC and the Ford Centre were, but theatre in the
area undoubtedly played an important part in constructing the District
as a civically affirmative enterprise.
There are two theatres within the heart of the Entertainment District:
the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Princess of Wales Theatre, both of
which are owned by the Mirvish family. The Entertainment District
cast these theatres in lead roles in its self-promotion. TEDA claimed

that the ‘crown jewels of the district are the Royal Alexandra and Prin-
cess of Wales theatres.’42 Both theatres, in turn, were promoted as a key
part of the ‘third-largest theatre centre in the English-speaking world,
after London and New York.’43 The Royal Alex is Toronto’s oldest
commercial theatre, with seating for approximately 1500 spectators.
The theatre has operated mostly as a roadhouse for touring shows,
offering its subscribers, in Herbert Whittaker’s words, ‘a popular mix
of musical hits from London or Broadway, serious drama, comedy, and
star performers.’44 When Toronto developed a large audience for
megamusicals like Cats and Phantom of the Opera in the 1980s and early
1990s, Mirvish built the Princess of Wales to accommodate local pro-
ductions of such shows as Miss Saigon, which opened the theatre in
1993.
The Royal Alex and Princess of Wales represent a very keen under-
standing of the market for live performance in Toronto. As the popu-
larity of megamusicals grew, Mirvish Productions suspended its
subscription series and booked long-running shows into the Royal
Alex. By building the Princess of Wales, Mirvish Productions was able
to return the Royal Alex to a subscriber-driven season of multiple
shows and programme long-running musicals in the Princess of Wales
down the street. The Royal Alex’s season provides a base of approxi-
mately 50,000 subscribers, who tend to be older, economically well off,
and interested in ‘serious’ drama.45 The Princess of Wales, with pro-
ductions like The Lion King in residence, is geared more towards fami-
lies and ‘tour bus’ audiences. The two theatres together appeal to a
wide spectrum of the market for premium theatrical commodities in
both Toronto and central North America, and draw affluent spectators
to the Entertainment District – something that was important if the
neighbourhood itself were also to be a ‘premium brand.’
In order to personalize the public image of the Entertainment Dis-
trict, TEDA resurrected the figure of the nineteenth-century theatre
impresario and married it to a local-boy-makes-good narrative. The
public face of the Entertainment District became Ed Mirvish. Mirvish
is popularly known in Toronto as ‘Honest Ed,’ after his Bloor Street
discount store, and his folksy maxims and Christmas turkey give-
aways have earned him a reputation as the city’s favourite busi-
nessperson and civic booster. Mirvish holds the Order of Canada, is a
Companion of the Order of the British Empire, received an honourary
Chair from the Harvard School of Business, and is a Freeman of the
City of London. Sheila Copps, then Canada’s deputy prime minister,

once called Mirvish ‘a Canadian folk hero and a national treasure.’46
Mirvish’s local renown is hard to ignore: the block of Markham Street
beside Honest Ed’s is named Mirvish Village, the mayor of Toronto
honoured Mirvish with Ed Mirvish Day in 1996, and, when TEDA cre-
ated a Canadian ‘walk of fame’ on King Street, they gave the first side-
walk star to Mirvish. Even the Toronto millennial calendar devoted
July to celebrating Mirvish, the only individual person singled out in
the entire year.47 The calendar’s historical photographs are of Mirvish
and his stores, and the two ‘days to remember’ are Canada Day and
Mirvish’s birthday.
If the District’s public and political appeal relied on Mirvish’s popu-
larity and his perceived benevolent boosterism, Mirvish’s biography
also reinforced the notion that the District rose from poor beginnings
to become an unqualified success (and that, in the process, it remained
humane and concerned for the individual consumer). Mirvish pro-
motes himself as, and is fêted for being, a local boy made good through
smart business. Mirvish’s 1993 autobiography, Honest Ed Mirvish: How
to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate or, 121 Lessons I Never Learned in
School, is organized as a series of lessons on being successful in busi-
ness and in life. The text is inflected with a mix of hyperbole and ‘aw
shucks’ modesty, a rhetorical ploy that both highlights and deflects the
implications of his present-day class privilege; he may be a millionaire,
but he is, after all, just ‘the bargain man.’48 Mirvish’s jokey self-depre-
cation reinscribes the liberal ideal of meritorious class ascension by
reminding the reader of his rise from working-class origins and imply-
ing that if he can do it anyone can. Simultaneously, he encourages the
reader to see him as still a working-class boy at heart, in spite of the
fact that his businesses are multimillion-dollar enterprises with more
than a thousand employees (Mirvish claimed in 1993 that his bargain
store alone grossed $65 million per year).49 The introduction to How to
Build an Empire sets a tone that the autobiography maintains through-
out:
My name is Honest Ed. Which alone is enough to make anyone suspicious. If

people think it’s batty I don’t blame them. After all, I chose the nickname
myself. But then again, it never hurt Abe. In fact, Mr. Lincoln and I have a
few things in common. Both of us grew up poor. Neither of us had much
schooling. He taught himself law; I taught myself business. We started from
scratch and learned by experience. And each of us always bucked popular
trends. Not that I’m comparing myself to Abraham. Hardly! I hate people
who boast. But with ‘Honest’ in front of your name you must tell the truth.
And no matter how much I try, it’s hard to be modest. I began in business as
a fifteen-year-old high school dropout with no money. I’ve never had a sin-
gle partner or shareholder, except for my wife and son. I never went public.
Without shareholders, I never had to explain why I did outrageous things –
nor why they misfired when they did. I’ve only had to remember what went
wrong, and not repeat it.50
Mirvish ingratiates himself as a colourful, self-made man. His popular

appeal relies on this invocation of the ascendant, individual, bourgeois
businessman.
The book also features Mirvish’s theatres prominently, and repre-
sents the apotheosis of his success as his theatre enterprises. In addi-
tion to the Royal Alex and the Princess of Wales, Mirvish owned the
Old Vic Theatre in London from 1983 to 1997. Mirvish’s purchase of
the Old Vic only heightened the sense that he had ‘made good,’ since it
represented both a capitalist and artistic inversion of colonial history.
As the title of his book says, he built his own ‘empire’: Mirvish, whose
roots were Canadian, working class, and Jewish, colonized the old
imperial power by purchasing an important artefact of Britain’s cul-
tural history. He not only moved from the margins to the centre in his
own country, his actions implied that Canada could teach the old mas-
ter economic and cultural lessons as well. Writing three years before he
sold the Old Vic,51 he claimed:
To my constant astonishment, we now also own three world-class theatres.

Two, of course are internationally famous: the Royal Alexandra in Toronto,
built in 1907, and the Old Vic in London, built in 1818. The third is the Prin-
cess of Wales in Toronto (just down the street from the Royal Alex) which
we erected ourselves in 1993 – the first theatre to be privately constructed on
this continent in more than ninety years. It was built especially to house our
co-production of the super-hit Miss Saigon, the most expensive theatrical
production ever mounted in Canada. I still can’t believe I’m in show biz.52
The penultimate marker of Mirvish’s ascent was becoming a transna-

tional theatre impresario, and being recognized publicly as such: the
Globe and Mail refers to Mirvish as the head of ‘Canada’s premier the-
atre family.’53 Mirvish is known as much for being a ‘show biz’ figure
as a ‘bargain merchant’; indeed, he successfully frames his success as
the improbable marriage of the two. In a public tribute at the unveiling

of his sidewalk star, even the edgy, modern Desrosier Dance Theatre
presented, in dance, ‘Mirvish’s life from delivering groceries for his
father’s store through to buying the Royal Alex and the Old Vic The-
atre in London, England.’54 Desrosier’s tribute demonstrates how suc-
cessfully Mirvish has naturalized his personal narrative as the local
boy made good. But an important part of this narrative, regardless of
the extent of Mirvish’s notoriety, is that he has always resided in Tor-
onto. Mirvish is able to be such a prominent civic booster partly
because his heart and his home have remained in the city.
Installing Mirvish as the public face of the Entertainment District
was important to TEDA for several reasons. Because Mirvish embod-
ied the bourgeois ideal of the self-made man he counterpointed the fact
that the Entertainment District was dominated by huge transnational
corporations like Sony, Paramount, and Holiday Inn.55 His claim that
the Princess of Wales was the first theatre built with private money in
North America for over ninety years is patently untrue – a number of
new theatre buildings were constructed in New York with private
money in the 1910s and 1920s – but the subtext of this claim is more
important than its manifest inaccuracy: Mirvish’s private sponsorship
of the Princess of Wales distinguished him from, and privileged him
over, Garth Drabinsky, who enlisted state sponsorship for the Ford
Centre.56 Mirvish, then, was a self-reliant businessman, he was endear-
ing to many Torontonians, and his biography seamlessly blended the
local and the transnational. At a historical moment when there was tre-
mendous anxiety in Canada about the speed and shape of globaliza-
tion, this type of personalization was naively reassuring.57 Mirvish’s
involvement with the Entertainment District illustrates Harvey’s point
that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy often gives new
importance to ‘older systems of domestic, artisanal, familial (patriar-
chal), and paternalistic’ capitalism.58 The District gave the bourgeois
merchant an even more prominent place in the neighbourhood than he
previously enjoyed, and it was only with the rise of the Entertainment
District that Ed Mirvish and his theatres were fully integrated as ‘cen-
trepieces rather than appendages’ of the neighbourhood’s urban econ-
omy.59
The romantic appeal of the merchant was doubly effective when it
possessed the familial and civic connotations of the theatre impresario
– something that Mirvish and his family have been called in the popu-
lar press, and which figured from the beginning in TEDA’s promotion
of the District.60 As impresarios, the Mirvishes blurred the distinction

between market and sentimental value, and between quantitative and
qualitative benefit – obfuscations that served the District’s interests.
The sentimental connotations of the impresario, articulated through
Mirvish’s promotional role in what he called ‘show biz,’ conflated
market and sentimental value. This conflation was necessary to a Dis-
trict that sought to make consumption of entertainment commodities –
predominantly a market activity – a playful and civically virtuous act.
John Rosselli notes that, for impresarios, ‘the firm’ was often an indi-
vidual and his family.61 Mirvish Productions is wholly owned by the
Mirvish family and Ed is its businessman patriarch. As Hampson’s
profile of Ed, wife Anne, and son David illustrates, keeping the theatre
business ‘All in the Family’ successfully recuperates the dominant pre-
modern business structure, minimizing the chance that the Mirvishes
would provoke social anxiety in the way that the transnational busi-
ness structure has. Mirvish Productions also embodies positivist famil-
ial ideology, which values intimate personal relationships outside the
market (values that may be characterized as ‘caring,’ ‘sharing,’ or ‘sup-
portive’) to elide the less romantic market mechanisms by which the
Mirvishes became millionaires.
In addition, Rosselli argues that the impresario has historically been
preoccupied with civic pride, something that Mirvish illustrates in a
contemporary context. Rosselli states that the impresario was highly
conscious of the locality of his enterprise, and was therefore keen ‘to
avoid any seeming offence to local patriotism.’62 Mirvish’s civic
honours suggest that he not only refrained from offending local patrio-
tism, but that his civic boosterism played a part in creating the popu-
list notion of Toronto as a ‘world class’ city. This civic capital made
Mirvish, and, by extension, the interests he represented, more difficult
to dissent from politically.
Considering Toronto’s often fractious history over urban redevelop-
ment since the 1960s, the Entertainment District provoked remarkably
little disagreement at the local political level. This was due, in part, to
the fact that the District was proposed during the early 1990s, when
Toronto was struggling to emerge from a severe recession. The com-
mercial property-development industry, which fuelled the downtown
economy through the 1980s, had collapsed, leaving behind the unfin-
ished core of the Bay-Adelaide Centre as a raw concrete reminder of
what happened when business simply ceased. Mirvish’s civic appeal
was tremendously helpful in assembling a new service-sector oligar-
chy that married urban development to leisure provision instead of

office space. This oligarchy was coordinated through the development
and administration of the District: the Entertainment District is over-
seen by TEDA, which is the formal link between the District’s capital-
ists and the city government; TEDA oversees the Entertainment
District as a Business Improvement Area (BIA), which means that the
municipality turns back a portion of property taxes to TEDA to spend
on neighbourhood promotion and ‘public improvements’ like special
street signs, tree planting, customized street lamps, and advertising.
BIAs have always been an important political constituency of capital-
ists at city hall, but the Entertainment District brought together a group
of service-sector proprietors who were particularly prominent in the
post-Fordist economy (theatre owners, hotel operators, convention
centre managers, local restaurateurs, and media corporations), and it
brought them together not as competitors but as cooperators. The
Entertainment District used theatre to help secure a kind of civic eco-
nomic corporatism.63
The Entertainment District, then, was a test case for a post-Fordist
version of civic harmony. In Toronto, the period between the 1960s and
the 1980s were marked by vigorous political activism as neighbour-
hood coalitions and their allies on city council fought blockbusting
development of old neighbourhoods and helped to instal a modestly
progressive system of social services and urban planning. In this older
political model, civic harmony in Toronto was often achieved by the
municipal state functioning (admittedly awkwardly) as a broker
between neighbourhood political organizations and capitalists, most of
whom were commercial property developers. But when the develop-
ment market collapsed in 1990 and the worst recession since the 1930s
brought about a major retrenchment for the Left in Canada, the rela-
tionship between the municipal state and capital changed. Now, in
addition to commercial developers, some of the most prominent capi-
talists in the city were cultural impresarios like Mirvish and the then-
head of the LivEntertainment Corporation, Garth Drabinsky.
Instead of brokering disputes between local political organizations
and big business, the role of the municipal state was increasingly to
broker disputes between theatre industry capitalists themselves. In
1996 an argument broke out between King-Spadina businesses and
Yonge-Dundas businesses over the boundaries of what was then to be
called the ‘Theatre District.’ Yonge-Dundas could also make a legiti-
mate claim to the designation: the area was home to Massey Hall, the
Elgin and Wintergarden Theatres, and Livent’s Pantages Theatre. Busi-

ness owners at Yonge and Dundas saw the Theatre District moniker as
a way to displace the area’s homeless community and lever invest-
ment into an area that they perceived as too downmarket to capitalize
heavily on the transnational cultural tourist trade. The conflict was
only resolved when the City named King-Spadina the Entertainment
District and Yonge-Dundas the Theatre District. This latter designation
was never employed by the media or in municipal publications to any
extent, however, and, in post-Fordist Toronto, it seemed an antiquated
designation. Mirvish was the spokesperson for the Toronto Entertain-
ment District Association, and Garth Drabinsky spoke for the Yonge-
Dundas association. Through these two men city hall brokered the
compromise, but the ultimate solution was to incorporate the Theatre
District area within the Entertainment District (and Mirvish eventually
took over the lease on the Pantages Theatre, which was renamed the
Canon Theatre). Civic harmony was now promoted by the City of Tor-
onto ensuring that theatrical capitalists got along with each other, and
then, when Livent became bankrupt, supporting the expansion of the
Entertainment District throughout a large section of the downtown
core.
Making the City Safe for Play
If civic harmony was required for the Entertainment District to exist in

the present, this was made possible because advocates represented the
District as breaking with a discordant urban past. Promoters of the
District rewrote the history of King-Spadina to present their develop-
ment in a more positive light, and, in the process, they used theatre to
salve an anxiety about cities, labour, and public health. Their new nar-
rative inverted an older association of theatre with moral ambivalence
and urban decline. Instead, theatre was represented as a healthy activ-
ity that required protection from an unsavoury neighbourhood that
had become a ‘slum.’ The Entertainment District became all the more
necessary because it would make King-Spadina safe for theatre and,
by extension, clean for civic consumption.
Advocates for the Entertainment District propounded a glib and
revisionist history of the area that they used to justify the District’s
development. Their promotion inverted the usual nostalgic trope of
good past / bad present, invoking a nostalgia for the present that was
made possible by recuperating the neighbourhood’s past as malign.
Ed Mirvish remade the area’s history in precisely this way when he

contrasted the Royal Alex’s neighbourhood in the 1990s with its condi-
tion in the 1960s:
Within the immediate area of the theatre today are Toronto’s most famous
tourist and architectural attractions. Directly across the street is the magnifi-
cent Roy Thomson Hall renowned for symphonies, plus the enormous
three-tower Metro Hall, which houses the bulk of city bureaucrats. Behind
them are the giant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre, as well as the
massive Metro Toronto Convention Centre and adjoining L’Hotel. But also
within [a] stone’s throw are two world-renowned, record-breaking construc-
tions: the CN Tower, at 1,815 feet the world’s tallest free-standing structure;
and the Skydome [sic] holding 52,000 fans beneath its movable roof, the
world’s largest domed sports stadium. To say nothing of our own 2,600 res-
taurant complex, and the area’s newest jewel, the Princess of Wales Theatre.
The district is now without a doubt one of the most exciting anywhere.64
Mirvish’s hyperbole about the present was matched by the purported

horrors of the area before the Entertainment District:
When we bought [the Royal Alex, in 1963] ... the surrounding area was even
seedier than the Old Vic’s. Warehouses on both sides and a desolate stretch
of railway tracks across the street. Yet three decades later, the slum has
become a city showcase ... When reporters ask why we ever bought a theatre
in such a squalid section of the city, I say I always visualized the area’s
potential. Of course, to be honest (which I must be), I hadn’t a clue.65
Mirvish was not the only supporter of the Entertainment District who
depicted the neighbourhood’s past as ‘desolate’ and its present as a
‘showcase.’ Christopher Hume, the influential architecture critic at the
Toronto Star, wrote that the history of the King-Spadina area, pre–Enter-
tainment District, was ‘anti-urban: the city as a cesspool of poverty,
pollution and paranoia.’66 The redevelopment of the neighbourhood
represented ‘a new metropolitan age. The city itself has emerged not
just as the context of contemporary culture, but as its content, too.’67
The problem with these characterizations of the King-Spadina area
in the decades before to the Entertainment District is that they are his-
torically misleading about the neighbourhood’s urban history and con-
sequently exaggerate the threat that the area posed to theatre. There is
no evidence that the Royal Alex’s neighbourhood, contrary to what
Mirvish and Hume claim, has ever been a ‘slum’ or a ‘cesspool of pov-
erty.’ While there is little doubt that the dominant economic motors of
the area were slowing in the 1960s when Mirvish bought the Royal
Alex, this was a gradual and relative process taking decades and was
not by any means a wholesale economic collapse. In fact, King-Spa-
dina absorbed recessions and potentially traumatic changes in Tor-
onto’s economy rather better than might be expected, and evidence
gathered by the City of Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto between the
1970s and 1990s invariably showed that King-Spadina had one of Tor-
onto’s healthier post–Second World War economies (this was even
more the case in the part of the area immediately surrounding the
Royal Alex). King-Spadina is one of the most studied neighbourhoods
in Toronto, and if the anxiety that prompted these analyses stemmed
from concern about the effects on the area of a national and local
decline in manufacturing, research consistently concluded that the
neighbourhood was, and has always been, remarkably healthy eco-
nomically.68 The City of Toronto reported in 1977 that, while a number
of firms had migrated to the suburbs, the decline had levelled off dur-
ing the 1970s and vacancy rates were the lowest that they had been
since the 1960s.69 A decade later the City reported that the area was
still ‘the largest industrial district in the City in terms of employment’
and that business vacancy rates of 7 to 8 per cent were relatively low
by local standards.70
If the economic history of the area disproves the content of Mirvish’s
and Hume’s assertions, what is the significance of their rhetoric? The
adjectives they used to describe the neighbourhood before the Enter-
tainment District are vivid: the neighbourhood was ‘seedier’ than
Waterloo Road in London when Mirvish owned the Old Vic (a prepos-
terous notion, as anyone who crossed over the large homeless encamp-
ment under Waterloo Bridge or walked the broken-down Waterloo
Road in the 1980s or early 1990s can attest), it was ‘desolate’ and a
‘slum,’ and was a ‘cesspool of poverty, pollution, and paranoia.’ These
descriptions justified the Entertainment District by invoking a long-
standing anxiety about the class inflection of cities in western Europe
and North America. Calling the city squalid, a cesspool, and polluted
also recalled an anti-urban discourse in which cities activate a panic
about hygiene; in this discourse, cities are, de facto, unclean and
unhealthy. Sewell argues that this conception reconciles three strands
of thought: ‘[A] straightforward belief that cities are bad, in and of
themselves; a sense that cities are unhealthy – physically, socially, aes-
thetically, and morally; and a feeling that cities mitigate against a good
family life. These ideas found expression in Western thought from the
sixteenth century onward, and fell on fertile ground in thought and
deed in the twentieth century.’71 Though a hygienic discourse gained
greater purchase in the United States than in Canada, Sewell argues
that ‘anti-urban’ sentiment has a Canadian history as well. He points
out that, with some notable exceptions, Canadian cultural production
has been distinctly uneasy about the city, preferring to use an often ide-
alized wilderness or ‘nature’ as its imaginary material.72 When observ-
ers turned their attention to the Canadian city, they often failed to
distinguish between the ill effects of poor municipal services and cities
in general. ‘While the city may have failed Canadian writers as a locus
of the imagination,’ Sewell comments, ‘most Canadians were city
dwellers from the mid-nineteenth century on. Commentators looked at
this real world and concluded the city was a place that threatened
health.’73
Mirvish and Hume, then, invoked an urban discourse that saw the
manufacturing city as the space where contamination by poor hygiene
and the working class occurred, and implied that this was an unnatu-
ral environment for playing. Mirvish and Hume testified once more to
the class anxiety inscribed within the Entertainment District by remak-
ing the labour history of King-Spadina – which for the majority of the
twentieth century was largely manufacturing-based and working class
– as a narrative about the dirty and poor. The Entertainment District, in
contrast, supposedly embodied a ‘new urbanism,’ a cosmopolitan
mode of production that implied affluence, clean production, and for-
ward thinking – and thereby made the city safe for theatre and its well-
heeled audiences.
Conclusion
The inevitable question arises: Who are the discontents in this econ-
omy of urban play? There are a range of potential disruptions that the
Entertainment District tried to efface, for they represented a potential
rupture to its cozy play economy. The first was Toronto’s large not-for-
profit theatre sector, which resists definition as commodity perfor-
mance. There are patterns of urban consumption of which not-for-
profit theatres are a part, but these are more likely to be localized,
known primarily to Toronto residents, less amenable to large-scale
tourist marketing, and difficult to reify geographically. The second
potential threat was on the border of the Entertainment District. A

Queen Street residents group protested the extension of the Entertain-
ment District to Queen Street. Their organizer argued that ‘Queen St
W. we feel is part of our community ... It’s not an entertainment dis-
trict.’74 It is important not to idealize the political motives of residents’
associations, which, in Toronto, have predominantly concerned them-
selves with sustaining private property values; however, it is interest-
ing to note that some people, in spite of the best efforts of the
Entertainment District, still believed that ‘entertainment’ and ‘commu-
nity’ were antithetical. A third potential disruption lay in the heart of
the District itself. As Sassen points out, ‘global cities’ rely on a large
pool of service labour that is highly stratified internally by wage and
skill.75 On the one hand, there are the producers who work at the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Centre; on the other, there are the
people who clean their offices and those who make the beds at the
Holiday Inn. Market and sentimental harmony may be a goal of the
Entertainment District, but class and labour conflict did not simply
disappear with its creation. For instance, on the night that Ed Mirvish
was being celebrated by political and cultural luminaries as a hero for
his contributions to the city, members of Local 75 of the Hotel Employ-
ees Restaurant Employees Union protested Mirvish’s tough line in
contract negotiations. Theatre labour may have been well treated by
Mirvish, but those who worked in his restaurants for far lower wages
were often frustrated by his management and bargaining practices.76
Moreover, the membership of the Hotel and Restaurant union is domi-
nated by women, immigrants, and people of colour. The Entertain-
ment District values transnationalism as theatre and consumption,
but, as urban labour, transnationalism has proved more problematic.
The transnational migration of labour provided a workforce on which
this play economy depended, but those workers’ class position, and
their racial difference, was potentially disruptive. Theatre may have
helped secure the creation of the Entertainment District, and the Dis-
trict has been successful in offering a vision of civic harmony gained
through urban leisure consumption. But the protest by Mirvish’s res-
taurant workers serves as a reminder that this consumption – theatri-
cal and otherwise – also involves rather less romantic urban struggles.
PART TWO
The Edifice Complex

3 Space Administration:
Locating an Urban History
of Theatre Passe Muraille
When John Juliani described theatre in Canada as suffering from an

edifice complex, he had in mind regional theatre companies that occu-
pied buildings like the SLC. Canada’s regional theatre network was
inaugurated by the opening of the Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) in
Winnipeg in 1958, fulfilling recommendations made seven years ear-
lier by the Massey Report. During the next two decades a string of
buildings sprung up to house companies like Theatre Calgary and
Neptune Theatre in Halifax, whose repertoires drew largely on the
international mainstream and whose purviews were intended to
extend beyond their immediate locales to wider audiences. This expan-
sion of the Canadian theatre industry, though, was not without its crit-
ics. As Ric Knowles and Jennifer Fletcher comment, the regionals were
often disparaged for operating according to an industrial and bureau-
cratic model of culture, ‘as “branch-plant” operations, taking Art and
Culture from the Centre to the supposedly culturally impoverished
regions.’1 Indeed, the regional theatre network provided a structure
through which the production and distribution of relatively homoge-
neous high cultural commodities could be coordinated. The built
forms of these theatres, often styled in the massive concrete vernacular
of state-sponsored testaments to the Canadian public good, confirmed
both their dominance and their interchangeability.
A number of theatre companies grew up outside this network, how-
ever, and some of these became important features of the Canadian
theatrical landscape during the 1970s. In Toronto, these included The-
atre Passe Muraille (founded in 1968), Factory Theatre Lab (1970), Tar-
ragon Theatre (1971), and Toronto Free Theatre (1972). These
companies were among the more prominent members of what became
74 Part Two: The Edifice Complex
known as Toronto’s ‘alternative theatre movement,’ with Theatre

Passe Muraille frequently seen by commentators as the paradigmatic
alternative theatre.2 While these companies shared at least an initial
suspicion of the regional theatre system, the label ‘alternative theatre
movement’ implies a common purpose that simply did not exist. As
Knowles and Fletcher observe, the ‘mandates and practices of the so-
called “alternates” ... in fact varied considerably.’3 In spite of this, a
substantial body of theatre history about these companies has tended
to adopt a teleological model of their historical development (embrac-
ing what Alan Filewod has termed the ‘alternative orthodoxy’)4 and
driven a firm wedge between the concerns of the regional theatres and
those of their smaller counterparts.
Juliani’s characterization of the Canadian theatrical mainstream as
suffering from an edifice complex may have been true, but it is equally
true that many of the alternates experienced a variant of the same con-
dition. Indeed, companies like Passe Muraille, Tarragon, and Toronto
Free shared the same desire to own their buildings, and such owner-
ship testified to the companies’ success. Of the alternates or their suc-
cessors that still exist, all now own the buildings in which they reside.
Where the alternates diverged from the regionals was in the types of
buildings they occupied: many were formerly manufacturing facilities
that had become vacant when their owners departed the city core dur-
ing the suburbanization of manual industry in Toronto in the 1950s
and 1960s. Factory Theatre consciously drew attention to the industrial
character of its first location (a former candle factory) through the
company’s name, but its decision to locate in such a building was not
unusual in the first half of the 1970s. Tarragon, two blocks from Fac-
tory’s original home, occupied a former cribbage board factory (where
it remains today). Toronto Free Theatre’s premises on Berkeley Street
at the southeast edge of downtown were formerly a gasworks, and are
still the headquarters of CanStage, Toronto Free’s successor company.
Theatre Passe Muraille purchased a vacant metalworks near the inter-
section of Queen and Bathurst Streets, in the southwest of the older
city core, and has resided there since.
It is no accident that most of these companies followed the same pat-
tern of ownership, and it is this pattern that points to the implication of
small and mid-sized theatre companies in Toronto’s urban political
economy. Factory aside (which did not purchase a home until much
later), these companies identified a building that once housed manual
industry, purchased it, and renovated it to accommodate theatrical
Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe Muraille 75
performance. Such a process was possible because of a historically cir-

cumscribed combination of events: the buildings were available
because of the increasing suburbanization of Toronto’s manufacturing
industry, and they were relatively affordable because the massive
property-value inflation that came to characterize the downtown real
estate market in the 1980s had not yet occurred (before this, post-war
property prices in Toronto were largely stable, keeping pace with infla-
tion but neither rising nor falling sharply). Establishing a ‘permanent
home,’ as Passe Muraille called it, became a greater possibility than it
could have been before or since.
With this possibility came tremendous challenges, however, and it is
Passe Muraille that has grappled with Toronto’s urban political econ-
omy more directly (and tumultuously) than the other so-called alter-
nates. Passe Muraille was not the first alternate to occupy a former
factory (that was Factory Theatre), nor is it the longest resident com-
pany in a former factory (that is Tarragon Theatre). And, arguably, it
does not possess the building that has been gentrified most extensively
(that is likely CanStage at Berkeley Street). But Passe Muraille was the
first of these companies to own a former factory, and its attempts to
negotiate the challenges posed by the ownership of such a building –
by the property’s built form, its industrial history, and its value as real
estate – consistently elaborate a more subtle and expansive under-
standing of the edifice complex than Juliani imagined.
From its inception, Theatre Passe Muraille grappled with a spatial
contradiction raised by the local application of modern performance
ideology. On one hand, performance space was coded in late 1960s
Canada as the architectural expression of artistic ossification and social
privilege. Brutalist theatre buildings seemed to enforce boundaries
between stage, audience, and world, making these boundaries appear
immutable and impermeable. On the other hand, experimental theatre
of the late 1960s saw performance space (broadly defined) as a site of
theatrical and social contest, where, if the space itself were subjected to
consistent re-theorization, the theatrical event could be artistically and
socially liberatory. Theatre Passe Muraille was named with this in
mind: translated from the French, théâtre passe muraille means ‘theatre
through (or “without”) walls.’ The founder of Passe Muraille, Jim Gar-
rard, desired ‘a theatre free of distinctions between actor and spectator,
between “inside” and “outside” the theatre.’5 Paul Thompson deep-
ened the exploration of these ideals during his tenure as artistic direc-
tor through collective creations that often questioned what it meant to
perform in spaces not conventionally deemed theatrical. A production

like The Farm Show, played in a barn on a southwestern Ontario farm
with the audience sitting on hay bales, explicitly drew attention to the
way that space was an important constituent of the theatrical event.
Garrard’s notion of a ‘plastic theatre,’ and the company’s emphasis
in the early 1970s on touring and helping to develop new work across
Canada, demanded a constant re-evaluation of the location of perfor-
mance. Such a continuous re-theorization of performance space was
difficult to reconcile, however, with the administrative demands of an
expanding theatre company. Although Passe Muraille’s use of multi-
ple and flexible performance spaces was an inventive response to the
way in which the Canadian theatrical establishment predominantly
used performance space, this flexibility created problems as well as
possibilities. As any theatre company that attempts to tour on tight
budgets knows, re-situating a company in various, often logistically
demanding, spaces eventually can become tiring, expensive, and diffi-
cult to manage. Consequently, Passe Muraille focused on establishing
a single theatre complex that could function as a ‘home for its adminis-
tration’ in the mid-1970s.6 The company’s purchase of 16 Ryerson Ave-
nue was an attempt to divide spatial considerations from artistic ones;
more specifically, its goal was to make performance space assume a
predictable consistency through monopoly control of one location. The
creative possibilities of performance space were mitigated by the
administrative concerns of its management – in effect, the solution to
the spatial problem in one location was to move it to another.
The volatility of Toronto’s property market during the 1980s – and
the effect that this volatility had on the value of Passe Muraille’s prop-
erty – subsequently contributed to a financial crisis that nearly bank-
rupted the company. Yet once again the tense spatial dialectic
continued. While the building had become part of the financial prob-
lem, now it became part of the solution to that problem. In the 1990s,
Passe Muraille’s property was enlisted in an increasingly insistent
commemoration of the company’s own history through performance,
a commemoration that helped restore the company to some measure
of financial stability. If there were any doubt that the boundaries
between mainstream and alternative theatre were tenuous, the inextri-
cability of Passe Muraille’s theatrical and spatial histories shows that
such divisions became increasingly irrelevant. And if there were any
question about the difficulty of theatre companies asserting complete
control over performance space, Passe Muraille’s experience of urban
property ownership removes all doubts about the challenges of doing

so. The theatre beyond walls repeatedly discovered that its walls
offered more opportunities – and created more challenges – than its
founders could have imagined.
Towards a Permanent Home: Spatializing the History of

Theatre Passe Muraille
Theatre Passe Muraille was founded in 1968 by Jim Garrard at Roch-

dale College, the now defunct housing and educational laboratory
affiliated with the University of Toronto. Garrard was influenced by
the theatre experiments of LaMama in New York, Panic Circus in
France, and various work that he had seen while a student at the Lon-
don Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.7 Garrard saw Passe
Muraille as a similar response to naturalist theatre aesthetics and the
Canadian regional theatre movement, and his first two shows were
productions of plays that he had first seen performed by LaMama.
Paul Foster’s Tom Paine (1968) received only one performance in the
underground parking garage of Rochdale, but Garrard gained greater
attention with Rachel Owens’s Futz (1969), a love story between a
farmer and a pig. Passe Muraille’s notoriety in Toronto was cemented
when the actors in Futz were charged with and convicted of staging an
indecent performance (they were acquitted on appeal), and the show
inaugurated a provocative stylistic and political pose that became pop-
ularly associated, for better and worse, with the alternative theatres.
When Paul Thompson took over as artistic director in 1970, he
moved Passe Muraille’s acting ensemble into the collective creation of
plays, a mode of dramaturgy and performance style in which Thomp-
son and the actors created productions through research and improvi-
sation in rehearsal. This approach often involved a complete
rethinking of the way in which performance space contributed to the
creation and reception of theatre. The Farm Show (1972), for example,
was developed as a play about farm life by actors who lived and
worked on farms near Clinton, Ontario. The original production was
rehearsed and performed in Ray Bird’s barn, where the spectators
included people on whom characters in the play were based. The show
subsequently played Toronto and toured widely. 1837 (1973), created
by the Passe Muraille company and writer Rick Salutin, re-staged the
Upper Canada Rebellion as an allegory for Canadian cultural and eco-
nomic independence in the 1970s. The location of performance had a
direct impact on the dramaturgy of the play, with the ‘left-of-liberal

politics’ of the Toronto production toned down and the emphasis on
the farmers’ role in the revolt strengthened as the show toured
Ontario.8 The title of the show, now 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt, changed
to reflect the fact that it had been rewritten for rural audiences.
Although Theatre Passe Muraille produced the work of individual
playwrights, the company became best known for its method of collec-
tively developing plays that had ‘ordinary (even banal) Canadians as
their central figures.’9 The work of Passe Muraille in the early 1970s
used collective creation to yoke an intensely localist dramaturgy with
national (and nationalist) commentary: theatrical location, method,
subject matter, and political imperative seemed to converge more
immediately than in the established theatres. In Toronto, Passe
Muraille best exemplified the cultural nationalist ideal of, as Don
Rubin put it, ‘Canadian theatre as something distinct from the more tra-
ditional notion of theatre in Canada.’10
For the first eight years of its existence, Theatre Passe Muraille oper-
ated out of a variety of performance spaces in downtown Toronto, all
of which it rented. The 1975 production of I Love You, Baby Blue, how-
ever, provided Passe Muraille with the capital necessary to purchase
its present home at 16 Ryerson Avenue. I Love You, Baby Blue was a
collective creation that examined sexual attitudes in Toronto, taking
CityTV’s popular late-night soft-porn movies as its point of departure.
The show contained nudity and sexually explicit material and was
shut down twice by the morality squad of the Toronto police. In a
rerun of the Futz case, Thompson and cast members were eventually
acquitted of obscenity charges, but the play’s notoriety ensured a
lengthy and enormously profitable run. Passe Muraille located a
vacant building in a residential neighbourhood at the west end of
downtown near the intersection of Queen and Bathurst Streets and
purchased the property for $100,000. Passe Muraille thus became the
first ‘alternative’ theatre in Toronto to own its home. This ownership
testified to the company’s apparent vibrancy and stability, and it inau-
gurated an affiliation between property ownership and theatrical legit-
imacy in Toronto that would prove persistent for years to come.
Built in 1902 as a commercial bakery, complete with stables for
delivery horses, 16 Ryerson Avenue is a competently designed but
now slightly shabby example of Toronto’s mercantile industrial archi-
tecture, styled in beaux-arts neoclassicism. The Toronto Historical
Board describes the building as ‘a notable example of a small indus-
trial building of the period. The skilful use of brick and classical archi-
tectural design elements in the façade gives it a prominence in the
neighbourhood that is usually found only in public buildings.’11 The
building was listed in the City of Toronto’s Inventory of Heritage Prop-
erties in 1974, and it was subsequently designated as a historical prop-
erty of architectural value by Toronto City Council in 1977.12 This
prominence was not only aesthetic but physical and economic, since
the building occupied a site considerably larger than those of its resi-
dential neighbours and was relatively valuable; at 60 feet wide by 100
feet long, its lot was three times the width of the neighbourhood aver-
age, and the building’s 1902 City assessment valued the property at
$9000, a substantial sum for the time (especially since the neighbour-
hood’s workers lived in houses usually worth between $250 and
$600).13
The building housed bakeries and confectioneries until 1926, but in
1927 Wilkinson and Kompass of Hamilton took over the facility, manu-
facturing and wholesaling hardware until 1957. Sol Friendly Sheet
Metal Works, which manufactured heating supplies, occupied the
vacant building in 1959 and remained there until 1967, after which the
building sat empty until Theatre Passe Muraille’s purchase in 1975.
Following repairs to bring the space into compliance with building
codes for theatres, Passe Muraille opened its doors on Ryerson Avenue
in 1976. The former home of bakers and machinists was now the home
of theatre.
Finding a permanent home meant that Passe Muraille was making a
monopoly claim over the use of a particular space. Asserting monop-
oly control over space as property owners is only possible, however,
when certain historical conditions are met. It is not only a matter of
prices in the local real estate market being affordable; a supply of ame-
nable properties must also be available. The possibility of buying a
property like 16 Ryerson Avenue was contingent on changes in Tor-
onto’s urban political economy. Theatre Passe Muraille could only pur-
chase 16 Ryerson Avenue because manufacturing industry was
abandoning the downtown core. Fordist suburbanization of manufac-
turing in Toronto was well under way by 1975, and the location, scale,
and design of 16 Ryerson Avenue was economically impractical for
manufacturing metal products by the late 1960s, a fact that was dem-
onstrated by the building’s nearly eight-year vacancy when Passe
Muraille purchased it in 1975. When Wilkinson-Kompass (as Wilkin-
son and Kompass of Hamilton became) and Sol Friendly Sheet Metal
Works left 16 Ryerson Avenue, both moved to larger sites in the rap-
idly expanding suburb of North York.14 Manufacturing industries that
formerly would have occupied buildings such as 16 Ryerson Avenue
had largely left the downtown core or closed up shop permanently;
the portion of Canada’s economy devoted to the manufacturing indus-
try (already smaller than that of its major trading partners in North
America and Europe) had been declining since the end of the Second
World War, and Toronto’s industrial decline was even greater than
the national average. As remaining manufacturing companies like
Wilkinson-Kompass and Sol Friendly moved to greenfield sites and
industrial parks near 400-series superhighways, the majority of the
economic activity in the city core became tied to financial services and
commercial property development.15 This transformation suppressed
the market value of former downtown manufacturing sites enough
that even cash-strapped theatre companies could move into the prop-
erty market, and it freed up space that, while sometimes uncomfort-
able, could accommodate the needs of theatre companies and their
audiences. In fact, it is difficult to imagine 16 Ryerson Avenue as a
working factory today. This conceptual shift speaks to the way that the
post-war economic boom changed the dominant understanding of the
amount and type of space needed to do manufacturing work in Tor-
onto, while, at the same time, making former manufacturing spaces
seem entirely appropriate for theatre work. The idea of 16 Ryerson
Avenue as a manufacturing building seems almost quaint now, but as
a theatre space it seems entirely natural.
Property as a Spatial Instrument of Theatrical Labour
That it should appear this way, however, does not mean that the pro-
cess of transforming a manufacturing facility into a theatre venue is
without conflicts and contradictions. Under modern capitalism, the
privileged relationship of the subject to urban space is secured through
private-property ownership, and small and mid-sized theatre enter-
prises like Passe Muraille best exemplify the complexities and contra-
dictions of achieving such status. David Harvey argues that ownership
is the means by which monopoly control is asserted over space, and
that the property relationship attempts to produce ‘absolute space’
where ‘“owners” possess monopoly privileges over “pieces” of
space.’16 By 1975 Theatre Passe Muraille was looking for some sort of
predictability in its relationship with performance space; the company
wanted to exert greater control over space, and private-property own-

ership offered the greatest opportunity to do so. But owning one’s
property does not automatically mean that one can immediately use
that property most effectively; property ownership is only useful inso-
far as a property can be integrated into the everyday working practices
of a theatre company. As a result, Passe Muraille’s ownership of its
building, particularly one that was part of an increasingly tumultuous
urban political economy, had consequences for the company’s labour
process.
It is illuminating to consider 16 Ryerson Avenue as a spatial instru-
ment of theatrical labour for Passe Muraille. In framing the issue of Passe
Muraille’s relationship with its property in this way, I draw on Marx’s
foundational analysis of economic production, and on contemporary
materialist geography, which has attempted to spatialize Marx’s cate-
gories in order to account for the affiliation between social practice and
place. In the first volume of Capital, Marx makes a tripartite division in
his discussion of labour: there is the labourer, the social subject; there is
labour power, the ability to work; and there is the labour process, the
structured system by which the worker puts his or her labour to use in
service of the production of an object. The labourer and labour power
are potential resources, but are not actually labour practice until struc-
tured through some sort of process. The labour process, in turn, is
made of three parts: ‘(1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the
object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that
work.’17
It is this final component – comprising the instruments of labour –
that is particularly interesting in the context of Passe Muraille and its
property. Marx defines an instrument of labour in the following way:
[A] thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between him-
self and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his
activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chem-
ical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other sub-
stances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes ... In
a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour, in addition to
things through which the impact of labour on its object is mediated, and
which therefore in one way or another, serve as conductors of activity, all the
objective conditions necessary for carrying on the labour process.18
Marx did not imagine, however, that the spatial characteristics of a

labour process might be important in a complex fashion; insofar as he

considers space in Capital, Marx tends to treat it as the unmediated
physical reflection of a capitalist mode of production. In response,
materialist geographers have attempted to integrate spatial concerns
into Marx’s labour theory. Dorren Massey points out that spatial prac-
tices are always already inscribed in the labour process, exploring
‘spatial divisions of labour’ in which space functions as a necessary
and frequently disciplinary part of the organization of the labour pro-
cess.19 At the same time, the labour process is an important constituent
of space, part of what makes space not merely a physical precondition
for work but a social product created through work. This distinction is
also particularly significant for Henri Lefebvre, who ‘distinguishes
between Nature as naïvely given context and what can be termed “sec-
ond nature,” the transformed and social concretized spatiality arising
from the application of purposeful human labour. It is this second
nature that becomes the geographical subject and object of historical
materialist analysis, of a materialist interpretation of spatiality.’20
Materialist thinkers, then, have argued that labour and space are
inseparable. Marx draws attention to the fact that the labour process
requires instruments of work to function, and materialist geographers
show that space – regardless of the forms in which it appears – can
function as just such an instrument. Passe Muraille’s use of 16 Ryerson
Avenue as an instrument of its own theatrical labour process illustrates
that such use has concrete administrative and theatrical effects.
Accounting for 16 Ryerson Avenue as a spatial instrument of Passe
Muraille’s labour not only involves measuring how the company puts
the building’s physical qualities to work, but also how the company’s
work imagines the building’s ‘second nature’ in performance.
As with any mode of production, theatrical production requires that
its labour process be organized and administered. For Theatre Passe
Muraille, 16 Ryerson Avenue was the spatial means by which to cen-
tralize and coordinate its work, and, as such, became an administrative
instrument of labour. A fund-raising prospectus circulated in 1978
explicitly linked building renovations to Passe Muraille’s labour pro-
cess and practices: ‘The growth of this creative and resourceful enter-
prise, and the flourishing of many affilliated [sic] projects, has
necessitated the establishment of a CENTRE, a home for its adminis-
tration, for the building and storage of sets, and most importantly, for
a flexible performance space.’21 Significantly, this statement redefined
the earlier conception of flexibility employed by the company:
whereas previously Passe Murraile understood flexibility to be the

ability to perform in multiple places, now it understood flexibility to
be the ease with which a single place could be used. The practical chal-
lenges of working in rented space at Rochdale College and Trinity
Square (let alone the various sites that Passe Muraille had used around
the province) made ownership a desirable goal pragmatically; one
could, for example, drill holes in the floor and schedule work without
being accountable to nervous landlords or competing users.22 But
property ownership also brought with it an air of permanence. By
gaining ownership of fixed capital, Passe Muraille was able to lay
claim to an ideology of permanence – using space, in effect, to become
timeless – that could be mobilized as an administrative tool and virtue.
This ideology of permanence would also become important as the spa-
tial basis by which a Passe Muraille ‘tradition’ could later be pro-
claimed in performance.
Passe Muraille’s building also became an institutional instrument of
labour by helping to organize and sustain complementary economic
investments with the state and with trade labour. The extensive reno-
vations made to 16 Ryerson Avenue in 1983 are illustrative in this
regard. Significant funding for the renovations came from the federal
and provincial governments through the Canada/Ontario Employ-
ment Development Program, a scheme that provided wage subsidies
for registered businesses, not-for-profit organizations, partnerships,
and corporations to hire the long-term unemployed for specific
projects.23 Passe Muraille’s successful appeal for funding was made
not in artistic language but in that of spatialized political economy:
company correspondence to the federal government stated that con-
struction ‘requires at least 22 skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen total-
ling 221 work-weeks of labour – a significant figure at a time of
widespread unemployment.’24 Passe Muraille used its physical plant
to attract required investment from the state in the building itself,
transforming a manufacturing space into a space better suited to the-
atre work over the long term, and it linked funding for the company’s
spatial requirements to state desires to alleviate long-term unemploy-
ment during a major economic recession. This state contract also
involved the building in supporting both an internal labour economy
(the company’s work in its own space) and an external labour econ-
omy (the non-performance labour that the building attracted into the
theatrical workplace, as trade workers dismantled and remade the
interior of Theatre Passe Muraille during the 1983 renovation).25 This
moment embodied a shared work history, in which two types of work-

ers often considered to have little in common worked in, and on, per-
formance space.
Theatre companies need not only to coordinate their labour pro-
cesses but also to capitalize them, and it is in this context that its prop-
erty also became a financial instrument of labour for Passe Muraille.
The company used the industrial history of 16 Ryerson Avenue strate-
gically to attract capital investment to finance its work. As I noted ear-
lier, the building was deemed in 1977 to have ‘architectural value.’
When Passe Muraille first acquired the property, renovations were
geared primarily to making the space usable for public performance in
the short term: fitting fire doors, enclosing stairwells, and installing
public washrooms. But the building still required substantial recon-
struction. Its industrial heritage ensured an appropriate physical scale
and price, but the space was still not ideally suited for a theatrical
workplace. Thus, a major renovation in the early 1980s removed most
of the second floor and many of the building’s internal supporting,
and therefore obstructing, pillars. It also restored historically ‘correct’
sash windows to the building’s second-storey exterior.
The transformation of the interior for theatrical purposes depended
on the invocation of the exterior for ‘heritage’ purposes.26 Persuading
the City of Toronto of the building’s heritage value had prevented its
previous owner from demolishing the empty factory and encouraged
him to sell the plant to Passe Muraille.27 The official heritage designa-
tion, granted later, increased the urban status of the space, allowing
Passe Muraille to invoke 16 Ryerson Avenue’s protected industrial
façade as a means of levering capital investment into the theatre com-
pany. The 1978 fund-raising prospectus offered contributors the
opportunity of ‘investing in a handsome building, the continued
existence of which is assured by its designation under the
ontario heritage act,’ and gave them the chance of ‘enhancing
and preserving a part of toronto’s history,’ while ‘providing
audiences with a comfortable and accessible theatre.’28 The
importance of the building’s industrial history persisted after Passe
Muraille’s assumption of ownership, then, but that history was now
framed as heritage. The façade helped to smooth a difficult transition
from an industrial to a theatrical workplace by turning the building’s
architectural, aesthetic, and local history into tools of capital invest-
ment that allowed Passe Muraille to finance its work, and define that
work spatially.
Economic Crisis
Theatre Passe Muraille nearly ceased operations when it ran into seri-
ous financial difficulty in 1990. The company had accumulated a defi-
cit of approximately $500,00029 and its bank ultimately refused to
extend its line of credit. There was widespread concern in the theatre
community over this state of affairs: in a performance of the The Noam
Chomsky Lectures, Daniel Brooks remarked, ‘some of you may know
that Theatre Passe Muraille is undergoing great financial difficulty at
the present time. In fact, their general manager has told me that they
are in the avant-garde of financial crisis management.’30 This is a clever
way to describe the situation, but also a revealing one: the problem of
being avant-garde had shifted from the aesthetic to the economic
realm. Yet its property had allowed Passe Muraille access to capital
that it would otherwise have been denied; the value of 16 Ryerson
allowed work to continue far longer than would have been economi-
cally sustainable for many other theatre companies, and only ampli-
fied the company’s desire to hang on to the property. ‘What we’re
fighting for,’ Passe Muraille’s general manager told Theatrum magazine
in 1991, ‘is the survival of the facility as a viable theatre space.’31
Residential property values across Toronto rose significantly during
the 1980s, driving up the potential resale value of 16 Ryerson Avenue
to the point where the company could borrow heavily against its
equity in the building.32 As figure 3 demonstrates, residential prices in
both the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area and in the downtown-
west district increased almost in lock step through the early 1980s
recession and skyrocketed after the recession ended. By the time of an
appraisal in early 1983, the market value of 16 Ryerson Avenue had
almost trebled to $275,000.33 By 1990 the value of the property had
leapt to $890,00034 and the only thing that allowed the company to con-
tinue to operate – its line of credit with the Canadian Imperial Bank of
Commerce (CIBC) – was secured against 16 Ryerson Avenue.35 The
property value of 16 Ryerson Avenue permitted heavy borrowing on
this line of credit (up to $200,000 initially and then $300,000) to sustain
the company’s operating budget, allowing its work to continue when
its overall revenues were insufficient to meet expenditures.36 But bor-
rowing against the property to such an extent also tied Passe
Muraille’s financial administration to a highly speculative and volatile
downtown housing market. Real estate markets can fall as easily as
they can rise, and Passe Muraille’s crisis in 1990 and 1991 coincided
350,000
300,000
250,000
Dollars
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97
19
Year
Toronto CMA District C1
Figure 3 Residential property average sale prices for Toronto Census Metro-
politan Area (1953–98) and District C1 (Bloor Street–Lake Ontario, Yonge
Street–Dufferin Street) (1970–98).
Source: Toronto Real Estate Board.
with a dramatic drop in the value of residential properties in the Tor-

onto Census Metropolitan Area and an even steeper decline in its
immediate area (see figure 3).37 While Passe Muraille’s debt-to-income
ratio was undoubtedly extremely poor, this shudder in the real estate
market would not have reassured the company’s bank either, since the
CIBC would have been faced with the prospect of seizing an asset
whose value was threatened.
Property-value inflation and deflation, on a scale previously
unknown, became a dominant feature of Toronto’s post-Fordist urban
economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Passe Muraille entered this economy
through its building, and the measure of the company’s economic inte-
gration is the way in which its physical space offered, on the one hand,
a means of capitalization and, on the other, an ever greater exposure to
the economic shocks of property-value speculation. In effect, Passe
Muraille internalized the post-Fordist property market through its per-
formance space, and this contributed to the company’s near collapse.
Heritage and the Spatialization of Collective Memory
Although Theatre Passe Muraille often privileged theatre space as an

administrative issue (as a ‘container’ for its theatrical activity), theatre

space did not disappear as an artistic issue. While heritage referred to a
particular representation – historical, aesthetic, and symbolic – of the
architectural features of 16 Ryerson Avenue in the late 1970s and 1980s,
the term took on a different meaning after Passe Muraille’s financial
crisis in 1990–1. Alongside its functional and administrative signifi-
cance, the building became a spatial commemoration of the company’s
own history, and this commemoration helped restore the company to a
measure of its former health.
Materialist geography argues that it is an epistemological error to
assume that the measurement of spatial relationships is necessarily
physical and a fetish to make the physical the referent and analytical
touchstone of the spatial. As a corrective, Harvey emphasizes Bach-
elard’s theory of ‘poetic space’ and Lefebvre’s concept of ‘imagined
space.’ Here space functions as a representational discourse in which
‘codes, signs, ... utopian plans, imaginary landscapes, and even mate-
rial constructs such as symbolic spaces, particular built environments,
paintings, museums, and the like’ produce social meanings above and
beyond the physical.38 One of the ways in which 16 Ryerson Avenue
became a poetic space for Passe Muraille was through its role in pro-
ducing collective memory. ‘Heritage,’ after Passe Muraille’s financial
crisis, increasingly connoted the way in which 16 Ryerson Avenue spa-
tially commemorated the theatre company’s own history, and offered a
way to recuperate the past in order to secure a future existence.
Commemoration, as Susan Bennett points out, is nostalgic. It acti-
vates an ‘imaginary past’ as a ‘stable referent’ in order to compensate
for a ‘defective and diminished present.’39 Bennett describes commem-
oration as functioning through a binary of good past/bad present,
though this binary may be reframed slightly in the context of Passe
Muraille; for the company, it was not only an issue of good past/bad
present but also of stable past/unstable present. As Passe Muraille
weathered the upheavals of a post-Fordist political economy in Tor-
onto in the 1990s, the company’s history became a marker of stability
and its property an important means by which that history could be
made spatially manifest. The theatrical event at 16 Ryerson Avenue
increasingly commemorated this ostensibly stable past, transposing it
to the present as a form of theatrical compensation for contemporane-
ous political and cultural volatility.
The 1990s were unkind to mid-sized, not-for-profit theatres across
Canada.40 The recession of the early 1990s was deep and long in
Ontario, to a degree unseen since the Depression. Moreover, the politi-
cal consensus around the desirability of public arts funding in Ontario,

on which not-for-profit companies rely heavily, began to break down
in that recession (and was dismantled completely after the election of
Mike Harris’s Conservative government in 1995). Without the degree
of access to private sponsorship that the regional theatres enjoyed,
mid-sized theatres in Toronto, of which Theatre Passe Muraille was
only one, were generally under severe financial pressure for the entire
decade.
Theatre Passe Muraille was distinct from these other companies,
however, because of its ability to recuperate a historical period in the
1970s when it was seen – rightly or wrongly – as ‘probably the most
influential company in Canada.’41s To this end, Passe Muraille’s pro-
gramming increasingly recalled its early and most famous collective
creations. This work included The Urban Donnellys (1993), which resit-
uated some of the themes of the 1973–4 collective creation Them Don-
nellys in inner-city Toronto; a new production of 1837: The Farmer’s
Revolt (1998); Michael Healey’s The Drawer Boy (first produced in the
1998–9 season and then remounted in the 1999–2000 season), based on
the making of The Farm Show; and The Rediscovery of Sex (2000), a col-
lective creation that revisited the ideas explored in I Love You, Baby
Blue. Furthermore, many of the practitioners from Passe Muraille’s
first decade were prominently involved. These included Paul Thomp-
son, actor David Fox, Jim Garrard, actor-writer Linda Griffiths, and
Miles Potter (who acted in The Farm Show and 1837 and directed The
Drawer Boy). Throughout the 1990s, the company’s repertoire and per-
sonnel increasingly drew on what were perceived as Passe Muraille’s
golden years.
A performance of The Drawer Boy was a particularly powerful com-
memorative event, in which the company’s representation of its past
shored up an unsteady present by positing the existence of, and its
allegiance to, a Theatre Passe Muraille tradition (however ill-defined
that tradition may have been). The basic plot of the play – an actor
named Miles lives and works with a pair of farmers as research for an
unnamed play that he is helping to create and in which he will per-
form – was inspired by the creation of The Farm Show. The role of
Angus, one of the two farmers in The Drawer Boy, was played by David
Fox, who also performed in the original production of The Farm Show.
The director of The Drawer Boy, Miles Potter, performed in The Farm
Show, and the character of Miles in The Drawer Boy is a clear reference
to Potter and some of his experiences living and working on a farm.
The origin of the haying scene in The Farm Show, which was based on
Potter’s frustrations with farm labour, is depicted in The Drawer Boy.
For those in the audience who saw the original production of The
Farm Show, The Drawer Boy acknowledged their spectatorial history
with the company and affirmed that this history was constitutive of
their present spectatorship. In the same way that a production of the
play helped to unify Theatre Passe Muraille’s history into heritage, the
production’s inclusiveness reassured spectators that the history of
Passe Muraille was also their own history and, like the company’s, was
uncontested and stable. For those in the audience who did not see the
original production of The Farm Show, The Drawer Boy’s appeal to the
socially affirmative power of theatre was equally inviting; the produc-
tion implied that, by attending a production of The Drawer Boy, one
memorialized the theatrical past and through that commemoration
assumed a place within the Passe Muraille tradition.
Consequently, this conflation of histories and subjectivities com-
pletely re-figured the conception of Theatre Passe Muraille’s work dur-
ing the 1970s as ‘alternative.’ By deploying Passe Muraille’s history as
a stable and unifying referent, the theatrical event could no longer con-
ceive of this history as being in formation, dissonant, and anti-institu-
tional. Passe Muraille’s production of The Drawer Boy stripped the
company’s ‘alternative’ past of its radical content because that past
was now bourgeois, hermetic, and accessible through unmediated rep-
resentation in the present day. And an important part of that radical
past – the way in which it was spatially interrogative – became unrep-
resentable once 16 Ryerson Avenue was imagined as a commemorative
site. The nostalgic invocation of a stable past, so reassuring in a partic-
ularly uncertain moment of cultural production, was contingent on
performance space being conceived as transhistorically uncontested
and infinitely transposable. But this was misleading: 16 Ryerson Ave-
nue was a necessary part of this commemoration because, in the post-
Fordist economy, the building itself was reassuring. Its heritage, in
both an architectural and ideological sense, commemorated a Fordist
age that was ostensibly ordered and coherent and from which an
insurgent theatre company and its audience could emerge.
Conclusion
The problems of performance space did not cease to be an issue for

Theatre Passe Muraille after it purchased 16 Ryerson Avenue. Rather,
the company first used the building to relocate spatial concerns from
an artistic ideal to the administration of its labour process. The com-
pany’s challenge became finding the right theatrical ‘container’ for its
work, a challenge that could be met because the post-Fordist subur-
banization of manufacturing in Toronto’s urban political economy
released former industrial spaces for use by theatre companies. When
Passe Muraille purchased 16 Ryerson Avenue, however, it became
tightly tied to Toronto’s volatile property market, forcing the theatre
company to attempt to reconcile the spatial contradictions of the build-
ing adminstratively: while owning it offered methods of capitalization
and physically embodied a sense of stability that funding sources and
audiences usually welcome, the building, as real estate, also tied Passe
Muraille to swings in local property values. In this sense, Passe
Muraille awkwardly assimilated Toronto’s urban political economy
into the conception and management of its performance space.
But if materialist geography and political economy help illuminate
the unacknowledged spatial history of a theatre company, it is impor-
tant to acknowledge how transformations in theatre practice itself are
part of that history. For Passe Muraille, this transformation increas-
ingly meant that 16 Ryerson Avenue became a commemorative site,
the spatial means by which the theatre event blurred histories, and
invented and reproduced cultural tradition. A Theatre Passe Muraille
that was, in Jim Garrard’s words of 1968, ‘free of distinctions between
actor and spectator, between “inside” and “outside” the theatre,’ came
to promote a very different understanding of the ‘theatre beyond
walls.’
4 A Troubled Home: Spatializing the
Demise of Toronto Workshop Productions
Theatre Passe Muraille may have struggled to resolve its anxious rela-
tionship to 16 Ryerson Avenue, but it was not the only mid-sized the-
atre in Toronto to be preoccupied with its property. It is equally
striking how much of the history of Toronto Workshop Productions
(TWP) was tied up with its property at 12 Alexander Street, a former
car showroom near the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley Streets in
the city core. Through the 1980s, TWP increasingly invoked its prop-
erty as a way of solving (or eliding) mounting financial and adminis-
trative difficulties. Like Theatre Passe Muraille before it, TWP invoked
its property as an ideal of ‘home,’ where 12 Alexander Street func-
tioned as a locus for a community of artists and political fellow travel-
lers that was perceived to be socially marginal.1 TWP’s preoccupation
with 12 Alexander Street was a compensatory response to the com-
pany’s precarious situation, and the theatre building a site of anxiety
displacement: if TWP was in crisis administratively and financially,
then the symbolic and physical presence of that building implied sta-
bility and permanence. For the company, these qualities were particu-
larly important to assert when Canada’s political economy was
moving to the right during the 1980s.
This chapter focuses on the ways that TWP’s decline and ultimate
death were mediated through its property. It does not provide a com-
pany history, at least not of a conventional sort; Neil Carson, in Harle-
quin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions, has
already written a detailed history of TWP, and he devotes a substantial
portion of his book to the company’s troubles in the 1980s. But Car-
son’s analysis also exemplifies the conventional response to a major
problem one faces when writing about TWP: for all but its final two
years, the company was headed by one artistic director. George Lus-
combe was the central figure at TWP for so long that it can be difficult
to distinguish whether commentators are discussing the company or
writing Luscombe’s biography. Carson calls Luscombe ‘the single ani-
mating spirit of the theatre,’2 Johnston claims that ‘the history of Tor-
onto Workshop Productions ... is indistinguishable from that of George
Luscombe,’3 and one of TWP’s assessors at the Ontario Arts Council
states bluntly that ‘the history of TWP is the autobiography of George
Luscombe.’4 Furthermore, the demise of the company is often ac-
counted for in patriarchal and Lear-like terms, a narrative strategy that
reproduces the conventional ideal of history as the chronicle of great
male leaders, and submits the history of TWP rather uncomfortably to
the representational demands of tragedy. For example, in a magazine
profile of Luscombe written by Urjo Kareda shortly after Luscombe’s
death, entitled ‘Our Father,’ Kareda ties TWP’s downfall to a declining
Luscombe, the company’s collapse the result of a glorious but waning
patriarch staying on the throne too long and failing to complete the
division of his kingdom successfully.5
It is important not to diminish the significance of George Lus-
combe’s many roles, each one practised determinedly, in the history of
TWP: whether as director, administrator, acting teacher, or political
advocate. It is also important, however, to recognize that one man can-
not be the sole historical cause for, or measure of, the slow death of a
company. The story of TWP’s demise may feature Luscombe as pro-
tagonist, but it is also a more complicated narrative involving a theatre
company’s long struggle – and ultimate failure – to stabilize its rela-
tionship to urban space. If space, rather than the individual, is the
frame through which TWP’s collapse is read, then it is possible to iden-
tify how TWP’s demise was also rooted in the way that the company
was valued spatially by those who worked on its behalf (and this
includes not only George Luscombe and the company’s staff but also
TWP’s board of directors, artistic colleagues, political advocates, and
funding agencies). The death of TWP vividly illustrates how a theatre
company may negotiate multiple and sometimes conflicting spatial
values, and it is through its property that the unanticipated conse-
quences of such contradictions can be indexed.
As I indicated at the outset of this study, it is important to recognize
that ‘space’ can only be known by the forms it assumes. Moreover,
these forms are various, can exist simultaneously, and may combine in
unexpected ways. The history of TWP reveals that two broad spatial
Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop Productions 93
forms were particularly important to the company – theatre space and

urban space – and that their intersection was particularly consequen-
tial during the 1980s. More specifically, distinct characteristics of the-
atre and urban space became important during this period: the
aesthetic, ontological, and physical features of theatre space encoun-
tered the spatial forms of urban property, land, and real estate. TWP
not only negotiated these various spatial phenomena, but, especially
during the 1980s, negotiated combinations of them simultaneously,
whether it realized this or not at the time.
To its guardians, TWP was valuable because, as a theatre enterprise,
it was seen to be separate and offer a refuge from everyday life. This
sentimental ideal stemmed from the separatist way in which TWP spa-
tialized socialist aesthetic ideology, first as a kind of company auto-
imaginary and then in the company’s use of physical places. But in an
ironic and unexpected twist, TWP’s eventual turn to property owner-
ship to shore up the sentimental value of the company also contributed
to the conditions by which the market value of TWP emerged sover-
eign through the potential for real estate speculation. The sentimental
value of guardianship unwittingly encouraged, and then gave way to,
the market value of proprietorship because the spatial means of their
articulation – 12 Alexander Street – were the same. Proprietorship ini-
tially offered TWP the opportunity to capitalize on the market value of
12 Alexander Street as a commodity in Toronto’s inflationary real
estate market during the late 1980s, and the company attempted to
play this real estate market to its advantage. The results proved wholly
unsuccessful, however, and exposed a central problem that could not
be resolved, at least at that historical moment: TWP saw itself as a com-
pany resisting the dominance of market relations, but, by attempting to
use its property to secure the company’s future, was propelled more
deeply into the market economy than it could manage.
Performance, Property, and Problems: Spatializing the History

of Toronto Workshop Productions
Toronto Workshop Productions plays a key role in the history of con-

temporary Toronto theatre. Founded in 1959 as Workshop Productions
by George Luscombe (‘Toronto’ was added to the company’s name in
1963), TWP was, for nearly a decade, an important alternative to com-
mercial touring shows and local avatars of high culture like the Crest
Theatre. Much of its distinctiveness stemmed from the fact that Lus-
combe’s politics were explicitly socialist (unlike the softer left-liberal-

ism of many of his peers in Toronto theatre), and he was committed to
developing the group theatre techniques that he had learned as an
actor in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Britain. Unlike much
Toronto theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, TWP’s work was actor- rather
than playwright-centred (though one could justifiably argue that, in its
singularity of method and presentational style, TWP’s work was
equally Luscombe-centred). Luscombe’s acting ensembles were often
exceptionally skilled and disciplined; performances in a TWP show
extended naturalist characterization through stylized, often rhythmic
stage movement, and productions like Hey, Rube! Ten Lost Years, and
The Mac-Paps saw the stage as a distinct forum for socialist and theatri-
cal advocacy.
TWP started producing plays in a donated, 100-seat basement space
in Parkdale, a working-class neighbourhood in the old city’s west end.
The first play to draw popular and critical acclaim was Hey Rube!
which TWP first mounted in 1961 and then re-staged periodically. A
play about a tattered circus troupe that performs for a hostile town, the
play’s success in its 1966 production helped convince TWP to move to
larger quarters (the arts councils’ insistence that TWP attract larger
audiences also compelled the transfer). The following year Luscombe
leased an empty car showroom in the heart of downtown Toronto.
With the help of a friendly architect, and through colleagues donating
their labour, the company quickly transformed 12 Alexander Street
into a 285-seat theatre. On New Year’s Eve, 1967, TWP gave its first
performance in its new home.
Productions like Mr. Bones (1969) and Chicago ’70 (1970) attracted
local and international attention, but in 1974 a fire seriously damaged
12 Alexander Street. Though it did not own the building, the company
raised the funds to pay for repairs and quickly reopened. The fire inau-
gurated a pattern of periodic anxiety over its property. In 1977 TWP’s
lease was terminated, but, after successfully staving off eviction, the
company faced the same threat in 1979. A major public-relations cam-
paign persuaded the City of Toronto to freeze commercial develop-
ment on the site and the province agreed to provide an interest-free
mortgage so that TWP could buy the property (which it finally did in
1984). These spatial anxieties were accompanied by increasing finan-
cial and administrative trouble at the company: audiences were declin-
ing and the company was under pressure from the arts councils to
improve its administration. Moreover, TWP’s politics seemed increas-
ingly out-of-step with the emerging conservatism of the 1980s; even

though provincial governments remained largely middle-of-the-road
ideologically, the Progressive Conservative federal government, elec-
ted in 1984, was committed to reducing arts funding and fostering pri-
vate enterprise; and a faction of aldermen (as city councillors were
then called) with close ties to commercial property developers con-
trolled Toronto city council.
Put simply, TWP was in serious trouble by the 1980s. As table 1
shows, TWP’s accumulated deficit in 1980 was nearly $90,000; though
the deficit had, in fact, been accumulating over the previous few years,
accounting errors had led the company and its funding bodies to
believe that TWP had been operating in the black.6 The unexpected
appearance of a substantial deficit was alarming and called into ques-
tion the company’s attention to administrative and financial planning.
In 1982 the Canada Council expressed its concern that the company
projected a deficit of over $200,000, noted falling attendance, and
urged it to ‘re-establish contact with an audience.’7 By 1984 TWP’s
funding bodies were becoming increasingly uneasy about the com-
pany’s administrative and financial difficulties – TWP had, for exam-
ple, employed four different administrators between the 1981–2 and
1984–5 seasons8 – and progressively more frustrated with Luscombe
and the board of directors.9 They, along with the theatre’s board of
directors, were anxious to resolve the issue of Luscombe’s successor,
keeping a watchful eye to Luscombe retiring or, at least, reducing his
role to directing TWP’s actor training program. Luscombe resisted
being eased aside and his relations with the board grew tense, but in
March 1985 he agreed to the appointment of Robert Rooney as associ-
ate artistic director. After a year’s probation, Rooney would be pro-
moted to artistic director. This ostensibly signalled that the board was
now taking a more active role in the administration of the company
and that the long-standing problem of how to plan Luscombe’s succes-
sion had been successfully resolved.
But if TWP’s affairs looked like they might stabilize, two more serious
blows landed that summer. The company’s accumulated deficit, already
barely sustainable and only kept in check by sharp reductions in pro-
gramming, more than tripled in one season to almost $200,000. This fig-
ure did not include the $100,000 mortgage liability to the Ontario
government that TWP now carried because its purchase of 12 Alexander
Street had been finalized. TWP acknowledged that the company faced
‘the most serious financial crisis in its history.’10 To make matters worse,
Table 1 Toronto Workshop Productions annual accumulated operating deficit
Yeara Accumulated deficit
1980 $81,654
1981 167,407
1982 181,153
1983 95,683
1984 54,271b
1985 179,328c
1986 223,371
1987 149,920d
1988e 375,870
Sources: 1980, 1981 – Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Financial History 1979/80–1982/

83,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library; 1982, 1983 –
TWP, ‘Balance Sheet,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph
Library; 1984 – TWP, ‘Copy of Completed Metropolitan Toronto 1985 Application for
Grants in Aid of the Arts,’ 1985, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph
Library; 1985, 1986 – TWP, ‘Financial Report,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908000, TWP Archives,
University of Guelph Library; 1987 – TWP, ‘Financial Report,’ 1987, TWP Archives, Uni-
versity of Guelph Library; 1988 – TWP ‘Revenues and Expenses Report,’ 1988, XZ1 MS
A908000, TWP Archives, University of Guelph Library.
a
This refers to the end of the fiscal year, which for 1980–3 was 31 August. From 1984
on, the end of the fiscal year was 30 June. Figures are not adjusted for inflation.
b
This figure should be treated with some scepticism. A figure from a financial statement
was unavailable, the data provided to the Cultural Affairs Division of Metropolitan Toronto
in the application from which this figure is drawn appear to be incomplete, and TWP had
a history of under-reporting its accumulated deficit to funding bodies. In some cases, this
is because of accounting errors on its part, in others because the company’s fiscal year
did not correspond to that of the granting body; therefore the deficit projection was – as it
was every year in TWP’s year-ahead budget – significantly optimistic.
c
An alternative deficit figure of $249,566 is contained in a fragment of a larger, undated doc-
ument pertaining to the financial picture of the company and its plans for deficit reduction.
This figure is not included in the table because of the presence of an audited figure; how-
ever, it is possible, given the confused state of TWP’s financial administration at the time,
that this figure more accurately reflects the deficit position of the company that the one that
the records assessed by the auditor produced. Either way, the situation is poor.
TWP also finally received the deed to the 12 Alexander Street property during the
1984–5 financial year. As a result of this purchase, TWP now carried an additional
$100,000 liability on top of its accumulated deficit in the form of an interest-free mort-
gage owed to the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture (this was the only mortgage
on the property, as TWP’s agreement with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
covered a revolving term loan secured against the property, but the province was lead
creditor in the event of bankruptcy). This liability was not discharged until 12 Alexander
Street was sold and the company wound up.
d
This figure includes a one-time deficit reduction grant from the Ontario Ministry of Citi-
zenship and Culture in the amount of $109,489.
e
TWP dismissed all staff and ceased operations at the end of June 1988. The company
finally ceased to exist legally in the fall of 1989.
the Canada Council informed TWP that its operating grant would be cut
by $30,000 for the upcoming year. The OAC followed with a $6000 cut.
This crisis atmosphere prompted the OAC and the Canada Council to
commission a study of TWP’s management. Consultant Graeme Page
recommended wholesale administrative reorganization, including the
establishment of a board of trustees to ‘review, approve and monitor all
budgets, cash-flow projections, renovation plans and the like’ and, ulti-
mately, to serve as a final arbiter on all administrative functions of the
company.11 Page’s report provided the final impetus for Luscombe to
assume the position of ‘Artistic Director Emeritus.’ The trustees took
over in September 1986, with representatives of TWP, the Toronto Arts
Council, and the OAC constituting the board, and Robert Rooney’s
ascension to the artistic directorship meant that he now grappled with
the precarious state of the company.
Neither Luscombe nor Rooney lasted long in their new positions,
however, as the board of directors and the administrative trustees soon
dismissed both (in 1987 and 1988, respectively) amid cancelled shows
and soaring deficits. They appointed actor Leon Pownall as the new
artistic director, and, in the face of vocal opposition from many local
artists and politicians, mooted various schemes to capitalize on the real
estate value of 12 Alexander Street. TWP finally collapsed in 1989, with
the City of Toronto purchasing the boarded-up property at 12 Alex-
ander Street so that it would remain a theatre building. The purchase
price covered TWP’s debts, but there was nothing left over to continue
producing plays.
Theatrical Guardianship as a Spatial Ideology
Critics, most notably Carson, have discussed TWP’s difficulty in recon-

ciling artistic and economic imperatives, but they have considered
only indirectly how the company’s property was often at the heart of
this struggle. The best way to describe TWP’s view of itself is as a
guardian of the theatre, with George Luscombe as that view’s chief
exponent. This lengthy quotation, taken from a speech Luscombe gave
at a crisis meeting between TWP and its funding councils in 1986, illus-
trates best the sentimental economy that Luscombe and the company
had constructed over the lifetime of the theatre:
We live in hope, or we would not have begun the enterprise of theatre pro-
duction in the first place. Our optimism and faith in ourselves has not
diminished with the years. In fact, many of our objectives over the past 27
years have come to pass and have contributed to the development of the-
atre, not only in Toronto, but nationally. But change and adaptation to a new
era is essential and our problem has become the very thing we fought so
hard to achieve – the building – it’s [sic] condition. Repairs are a constant
problem ... But in my opinion it is not these things, most unnoticed by the
audience that has [sic] caused our audience to withdraw from our theatre.
By far the stronger reason is the perception of 12 Alexander Street as a the-
atre that ‘once was,’ a theatre of uncomfortable benches that ‘once was’ the
‘in’ thing. A theatre of black painted walls that ‘once was’ what one
expected or would put up with. In short a theatre that has remained in the
60’s and 70’s – whose appeal is ‘once was’ ... At the time of our winning the
theatre in 1980 from the developer, the city passed a by-law defining the
building and land at 12 Alexander as a theatre space from this time on.12
This was the result of the enthusiasm of the people of Toronto at that time to
maintain the theatre and TWP ... It is my intention as I relinquish the Artistic
leadership of the company to see it firmly settled in its home [emphasis
added]; to see it as a theatre for other young companies and groups lacking
a home of their own; to see it as a meeting place of like-minded men and
women whose concerns for man’s plight has led them to seek solutions and
whose love of life has led them to seek those solutions in the theatre. The
first and immediate change needed is the long overdue renovations to the
theatre ... It is obvious from the above that while the situation is very seri-
ous, we still have great faith in the viability of TWP. We feel, and the Board
agrees with me on this, that the traditions so firmly established by the The-
atre over the past quarter of a century must be kept alive; that the need for
the type of socially responsible work is probably more important in the
future when we are and will be faced with more social problems.13
For Luscombe, TWP’s ‘tradition’ was inseparable from its ‘home’ at 12

Alexander Street. The company’s purpose, then, was to serve as a
guardian of the ‘meeting place’ for the theatrical community of ‘like-
minded men and women’ it housed. Though this speech was perhaps
the single clearest articulation of Luscombe’s desire to keep TWP
afloat, it also brought into focus the way in which TWP’s ideology of
theatrical guardianship was spatially dependent.
Luscombe’s lofty language and romantic appeal should not obscure
the fact that this ideology relied on a long-standing, complex, and
often rigorous logic about the ideal relationship between theatre and
place. For TWP, its building represented the spatial manifestation of
the socialist and oppositional artistic lineage of which it considered

itself to be a part. The value of that building was rooted in its separa-
tion from everyday life, and the company frequently articulated this
value in sacral and domestic terms, representing the building in such a
way that its preservation and protection became a necessity. These sen-
timents – the separatist and the protectionist – required TWP to
assume the role of guardian over 12 Alexander Street, since the prop-
erty was their most visible embodiment. In doing so, TWP articulated
the aesthetic, social, ontological, and physical logic on which that
guardianship rested.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard proposes a phenomenology
of space, an attempt to theorize what he calls ‘felicitous’ or ‘eulogized’
space.14 He sets out to determine
the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be
defended against adverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, and
with the differences entailed by poetic shadings, this is eulogized space.
Attached to its protective value, which can be a positive one, are also imag-
ined values, which soon become dominant. Space that has been seized upon
by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures
and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but
with all the partiality of the imagination. Particularly, it nearly always exer-
cises an attraction. For it concentrates being within limits that protect.15
Bachelard argues that ‘poetry,’ by which he means artistic forms in

general, communicates through a series of arresting and revelatory
‘images.’ He argues that art activates (though, he stresses, does not cre-
ate) an ecstatic ontological ‘archetype lying dormant in the depths of
the unconscious.’16
It is a logical question how Bachelard’s formulation, with its poetic
romanticism, essentialism, and ahistoricism is useful to materialist crit-
icism (Bachelard writes, for example, that ‘the poetic image has no
past’ – a problematic claim in a materialist context).17 But Bachelard is
useful – if read against the grain – when one considers TWP, because
he tries to account for the ways in which certain spaces are valued over
others and marked off from everyday life. He claims that this process is
possible because those separate spaces are imagined to be ontologi-
cally expressive. They need protection because they express the ‘being’
of those who occupy them, and so must be defended from seizure,
which would represent the occupants’ symbolic death. What Bachelard
lacks, though, is a historical account of how and why this process

occurs. He claims that space, in general, is separatist, ontological, and
in need of protection; it is more important here to show how and why
TWP’s theatre space, in particular, was imagined to be separatist, onto-
logical, and in need of protection – and what the material effects of this
imagining were.
TWP’s work resided within a lineage of socialist theatre defined by
Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator, and Joan Little-
wood. The company shared with these artists a systematic pursuit of
anti-naturalist theatrical forms, a commitment to left-wing politics,
and a mistrust of direct polemic. TWP also shared the view that
because theatre relies on representation, the relationship between the-
atre and everyday life should not be homologous but refractory; that
is, theatre should not try to collapse the distinction between itself and
everyday life, but rather should exploit that distinction, because its
basis – representation – opens up the possibility of a distinct perfor-
mance vernacular that is irreducible to everyday language. Luscombe
described this ideal as ‘the opportunity to lift out of life onto a very
high frame that which is not realistic but rather, representational ...
Remember what Shakespeare said, “... as if into a mirror,” not into a
mirror; and Stanislavski expressed it as rendering into artistic terms.
The word rendering is very important.’18 In Luscombe’s understand-
ing, representation’s emphasis on the conditional ‘as if,’ on rendering
and transposition, meant that even if theatre invoked everyday life it
did this through a representational logic that was autonomous and
indigenous to performance itself. This meant that, in the theatre event,
the everyday should be seen as a representational effect of the medium
itself, not as a blurring of the space between theatre and the everyday.
Luscombe’s description echoes a line of thinking within socialist
aesthetics about the way in which representation should be used to
rupture any presumed homology between art and everyday life.
Though he does not say so explicitly, Luscombe obviously invokes
Brecht’s thinking; Luscombe shared Brecht’s respect for the supposed
‘epic’ qualities of Shakespeare, and concurred with Brecht’s con-
ception that the ideal representational relationship between art and
‘real life’ was one of refraction rather than verisimilitude.19 In a
broader sense, Luscombe’s thinking had much in common with that of
Herbert Marcuse, who elaborated upon the ideal of a deeply politi-
cized ‘autonomous’ art first articulated by Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer. Marcuse argues that the aesthetic form both sublimates
and de-sublimates the ‘given reality,’ reconciling the social subject to it

but also opening up the possibility of seeing it anew, because the oper-
ations of representation and the operations of reality can never be
entirely reconciled:
The work of art is thus ‘taken out’ of the constant process of reality and
assumes a significance and truth of its own. The aesthetic transformation is
achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding
so that they reveal the essence of reality in its appearance: the repressed
potentialities of man and nature. The work of art thus re-presents reality
while accusing it.20
Achieving autonomy was primarily an aesthetic problem for Lus-

combe, Brecht, and Marcuse; the distinctiveness and possibilities of the
artistic form were marked out through the specific demands and repre-
sentational vocabulary of art itself. For them, art ideally provoked an
imaginary schism between itself and its social formation. Its efficacy
and legitimacy were predicated on the existence and exploitation of
that imaginary space apart.
It is in this context that TWP’s recurring productions of Hey Rube!
were exemplary: the play insists on the primacy of a representational
vocabulary that it understands to be indigenously theatrical, and then
extends those representational ideals into a statement on the ideal
relationship between a theatre company and its social formation. Hey
Rube! was TWP’s signature piece, and was staged more often than any
other play in the company’s repertoire (the first production was in
1961, and the play was remounted in 1966, 1972, and 1984). Filewod
describes Hey Rube! in this way: ‘Its plot is little more than an
extended sketch: it describes the ordeals of a tattered one-ring circus
as it prepares to battle creditors and hostile townsfolk. Much of the
performance consisted of circus acts mimed in the Littlewood manner,
with orchestrated lighting effects, music and sound cues, and group
improvisation.’21 Part of Luscombe’s enthusiasm for the play stemmed
from his belief that the circus, with its emphasis on rigorous physical
training and precise gesture, on visual spectacle, and on a necessary
connection between individual virtuosity and strict collaboration,
offered ‘an essentially theatrical language.’22 Luscombe’s theatrical
language was physical and imagistic, but, more importantly, it at-
tempted to mark out a representational vernacular that was indige-
nously performative and obstinately separatist. The circus of Hey
Rube! provided an ideal model of the vernacular distinctiveness of

performance.
Hey Rube! also offered a paradigm of an oblique relationship
between the theatre enterprise and its social formation. The down-at-
heels circus in the play performs to a hostile town, but it is because
their theatrical language is deployed from a position of social margin-
alization that the circus performers are able to offer uncomfortable crit-
ical revelation to the townsfolk about themselves and the place in
which they live. Hey Rube! presented a model of theatrical community
and of civic critique that did not rely on the existence of an inclusive
public sphere. The circus performers’ sense of themselves as a commu-
nity is formed through their indigenous performance language and
their social exclusion from the town, and it is this separation that
ostensibly makes their civic critique possible.
TWP identified with the circus in Hey Rube! and encouraged its
audiences to view the company in the same way. Productions of Hey
Rube! transformed the entire auditorium into the inside of a circus tent,
complete with striped canvas and red poles. TWP also took on Hey
Rube!’s harlequin logo as the logo for the company itself, suggesting
that TWP was like the circus clowns: collaborating in adversity, mar-
ginal, but critically revelatory about society at large. Carson comments
that Hey Rube! was important because its recurring productions were
‘useful as a means of taking Luscombe and his actors back to his roots,’
and this is true insofar as Hey Rube! manufactured and reproduced a
reassuring mythology of autochthonous theatrical orgins.23 But Hey
Rube! was perhaps more significant because it translated these orgins
into an ontological statement for TWP itself: the play transformed ide-
als of performative and social autonomy into an expression of who
TWP was, proclaiming an ontological conviction at moments of uncer-
tainty or crisis: at the time of the first performance in 1961, TWP faced
eviction from its theatre building in Parkdale; in 1966, the Canada
Council threatened to eliminate TWP’s funding unless it reached
larger audiences; in 1972, TWP was trying to declare its relevance in
the face of popular attention turning to the new ‘alternative’ theatres;
and, in 1984, TWP entered its worst phase of financial crisis. Hey Rube!
was a compensatory auto-ontological manifesto for TWP, proclaimed
whenever the theatre’s future was in doubt or its existence needed to
be reasserted. The production marked out the supposed distinctive-
ness of the company, and served as a reminder of ‘who it was’ to the
wider public. TWP imagined itself as an ontological space apart, there-
fore, by linking an ideal of representational autonomy drawn from

socialist aesthetic theory to a romantic notion of the social marginaliza-
tion of the arts within society and translated this into an essentialist
ontological statement about itself. TWP imagined itself as a space
apart, this space was suffused with its being, and this space was fre-
quently under attack.
This imaginary ontological space did, however, have a physical
inscription: stage space, and the theatre building that enclosed that
stage space. These physical contours defined a border with everyday
life. Preserving this border could take the form of relatively minor
behaviour regulation. Filewod quotes one of Luscombe’s dicta: ‘No
one eats, drinks, reads newspapers or plays pinochle in my theatre.’24
Filewod justifiably interprets this comment as evidence of the disci-
plined behaviour Luscombe demanded from his actors, but it is also a
prohibition on everyday activities penetrating the theatre space, which
must be preserved from their invasion. Such physical conservation
could also be spiritually inflected. Carson recounts an incident early in
TWP’s history that became almost legendary among observers of and
participants in Toronto theatre, in which Luscombe fired an actor after
discovering him and a group of friends walking across the stage out-
side of rehearsal. Luscombe would later explain his rationale for firing
the actor by saying, ‘I don’t know what hit me, but I had a bad feeling
seeing them laughing on the stage. I felt it was important to show other
actors that you have reverence for the place you work in.’25 Carson
claims that the incident illustrates ‘what some people regarded as Lus-
combe’s “fanaticism,”’ but the nature of the transgression and the lan-
guage Luscombe uses to describe it indicate something more than
personal irascibility. The transgression was that the group walked on
the stage as though they were traversing any other space. The actor
brought ‘outsiders’ into the theatre building and together they used
the stage like an everyday space. In effect, they trespassed: they failed
to recognize that the theatre walls marked both a physical and sym-
bolic barrier and that the stage had a spatial presence of its own that
demanded codified negotiation–only in ‘theatrical’ moments could it
be crossed. Furthermore, Luscombe’s use of the word ‘reverence’ to
describe the ideal relationship between theatre practitioner and the
stage suggests that stage space was sanctified, a sense that TWP subse-
quently encouraged by quoting Herbert Whittaker’s comment in the
Globe and Mail that 12 Alexander Street was a ‘citadel practically sacred
to the City’s cultural development’ in its promotional and administra-
tive materials.26 For TWP, theatre space was not a physical space that
could or should be used like any outside the walls of the theatre. To
use it in such a way symbolically violated the important distinction
between theatre and everyday life.
The sacral spatial metaphor was also a useful way to argue against
the incursion of the market into the theatre space. In 1977 a developer,
Domingo Penaloza, took out an option with TWP’s landlord, Fobasco
Ltd., to purchase 12 Alexander Street and an adjoining parcel of land.
Penaloza recognized that, as Toronto’s property market heated up,
TWP’s home was becoming a valuable piece of real estate. Only after a
protracted battle involving Penaloza, Fobasco, and the City did TWP
arrive at a lease arrangement that would halt the company’s eviction
and its building’s demolition. When the deal collapsed two years later,
however, control of 12 Alexander Street reverted to Fobasco, which
made plans to proceed with its own development and served TWP
with an eviction notice.27 As Carson recounts, Karl Jaffery, a TWP
board member and the company’s lawyer, convened a meeting
between Fobasco and Luscombe. In Carson’s description of the
encounter, there is a clear difference between the way Fobasco viewed
the property and the way TWP viewed it:
The landlord wanted vacant possession of the property at a time in the near
future which would be convenient for TWP. Instead of being crestfallen (as
the agent no doubt expected), Luscombe bridled with righteous indigna-
tion. Eyes flashing, he insisted that 12 Alexander Street was not just any
building to be traded, vacated, or demolished. Whether the landlord liked it
or not, his property housed a theatre, and such a facility was a spiritual
resource to be preserved and cherished.28
The disagreement over the property between Fobasco and TWP

pointed to two different conceptions of 12 Alexander Street: the prop-
erty as a market space, which could be ‘traded, vacated, or demol-
ished’ at the will of its legal owner, Fobasco, and the property as a
sentimental theatre space, which was a ‘spiritual resource to be pre-
served and cherished’ by its steward, TWP.
Financial Crisis and the Domestic Refuge
The counterpart to 12 Alexander Street as citadel is a conservation area

of another sort: 12 Alexander Street as home. Bachelard devotes a sig-
nificant portion of The Poetics of Space to the home, which he reads as ‘a

privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values
of inside space.’29 TWP demonstrated that the ideal of home and the
protectionist values it represents can be tremendously reassuring to a
theatre company during times of difficulty; the ‘intimate values of
inside space’ are not only relevant to phenomenology, but are material
values that theatre companies may invoke at times of crisis. In TWP’s
case, 12 Alexander Street was a domestic refuge from the encroaching
demands of the market economy.
The rhetoric of ‘home’ is not unique to TWP. As I pointed out in the
previous chapter, Theatre Passe Muraille mobilized its funding cam-
paign for 16 Ryerson Avenue around the ideal of ‘a permanent home.’
But TWP inaugurated and insisted on a domestic appeal to a greater
degree than any other theatre in Toronto. Kareda comments that TWP
illustrated best the ‘credo that a theatre company needs its own build-
ing, needs to be a family.’ He also adds ominously, ‘The story continues
with the move to bigger quarters and their attendant bigger prob-
lems.’30 TWP’s move to 12 Alexander Street in 1967 signified an as-
cendancy in status not only because it moved to a larger building
but because its change of neighbourhood – moving into the heart of
the city – also suggested the company’s own increasing importance.
TWP’s new downtown location announced that the company was a
more legitimate enterprise and worthy of broader public and private
support. Indeed, TWP soon began to draw on this cultural and civic
capital. Funding appeals began to invoke maintaining the property as
a reason for supporting TWP, and linked the maintenance of the prop-
erty with a larger civic mission for the theatre: the company’s ‘new the-
atre fills a very real need in the Community [sic],’ administrator June
Faulkner wrote to potential contributors,31 and ‘Toronto Workshop
Productions is making an important contribution to the cultural life of
the city and providing a facility for other worthwhile groups.’32 Fund-
raising also began to employ property-related metaphors: ‘We really
need your assistance in keeping our doors open.’33 Due to its liminal
urban location, between a somewhat seedy stretch of Yonge Street
commercialism and large beautiful homes of old-money Toronto, the
theatre’s new home enabled a self-fashioning in which TWP became
invested: as a company close to Toronto’s margins, but with the bas-
tions of economic privilege in its view. The new property, then, pro-
vided a complex metaphor for the company itself. It embodied TWP’s
legitimacy as a theatrical and civic enterprise, and provided a spatial
language through which that legitimacy could be embodied and sus-

tained financially. But its urban location also implied that the com-
pany’s move into the heart of the city demanded a difficult negotiation
between privilege and marginalization.
It was not until after 1980, though, when TWP’s legal ownership of
12 Alexander Street became a possibility, that the building was consis-
tently invoked in domestic terms.34 Although TWP did not own the
property, the lease agreement imposed many of the responsibilities of
ownership over 12 Alexander Street – in addition to rent, the company
was required to pay for all property taxes and building repairs, for
example. TWP’s restoration of the theatre building after the 1974 fire
and its subsequent fights to avoid eviction had also encouraged a
sense of symbolic ownership over the property. The growing possibil-
ity of legal ownership, however, facilitated TWP’s assertion of domes-
tic spatial values in response to its rapidly worsening financial and
administrative situation (and, notably, the historical moment when
TWP first came close to collapse – in 1985 – was the moment when the
invocation of 12 Alexander Street as a home was greatest).
The most important characteristics of domestic ideology, according
to Bachelard, are stability and protection. ‘A house constitutes a body
of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability,’ he
writes.35 Bachelard also argues that the house is seen to unify the
ontology of the subject – ‘Without it, man would be a dispersed
being’36 – and that it links this ontological unification with a sense of
social value: ‘A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals
to our consciousness of centrality.’37 Qualities like stability and a uni-
fied sense of being became particularly important to TWP as the com-
pany’s future looked increasingly unsteady, and these qualities were
articulated through the built environment. TWP’s building became a
physical metaphor for the viability of the company, and so, in order to
display the relevance of the company, TWP fetishized 12 Alexander
Street as the main solution to problems primarily located elsewhere.
During the 1980s TWP repeatedly invoked 12 Alexander Street as a
domestic refuge that would ensure the survival of the company in the
face of hostile forces from without. A promotional document from
1980, entitled ‘A Parable: The Year of the Golden Egg,’ uses the anal-
ogy of the ‘Golden Goose’ residing in and protecting her ‘nest.’38 The
‘major and minor tragedies of the old bird’s life,’ including ‘Flood,
Fire and Expropriation,’ involved attacks on her nest, 12 Alexander
Street.39 The nest, as Bachelard points out, is a central metaphor for
home; it is associated with notions of self-protection and self-reproduc-

tion, and is the space of refuge through which a necessary sense of
‘well being’ is reproduced.40 Bachelard suggests that the nest is a pri-
mal archetype, but I would argue instead that the historical signifi-
cance of nesting lies in its strategic value for those who use its rhetoric.
The necessity to withdraw into one’s own corner, as Bachelard puts it,
is significant not because it is primal (an assertion that Bachelard strug-
gles to offer convincing evidence to support), but because it signifies a
marshalling of resources in the face of perceived attack. Nesting
emphasized the central role that 12 Alexander Street was perceived to
play for TWP. Twelve Alexander Street sheltered the company, offering
the space in which it might reproduce itself. Without that nest, the
company would die. This explains why TWP encouraged the City of
Toronto to pass a by-law proclaiming 12 Alexander Street a theatre in
perpetuity, something the City finally did in 1982. It also explains Lus-
combe’s later statement, ‘We must ensure that TWP and 12 Alexander
Street stay together.’41 In order to take on the qualities of stability that
the built environment represented, the company had to become insep-
arable from its building and its affirmative values.
When requesting funding for a building refurbishment study from
the Ontario Ministry of Culture and Recreation, TWP argued that the
‘continuity’ of the company depended on making 12 Alexander Street
a ‘permanent home.’42 The phrase ‘permanent home’ implies much the
same thing as it did in Theatre Passe Muraille’s earlier use: the notion
that the company’s survival could only be secured permanently
through the ownership of the built environment. But TWP’s invocation
of this ideal of physical entrenchment more emphatically amplified the
virtues of intransigence: having a ‘permanent home’ allowed TWP to
claim that it was a ‘permanent resident’ in the neighbourhood with no
possibility of being ‘moved on by a fickle landlord.’43
The inseparability of TWP from 12 Alexander Street meant that reno-
vations to its building assumed as great a symbolic role for TWP
through the early 1980s as they did a practical one, and often curtailed
needed discussions over the company’s administrative and financial
position.44 Luscombe and the board of directors believed that TWP
could only demonstrate the company’s value through its building. By
September 1982 renovation plans had broadened from a 400-seat
scheme to a 600-seat scheme. The justifications for expanding the pro-
posed theatre were as likely to be based on a sentimental appeal as
they were an economic rationale. The hope was that the ‘physical
space,’ both ‘interior and exterior,’ would give the opposite picture of
the company than that depicted by its grant assessors, low audience
attendance figures, and rapidly escalating deficit. On the contrary, its
home would announce that TWP was ‘exciting,’ had a ‘synergistic
impact on the environment’ and was devoted to ‘newness.’45
This sentimental self-fashioning could only defer financial crisis for
so long. TWP’s application for emergency funding from the councils in
1985 prompted consultant Graeme Page to lay a significant portion of
the blame for the situation on TWP’s preoccupation with its building.
Page argued that this preoccupation was compensatory:
The [financial] situation was further complicated by an unwarranted

amount of energy being expended on the needs, future and value of the
building. The statement that the Board had reached a clear ‘understanding
that the renovations are not just something desirable, but economically
essential to the future health of the theatre’ suggests that planning was
being done as a response to the crisis rather than as a carefully thought-out
process with definite priorities, goals and strategies.46
In the meeting convened with TWP’s funding bodies to discuss Page’s

report and the theatre’s financial crisis in January 1986, Luscombe
ignored the details of the consultant’s commentary and presented his
high-minded statement about the link between the company and its
building. Luscombe’s statement, however, confirmed that Page was
correct: 12 Alexander Street had become totemic for TWP, the com-
pany’s raison d’être and potential saviour. At the height of the crisis,
and in the moment where TWP needed to outline a plan to reduce its
deficit and stabilize its administration, Luscombe launched into a
romantic demand for renovation funding.
The arts councils’ response to Luscombe’s entreaty was unanimous
and uncompromising. The company, they stated, had produced the
crisis itself through poor administration and ‘the diversion of TWP’s
attention from its primary artistic objectives and mandate to the man-
agement and development of its theatre property.’47 They added that
‘developing the theatre property has been advanced by TWP as a solu-
tion to problems lodged primarily in the structure and operation of the
producing company. TWP’s preoccupation with its equity position in
the theatre appears to prevent it from coming to grips with its serious
operational difficulties.’48 The councils were ‘unanimous in [their]
appraisal that any consideration of capital expansion by TWP is
unrealistic at this time and therefore we are not supportive of this

request.’49
This does not mean that the building did not require attention;
indeed, it required substantial repairs to make it more functional and
comfortable. Luscombe, however, did not address a central problem:
by the mid-1980s attendance figures at TWP hovered around the 30 per
cent mark, and showed no signs of improvement. Luscombe’s pro-
posal failed to address how expanding the theatre from 300 to 600 seats
would solve a long-term decline in attendance, especially since such an
expansion would require a significant boost in the company’s budget
at a time of an already unsustainable accumulated deficit.50 Luscombe
appealed, instead, to an entirely different conception of the building: as
the spatial means by which social solidarity could be recuperated and
reproduced in a ‘new era’ when ‘we are and will be faced with more
social problems’ – in other words, an increasingly neo-liberal political
economy. Though satisfying Luscombe’s demands would require
money, the appeal itself was not primarily made on an economic basis,
since Luscombe instead made the case in sentimental terms: 12 Alex-
ander Street was a ‘home,’ and a ‘meeting place of like-minded men
and women.’ Only expanding the building – not working with differ-
ent artists in different ways, changing administrative operations, or
altering the repertoire – would sustain the distinct ‘traditions so firmly
established by the theatre over the past quarter century,’ with the phys-
ical growth of the building symbolizing the renewed strength of TWP’s
values.
When Luscombe defended 12 Alexander Street, then, he not only
defended the theatre company, he tried to preserve an entire system of
value that the property represented. If the Canadian political economy
was growing increasingly right-wing and antagonistic towards the
type of theatre that TWP offered, 12 Alexander Street offered an oppor-
tunity, it seemed, to proclaim TWP’s sentimental value through physi-
cal form. The continued presence of a building implies, rightly or
wrongly, that physical form transcends the passage of time, so that a
building can ideally become a transhistorical marker of community.
TWP’s property testified to a marginalized history and cultural mem-
ory under threat, and appeared to be the spatial means by which theat-
rical guardianship could be sustained and reproduced in a neo-liberal
political economy. But the doubtful practicality of Luscombe’s strategy
also meant that his statement became a eulogy for the place and the
values for which it stood. And, like a eulogy, it marked a death – not
the death of the company, which was still to come, but the death of the
value system that 12 Alexander Street embodied.
From Guardianship to Proprietorship
The problem in seeing 12 Alexander Street as the solution to the com-

pany’s woes was that the building itself was part of the problem. This
is due to the nature of private property ownership, and the fact that
this ownership brought the property directly into Toronto’s urban
economy as a real estate commodity. If TWP focused increasingly on
the sentimental value of 12 Alexander, once it owned the property it
was difficult to ignore its market value as real estate indefinitely. Like
Theatre Passe Muraille before it, TWP came to believe that property
ownership was the best way to mark theatre space in the company’s
name, to identify with theatre space, and to administer theatre space
according to the company’s wants and needs. But if George Luscombe
saw the purchase and refurbishment of 12 Alexander Street as the key
to shoring up TWP’s sentimental value, the company’s board of direc-
tors would later come to see the sale of 12 Alexander Street as the way
to eliminate TWP’s substantial and growing deficit. TWP had pur-
chased the property – land and building – in 1984 for the knock-down
price of $100,000. By 1988, developers were circling 12 Alexander
Street, which had by then become valuable downtown land in Tor-
onto’s highly inflationary real estate market. When Robert Rooney was
forced to resign in April of that year, TWP’s accumulated deficit was
rising towards $400,000; two months later, the company suspended
operations and dismissed all of its staff. The only asset that TWP pos-
sessed was its property, and so the board of directors set about looking
for ways to use the market value of 12 Alexander Street to underwrite
the company’s deficit and operational costs.
Though TWP had been keen to own 12 Alexander Street for many
years, it initially did not desire property ownership because of any
plan to capitalize on that property’s increasing exchange value.
Indeed, its position towards the value of the property was contradic-
tory at best. While TWP was happy to use 12 Alexander Street as col-
lateral against a revolving annual loan with the Canadian Imperial
Bank of Commerce, its successful campaign for the legal designation
of 12 Alexander Street as a theatre in perpetuity imposed a develop-
ment classification that actually reduced the market value of the
property significantly – the value of 12 Alexander Street lay in its
potential to accommodate condominiums, not theatres. But in 1988,

the board of directors responded to the worsening deficit situation by
looking for ways to exploit 12 Alexander Street’s value as real estate.
If previously the property was believed to be a bulwark against a
neo-liberal emphasis on the market economy, now its commodity
position within that market economy was to be recognized and
exploited. A sense of guardianship had eventually moved TWP
towards legal ownership of the property as a way of sustaining that
property’s sentimental resonances, but legal ownership also opened
up the possibility of capitalizing on its proprietorship over an urban
commodity in market terms.
One scheme, announced in June 1988, involved George Vari, a high-
profile local developer, paying TWP $300,000 for the property. With
TWP’s support, Vari would likely be able to persuade the city to
change the zoning of 12 Alexander Street to permit condominium
development. Included in this development would be a theatre space
for TWP. In return, TWP would transfer its land to Vari, and the devel-
oper would appoint the majority of TWP’s board of directors. If the
plan went ahead, the $300,000 would be considered to be the purchase
price of the property, and, if not, the money would be considered a
charitable gift from Vari’s personal foundation. TWP’s board jumped
at the offer, which they thought would wipe out the company’s debts
(though, as it turned out, $300,000 would not have been enough to
cover what TWP owed to its many creditors) and allow them to hang
on to a theatre space at 12 Alexander Street.
There were two key complications to the deal. First, the fact that Vari
would control TWP’s board of directors meant that Toronto’s oldest
left-wing theatre company would be under the effective control of one
of the city’s more prominent capitalists. Second, Vari’s involvement
would signal a change in the company’s mandate, although there was
some confusion over what this change would be. Pam Rogers, then
TWP’s general manager, said that TWP would shift from being a ‘polit-
ical’ theatre to a ‘social’ theatre.51 She did not define exactly what this
meant, but her additional comment to the Toronto Sun newspaper that
TWP was too often a ‘political forum rather than a theatre company’
seemed to signal a retreat from TWP’s previous commitment to advo-
cacy.52 Vari echoed this thinking when he claimed to be ‘not interested
in politics at all,’ but put an eccentric and, seemingly for TWP’s board
of directors, unexpected spin on what he saw the company’s new
future to be: ‘We want to enhance the cultural approach of France and
Canada,’ he stated, by presenting ‘French plays in English, English

plays in French.’53
In its desperation to strike a deal on the property, the board had not
worked through the implications of what the agreement might mean.
The theatre community and interested political parties were deeply
uneasy about the sale, and, in response, the board attempted to insert a
clause in the deal that Vari would not change the mandate of the com-
pany.54 When he refused, the board broke off negotiations. Vari’s
refusal to accept the clause was hardly surprising, but TWP’s anxious
insistence on the guarantee and Vari’s outright rejection both articu-
lated the same thing: that TWP’s entry into Toronto’s real estate econ-
omy effectively inverted the system of value that TWP had worked to
construct since 1967. Whereas previously the property was the spatial
means by which the sentimental value of the company was affirmed,
now the market value of the property superseded the sentimental
value of the company. In fact, insofar as the sentimental value of TWP
resided in its presence testifying to the lofty virtues of ‘like-minded
men and women’ concerned with ‘man’s plight,’ the company was a
hindrance to the development of the property. The only solution, as
Vari recognized, was to sever the property from the company or, at
best, to make the company subservient to the property. Either way, the
existing theatre building would be demolished.
The implications of entering into the real estate economy were the
key issues around which members of the theatre community rallied.
While TWP’s board of directors still sought some sort of deal with a
commercial property developer through the summer of 1988, a ‘Com-
mittee of Concern’ was formed that included, among others, Lus-
combe, director Ken Gass (the founder of Factory Theatre), Tarragon
Theatre’s general manager Mallory Gilbert, and the former head of the
Ontario Arts Council, Walter Pitman. Pitman said that the committee
was ‘concerned by the degree of influence that developers have in this
city’ and claimed that TWP’s survival was going to be difficult enough
without taking part in the city’s ‘fever of real estate development.’55
Indeed, over the course of the summer the board of directors appeared
as though it were encouraging a bidding war for 12 Alexander Street:
it declined an offer from one developer worth $327,500,56 and spurned
another from the owner of the Poor Alex theatre and a group of local
businesses for $430,000.57 Since the Poor Alex group was willing to
commit to continuing TWP’s mandate as a left-wing theatre, the
board’s rejection of its offer seemed curious initially, but the board
now stated publicly that it was attempting to generate maximum sur-

plus value on the sale of the property and that this would only come
through an arrangement with a commercial developer. The president
of TWP’s board of directors commented in the Globe and Mail that the
board ‘turned down this offer out of hand’ because they had calculated
that $430,000 was not the maximum possible return on the property.58
‘We are trying to capitalize on an asset,’ she stated, making clear that
sustaining the ‘traditions so firmly established by the Theatre’ were
now completely subservient to the market speculation on its property.
When the board of directors announced an agreement to develop 12
Alexander Street as a retirement lodge for performers in September
1988, members of the Committee of Concern staged a dawn occupation
of the theatre building.59 Though it did not succeed practically, the
occupation spatially re-established the symbolic link – however tem-
porarily – between the theatre building and the older conception of
TWP in which the Committee of Concern was invested. In his appreci-
ation of Luscombe after the director’s death, Rick Salutin noted the
tenacity of spatial metaphors in determining and remembering social
value. ‘This is a society that handles things that exist in space better
than things that exist in time,’ Salutin argued. ‘It’s as though what’s
past can only be imagined if it can be spatialized.’60 The occupation
reasserted a cultural history (however idealized) that the market dis-
placed; it was only when the Committee of Concern reasserted that
history spatially that the message resonated publicly. The occupation
was the last moment when TWP, as a sentimental entity, could be said
to exist.
As a legal entity, however, TWP limped on, and over the next eight
months the market economy triumphed at 12 Alexander Street. In May
1989, with the company on life support, the board fostered a final bid-
ding war between two developers interested in the property, resulting
in a high offer of $650,000, more than six times the 1984 purchase
price.61 The City of Toronto, which had offered $500,000 to keep the
property out of private hands, was eventually forced to match the
$650,000 offer. When opponents of the sale argued in favour of the sen-
timental value of the building – that 12 Alexander Street was a public
trust that had largely been paid for by various representatives of the
Canadian people and that its sale to a private developer would break
this trust by appropriating a community asset – the company’s board
of directors responded as capitalist landowners. ‘Judging from their
behaviour and pronouncements,’ argues Carson, ‘it appeared to out-
siders that the directors considered the theatre their property to dis-
pose of as they wished. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge any
moral obligation to the City or the Ministry, but they insisted that
$650,000 represented the fair market value of the building.’62 One
member of the board of directors told a local newspaper that the board
had the legal right to ‘accept the best offer for the property to which it
holds the title,’ and in this he was correct; whatever sentimental ties
once existed to 12 Alexander Street, the board of directors ultimately
held the juridical power to exchange the property as a commodity on
the market, and Toronto’s speculative urban economy provided both
the opportunity and encouragement to do that.63 Twelve Alexander
Street may have been a public trust, but its value as a commodity
could not be deferred indefinitely. That this commodity might one day
be exchanged in a speculative transaction may have been disappoint-
ing, but it is not entirely surprising.
Conclusion
TWP finally collapsed in June 1989 when all of its grant applications
were rejected. The City of Toronto eventually organized a new lease on
life for 12 Alexander Street, albeit in a very different guise: as the
smartly renovated home of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto’s
queer theatre company. In many ways, the fit between Buddies and 12
Alexander Street has become as natural as it once seemed for TWP, and
the reason for this is also partly geographical. In the years since TWP
moved to 12 Alexander Street, the eastern end of its neighbourhood
had become home to a thriving gay and lesbian community. For Bud-
dies, moving to 12 Alexander Street brought the company into close
physical proximity with an important constituency. Buddies became
well settled at 12 Alexander Street, though, as I will discuss in the next
chapter, the urban economy of Toronto was also implicated in the pro-
cess of the company making its home there.
It is possible that, at another historical moment, the spatial contra-
diction that undermined TWP would not have become so consequen-
tial. Had TWP’s financial and administrative difficulties not become
particularly severe during a downtown real estate boom, other ways
to address the company’s troubles might have come to the fore. None-
theless, it is entirely explicable why events transpired as they did, and
the reasons for this go beyond the personalities involved. TWP’s senti-
mental self-fashioning became deeply rooted in 12 Alexander Street,
and, in order to preserve the link between the company and the prop-
erty, it made a decision that is as understandable as it is ironic: in order
to attempt to preserve itself from the market economy, TWP was forced
to enter the market through private property ownership. This was a
logical response to pressures in one area – the threat of eviction was
long-term and significant – but it also opened up the company to pres-
sures in other areas. When a theatre company in difficulty owns prop-
erty that is becoming increasingly valuable, it becomes harder to
ignore the market value of that property. The problem for TWP, how-
ever, was that exploiting this market value undermined the sentimen-
tal economy that the company set out to preserve in the first place.
5 Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity,
Cultural Equity, and the Geography
of Theatrical Legitimacy
Among the generation of not-for-profit theatre companies founded in

Toronto since the late 1970s, none has purchased its own home. There
are many possible explanations for this, including the fact that, while
a number of these companies became well-known and long-lived
members of Toronto’s theatre community, many remained relatively
small enterprises. Companies like Nightwood Theatre, Necessary
Angel, and Theatre Columbus often produced only one or two shows
per season. This was not necessarily a problem, since the arts coun-
cils’ eventual extension of operating (in addition to project-based)
grants to a few smaller companies provided a limited degree of sta-
bility for a growing sector of Toronto’s theatre industry – a company
did not have to grow or die, and, arguably, the proliferation of small
companies during the 1980s and 1990s encouraged a welcome diver-
sity of theatrical production in Toronto.1 But for any of these compa-
nies to purchase a performance space would have been an economic
and administrative challenge, to say the least. Even a company like
Buddies in Bad Times, which grew substantially during this period
and is now a mid-sized operation, does not actually own the prop-
erty in which it performs – when Buddies took over 12 Alexander
Street two years after the demise of Toronto Workshop Productions, it
did so on a long-term lease at a nominal charge from the City of
Toronto.
The fact that no not-for-profit theatre company founded in Toronto
since the late 1970s owns a performance space indicates a historical
shift in the dominant relationship between theatre companies, the local
real estate market, and the built environment during the 1980s and
1990s. As the Small Theatres Caucus of the Toronto Theatre Alliance
The Geography of Theatrical Legitimacy 117
(TTA), whose membership includes most of the city’s professional the-

atre companies, noted in 1986:
The previous [sic] accepted model for theatre development in Toronto, based
on the experience of the early 1970’s, when most of what are now the estab-
lished theatres came into existence, no longer applies. At that time, as a the-
atre was able to prove itself artistically, its grants from funding bodies
increased ... The more successful of these companies were able to acquire
buildings – either through long-term leases or eventual outright purchase –
and the capital necessary to renovate and equip their performance spaces.2
This description may not give a full picture of the complexities that
were often involved when theatre companies established in the late
1960s and 1970s acquired and renovated property, but insofar as it
identifies the decline of a privileged model of theatrical development –
and points to the way that the dominant understanding of theatrical
development was tied up with property development – it is correct.
And yet the popular ideal that a theatre company should own a build-
ing (or, at the very least, occupy a single building for a long enough
period of time that it becomes associated with that building) persisted.
The TTA’s model of property-centred theatrical development is simply
a variation on the trajectory of theatrical legitimacy that Urjo Kareda
outlined in his discussion of TWP, where the acquisition of a building
becomes a sign of theatrical maturity. Others have also illustrated the
tenacity of this model. In 1989 Malcolm Burrows described having a
‘home’ as one of the key ‘trappings of success’ in Toronto theatre.3
When the Toronto Star characterized Necessary Angel in 1995 as
‘[p]robably the most important theatre company in Toronto not to actu-
ally have its own theatre,’ it yet again demonstrated the spatial norma-
tivity that has historically been at the heart of theatrical legitimacy in
Toronto: in this representation, Necessary Angel’s success was the sur-
prising exception to the spatial rule, which is that having one’s own
theatre is either the precondition for, or consequence of, theatrical
significance.4
In writing this, I am conscious that one of the ‘small company’ gen-
eration could purchase a property at any moment. One may also point
to an important company like Soulpepper, which has gained a home,
but it is important to note that this has been achieved through a dif-
ferent type of arrangement, which, while perhaps pointing to the
emergence of new models of theatrical occupancy, is unlikely to be
transposable beyond that company (or a very small number of oth-

ers).5 Yet even if Necessary Angel were to purchase a property the day
after this book is published, it would not change the fact that no the-
atre company of its generation had done so for more than two decades.
This suggests that, even if the legitimacy of a theatre company as a cul-
tural enterprise is still informed by a spatial calculus at the time of my
writing, the possibility of a company ‘proving itself’ (to use the TTA’s
phrase) through property acquisition was radically foreclosed for sub-
sequent generations of theatre companies.
This chapter, then, theorizes how such a historical change occurred
and why it is significant, and it employs two concise case studies to
examine some of the more exceptional ways that theatre companies
negotiated this shift. The shortage of theatre space that became
increasingly acute during the 1980s and 1990s did not come about by
accident, and the way that theatre companies engaged this problem
contributed to a particular urban geography of theatre practice and
cultural value. Two companies were particularly illuminating in this
context: Necessary Angel and Buddies in Bad Times. These companies,
along with Nightwood, AKA Performance Interfaces, and Autumn
Leaf founded the Theatre Centre in 1979 in order to provide adminis-
trative support and affordable performance space for themselves and
other theatre companies in the city. While the Theatre Centre eventu-
ally operated independently of its initial members, its creation recog-
nized a growing problem in Toronto: there was not only a shortage of
rehearsal and performance space for the city’s increasing number of
theatre companies, but these companies often could not afford to rent
or buy the spaces that were available. The Theatre Centre’s subse-
quent, and recurring, difficulties in fulfilling the spatial component of
its mandate illustrates how this problem only grew worse in the ensu-
ing years.6
While AKA Performance Interfaces no longer exists and Autumn
Leaf focuses largely on opera and music performance, Nightwood,
Necessary Angel, and Buddies have all survived as theatre companies,
and have prospered (albeit sometimes peripatetically). For the pur-
poses of my investigation, however, it is Necessary Angel and Bud-
dies’ distinctive uses of the built environment that are most
instructive.7 Necessary Angel and Buddies, in different ways, secured
their legitimacy as theatre companies through their use of the built
environment, even though they did not own performances spaces. In
effect, both companies achieved greater cultural equity than many other
theatres of their generation by making a virtue – accidentally, inten-

tionally, or through some combination of both – out of changes in the
urban geography of Toronto. And in doing so they revealed two
related facts. First, even if increasing its financial equity in Toronto’s
theatrical property market through outright ownership had become
impossible, a company could still find ways to secure its legitimacy
through its relationship with the built environment. Second, Necessary
Angel and Buddies also showed that site specificity encompassed not
only a type of theatre event that was spatially self-referential, but also a
theatre company’s conscious, monopolist claim over the built environ-
ment. This claim may not have depended on property ownership, but
it still traded on the older link between the built environment and the-
atrical legitimacy. Put simply, in the 1980s Necessary Angel secured its
cultural equity by making a virtue of its homelessness. In the next
decade, Buddies secured its cultural equity by making a virtue of its
homecoming.
Theorizing Toronto’s Other Housing Crisis
Many working in theatre in Toronto during the 1980s will recognize

the title of this section. The city’s ‘other housing crisis’ was a phrase
used by the Small Theatres Caucus of the Toronto Theatre Alliance in
its submission to Arthur Gelber, who assessed the state of arts facilities
in the Metropolitan Toronto area at the request of the provincial Minis-
try of Citizenship and Culture in 1986. This characterization was evoc-
ative because it drew on public anxiety about the supply and cost of
residential housing in Ontario, and particularly Toronto, in the mid-
1980s. By using a popular political discourse about the need for afford-
able housing, advocates for theatre companies framed their predica-
ment as an extension of a wider problem, and implied that their needs
were similar to, rather than distinct from, those of many people of the
province. Their use of the word ‘housing’ also invoked, yet again,
the ideal of home that registered affirmatively for many in Toronto’s
theatre community.
Gelber recommended a series of improvements to, and a significant
expansion of, the physical infrastructure of theatre in Toronto. He
argued that Toronto’s arts community had ‘grown considerably over
the past few years, and it is apparent that this growth will continue
over the next decade.’8 State subsidy, however, had ‘not kept pace with
this expansion.’9 Existing facilities suffered increasingly from disrepair,
and a growing number of arts organizations – often newer theatre

companies working in downtown Toronto – struggled to find work-
space. Among other things, Gelber claimed that these difficulties
undermined two key convictions underpinning theatrical production
in Toronto at the time: that ‘the acquisition of permanent homes [my
emphasis] is extremely important to the stability of the arts commu-
nity’10 and that arts facilities played an important role in stimulating
healthy urban economies.11
Although Gelber was correct in predicting that the size of Toronto’s
artistic community would continue to grow, few of his recommenda-
tions were ever acted upon. As he pointed out, state funding for capi-
tal building projects in the arts has tended to occur on an ad hoc basis
in Canada, with the assumption that arts organizations will fund
building repairs and upgrades out of ongoing income.12 Since the bud-
gets of these organizations are tight at best, and building costs usually
high, facilities can be in almost constant need of attention. Gelber’s
report did not prompt any change in state policy, but it did confirm
that a problem existed with Toronto’s theatre facilities, and that the
usual rationale for supporting such facilities was not being heard.
How, then, might we explain the emergence of Toronto’s theatrical
housing crisis through an urban analysis? And what were its conse-
quences for the theatre companies it most affected? The answers to
these questions lie in a combination of theatrical, economic, and geo-
graphic factors. One major artistic cause of the crisis was a change in
the theatrical demography of Toronto. The number of theatre compa-
nies in Metropolitan Toronto had grown to over one hundred by 1986,
with the vast majority of these working in downtown Toronto.13 Such
a number would have been difficult to forsee a few years earlier. Fur-
thermore, there were now thirty-two companies in the TTA’s Small
Theatres Caucus, with the majority of these having been created since
the late 1970s.14
Any company seeking performance space also encountered the
larger challenges of Toronto’s urban economy. In general, it is arguable
that not-for-profit theatre companies are likely to face a housing scar-
city in most robust urban economies (at least without significant state
intervention on their behalf). Their spatial requirements tend to be par-
ticular, and they tend to compete for those spaces with wealthier pri-
vate businesses. Provincially, changes to the Ontario Fire Code in the
early 1980s also meant that many existing warehouses and manufac-
turing buildings – the types of places that were converted into theatres
in the 1970s – now failed to meet statutory requirements, and few of

the newer, smaller theatre companies could afford the cost of retrofit-
ting to bring them up to standard.15
But there are further explanations for Toronto’s theatrical housing
crisis that are specific to the urban geography of theatre in the city. As
the TTA was aware, many of the companies constituting its Small The-
atres Caucus were finding their feet during a downtown property
development boom, a phenomenon I have discussed in previous chap-
ters. The widespread property-value inflation in Toronto’s downtown
real estate market through the 1980s occurred in both the residential
and commercial markets, creating a whipsaw effect on theatre compa-
nies: on the one hand, the types of buildings that could serve as perfor-
mance spaces were usually in the commercial market, and theatre
companies had difficulty competing for these spaces with profit-driven
enterprises that could often pay higher rents; on the other hand, rising
prices in the city’s residential market meant that commercial landlords
could sometimes gain a higher return by converting the buildings in
which theatre organizations resided into condominiums, as happened
when the Theatre Centre was forced to move out of its facility on Lip-
pincott Street in the Annex neighbourhood. That these buildings were
often located in older downtown neighbourhoods made them even
more appealing to landlords – the zoning of these neighbourhoods was
largely residential already, making it more likely for the City of Tor-
onto to approve their conversion from commercial to residential use.
This predicament was exacerbated by the fact that Toronto’s theatre
companies did not react to this tightening of the property market in
ways that one might anticipate economic agents – which theatre com-
panies undoubtedly are – to do. One might have expected them to
respond to the operations of supply and demand by seeking out less
expensive properties further from the downtown core, but, in the
main, they did not do this. In fact, it is remarkable how little change
there has been to the map of Toronto’s not-for-profit theatre industry
during the last thirty-odd years, even as potential performance spaces
downtown have become fewer in number and markedly more expen-
sive: the vast majority of theatrical activity in the city remains roughly
bounded by Lake Ontario to the south, Davenport Road to the north,
Bathurst Street to the west, and the Don River to the east. This theatri-
cal geography has not changed since the late 1960s, even though the
economic geography of this area has altered radically.
As a result, the economic model that could explain theatre compa-
nies’ relationship to urban property in the 1970s fails to do so in the

1980s and 1990s. When the decline and suburbanization of older forms
of industry made suitable downtown properties available at reason-
able prices in the 1970s, theatre companies purchased them (or at least
occupied them and began to work towards purchasing them at a later
date, as in the case of Tarragon). Roughly speaking, the demand for
‘homes’ was, at least to some degree, met by the supply of homes
(however imperfect this fit may have been in practice). But there was
renewed demand for downtown properties in the early 1980s – from
an expanding theatre sector and its private competitors – at the same
time as the supply of suitable properties was at best static and, more
likely, diminishing.
According to a classical economic explanation, then, theatre compa-
nies responded to a slack (or at least stable) real estate market in the
1970s by moving into the property market. When the property market
tightened considerably in the 1980s and 1990s, theatre companies were
no longer able to acquire property in the way they once were. The phe-
nomenon that such an economic model has more difficulty explaining,
however, is theatre companies’ response to this spatial scarcity. Instead
of moving to a location where space was available and cheaper, as
many businesses would have done, they stayed downtown. Ironically,
this complicates the popular notion that theatres became more respon-
sive to the demands of the free market in the 1980s and 1990s. No
doubt they were in some respects, but not in terms of their relationship
with the local property market. In their negotiation of the urban econ-
omy of the 1970s, theatre companies were market-led enterprises to a
greater extent than is commonly acknowledged; in the urban economy
that followed, theatre companies were market-defying enterprises to a
greater extent than is commonly acknowledged.
Some of this resistance to moving away from downtown was likely
due to the phenomenon that I identified in the introduction to my
investigation: that theatre companies perceived their audiences to be
unwilling to travel beyond the existing borders of theatrical activity in
numbers great enough to risk locating outside the downtown core.
Theatre companies balanced the constraints posed by one market (the
property market) against the perceived benefits of another (the market
for audiences), and chose the latter. But this adherence to a relatively
constant urban geography, even as the market for performance space
became tighter, also had a number of intriguing consequences. In the
first place, it demonstrated a continued theatrical investment in the
ideal of downtown, maintained in spite of adverse property market

forces. It also demonstrated that the ideal of downtown was not only
the preserve of the civic theatres, or even of the generation of mid-
sized theatres like Tarragon and Theatre Passe Muraille that had be-
come solid municipal citizens by the 1980s; instead, it was smaller
companies that entrenched the connection between theatre and down-
town through the 1980s and 1990s. The desire of these companies to
remain downtown – and their success in doing so – testifies to the way
in which the ideal of downtown in Toronto continued to be consti-
tuted, in part, through a link between theatre and the city. Indeed, the
spatial intransigence of small theatre companies only further deepened
the homology between downtown Toronto’s theatrical and urban
geographies.
Higher and Better Use
Such an urban economy poses significant challenges if a theatre com-

pany is to ‘prove itself’ through space. One way to do so, however, is to
achieve a higher and better use of the built environment. The concept
of ‘higher’ and ‘better’ use – or highest and best use, as it is sometimes
called – is foundational to the field of urban planning. As both a pro-
fession and field of inquiry, urban planning has historically been con-
cerned with the spatial coordination of the built environment in order
to facilitate optimal arrangements of ‘production, circulation, exchange
and consumption’ in given times and places.16 Realizing this optimal
relationship involves an assumption that, in specific times and places,
certain arrangements will be higher (of a superior type) and better (of
superior use within a type) than others, and that the role of urban plan-
ners is to offer both a process by which these can be conceived and,
ultimately, the plan that facilitates their achievement and effective use
by urban subjects.
Securing the higher and better use of the built environment can be
very awkward in practice. As Neil Smith points out, the calculation of
whether or not a property or area has achieved its higher and better
use is usually market based; it occurs, for example, when a significant
gap between the existing and potential price of a property (between its
actual and potential ground rent, to use the appropriate technical terms)
widens to the point where it creates a strong incentive for economic
agents to purchase and refurbish it in order to achieve much greater
equity and possible exchange value than would previously have been
the case.17 This process ostensibly leads to a neighbourhood’s higher

and better use through its class elevation, secured by greater home-
owner equity and increased cultural status (a phenomenon usually
called gentrification). It is also a process that involves economic win-
ners and losers: those who benefit from the rising value of properties
whose purchase price was relatively low, and those who are priced out
of the market as others who have access to greater investment capital
recognize and exploit the rent gap.
In Toronto, the first example of such urban gentrification is usually
considered to be the Don Vale neighbourhood during the 1970s (an area
in the eastern part of downtown Toronto more commonly called –
somewhat inaccurately – Cabbagetown).18 Its theatrical equivalent, at
much the same time, might be considered to be Theatre Passe Muraille,
which largely conformed to the standard gentrification model and
achieved a higher and better use for 16 Ryerson Avenue. But the local
property market became very different in the 1980s. In market terms, it
could be argued that the downtown Toronto property market, in the
aggregate, was achieving its higher and better use in the 1980s: prop-
erty values rose, vacancy rates fell, and the construction of projects like
office towers in the financial core accelerated. According to such a mar-
ket-based calculus, however, the smaller theatre companies that came
to prominence in the 1980s lost out. Theatre did not constitute a higher
and better use of the built environment in Toronto during the 1980s in
a market sense because the rent gap that theatre companies had
exploited previously was progressively narrowing, or, if the rent gap
was still substantial, the actual rent needed to enter the market in the
first place had become high enough to rule out theatre companies’ par-
ticipation, whatever the potential rent might have been.
The achievement of higher and better use should not be evaluated
solely by a market-based test, however, and certain theatre companies’
negotiation of Toronto’s built environment in the 1980s and 1990s
shows why. Necessary Angel and Buddies demonstrated that compa-
nies could – in different ways – achieve a sense of higher and better
use of the built environment through cultural means; they could gain
cultural equity and secure their theatrical legitimacy even without the
privilege of property ownership. They achieved this, though, by self-
consciously making monopolistic claims on certain urban places. As I
have discussed in another context, theatre companies and events often
make monopolistic claims on space: a particular place is imagined to
be the ideal location for a particular performance event, and a particu-
lar property is imagined to be the ideal location for a particular com-

pany.19 Thus, Strachan House becomes ideal for Necessary Angel’s
production of Tamara, and 12 Alexander Street becomes the ideal home
for Buddies. The reasons for making such links may be many, but they
are persuasive because claims about non-replicability are central to
both place and cultural production, and are often made using similar
language. As Harvey observes: ‘If claims to uniqueness, authenticity,
particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly
rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims
than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and prac-
tices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course,
the built, social and cultural environments)?’20 A production like Tam-
ara and Buddies’ occupancy of 12 Alexander Street does not involve
monopoly rent in a market sense (in that neither owns the performance
spaces involved), but they do involve monopoly rent in a cultural
sense: each company achieves greater cultural equity by trading on the
non-replicable and legitimating properties of the built environment.
While there is no inherent connection between an environmental per-
formance and its location, or a theatre company and its location, if one
can mobilize the qualitative properties of a site persuasively, one can
achieve greater cultural equity for one’s theatre company. In different
ways, Necessary Angel and Buddies did precisely that.
Necessary Angel
The success of Necessary Angel was built on an interrogative approach

to theatre and urban space. Productions like Tamara and Newhouse
demonstrated that buildings never intended for use as theatrical ven-
ues (such as a former bishop’s residence or a hockey arena) could, for a
short time, become inseparable from a theatrical experience and draw
attention to a small company that might otherwise have disappeared.
When one surveys press material related to Necessary Angel, the word
most consistently used to describe its work is ‘innovative.’21 This term,
and other affirmative language used to describe the company’s work,
is often linked to the environmental productions that Necessary Angel
mounted through the 1980s. The highest-profile of these was John Kri-
zanc’s Tamara (1981). The play, set in Fascist Italy, was first performed
in the former Strachan House in Trinity Bellwoods Park and subse-
quently produced internationally. Tamara drew considerable attention
to the then-fledgling company, which had been founded in 1978 by a
group of young theatre artists that had previously staged only a few,
low-profile shows. Necessary Angel’s later environmental productions
included Censored (1983), a play about Molière and religious authority,
in St Paul’s Church on Avenue Road; Yankees at York (1984), produced
with Autumn Leaf and set in Old Fort York; Chekhov’s Seagull (1984),
in the Queen’s Quay Terminal on Lake Ontario; Newhouse (1989), an
AIDS parable that transposed Don Juan to the contemporary Canadian
political scene, set in the William Bolton Arena in the Annex; and Com-
ing Through Slaughter (1989), an adaptation of the Michael Ondaatje
novel, set in the Silver Dollar Tavern on College Street. While environ-
mental work formed only a minority of Necessary Angel’s repertoire
during the 1980s (and almost no portion since), these productions
helped make Necessary Angel stand out from the many small compa-
nies that flourished during the decade.22
Not only did Necessary Angel’s environmental productions make
the company distinct from its peers, the company made an artistic vir-
tue out of Toronto’s shortage of performance spaces. In doing so, it
both confirmed the dominance of, and yet re-plotted, the conventional
trajectory of institutional legitimacy in Toronto: the theatre’s ascent
during the 1980s was secured by its use of the built environment, but
also by a self-conscious resistance to being associated with a single
building. This, in turn, contributed to the sense that Necessary Angel
was more avant-garde than many other companies during the 1980s
(even though the company’s dramaturgy was as strongly script-cen-
tred as that of many other theatres, and it worked comfortably with
many of Toronto’s established larger companies). The efficacy of Nec-
essary Angel’s spatial self-reflexiveness was achieved by conjoining an
environmental aesthetic lineage with contemporary urban impera-
tives. Necessary Angel used theatrical means to achieve – however
temporarily – higher and better use, and demonstrated that it was pos-
sible to do this even from a disadvantaged market position. Its envi-
ronmental performances implied that their uses of urban space
temporarily achieved a higher and better use for a given place by met-
aphorically positioning the company as urban planners, and the audi-
ence as urban subjects successfully negotiating a built environment
that, in Harvey’s words, had been transformed for optimum produc-
tion, circulation, exchange, and consumption.
Tamara is paradigmatic in this respect. The production took place in
the historic Strachan House, named after one of the most prominent
families of Upper Canada and located in Trinity Bellwoods Park on
Queen Street West. Krizanc and Richard Rose, Necessary Angel’s artis-
tic director, had originally wanted to stage Tamara in Casa Loma, the
mock castle in midtown Toronto that functions as a busy tourist attrac-
tion. The operators of Casa Loma declined, however, and, according to
Krizanc, the only other suitable place was Strachan House.23 By 1981
Strachan House was in poor repair; indeed, one of the reasons that
Rose and Krizanc were able to secure use of the property was because
it was of little immediate value to its owner, the City of Toronto. As
Krizanc later recalled:
The toilets at Strachan House were broken. The actors read in the dark
because there was no power. After an eight-hour rehearsal, they would stay
to paint walls, lay tile, or cook dinner. This zeal soon spread to friends, even
strangers in the park. Everyone wanted to help: a grade-eight class spent an
afternoon gathering up garbage, a carpenter volunteered labour in exchange
for tickets.24
Put simply, Strachan House, as it stood, was an unproductive place.

Those who helped refurbish it so that it might host a theatre event
made it productive again.
The play itself continued the planning process. As members of the
audience entered the building they were given ‘identity cards’ and the
regulations governing their negotiation of the performance (and there-
fore their negotiation of the building) were explained to them by two
characters:
Dante: Buona sera, Signore, Signori! Il Commondante is expecting you but first
you will please speak to Capitano Finzi. He will stamp your papers and
explain their importance to you. Capisce?
Finzi: (stands behind a small lectern in the hall, dressed in a black Fascist uniform)
Papers. (looks at the passport then hands it back to audience member) Sign there.
You will keep this with you at all times. If you are asked to produce your
visa, you will do so and you will be required to know its contents. Read it.
Anyone found without their papers will be arrested and deported. I would
also ask you to take special note of the date, January 10, 1927. (stamps the
papers, blows them dry and hands them back to the audience members) This visa is
good for forty-eight hours only.25
The identity cards were not only a theatrical device, they were the
means by which the audience’s circulation through the building was
inaugurated and regulated. The cards marked audience members as

spatial subjects, privileged to remain in the building for the duration
of the performance. Audience members were explicitly licensed to par-
ticipate in the time-delimited world of the play that the building phys-
ically defined, and that the theatre event offered a structured way to
engage. Although the rationale behind the identity cards is clearly
authoritarian within the fictional frame of the play, within the context
of the actual world the cards represented the audience’s efficient
mobility through space. As Rose and Krizanc recognized, the circula-
tion of the audience through Strachan House had to be planned; if
audience members went where they liked when they liked, the event
would quickly falter and the space would become disorganized. Ric
Knowles argues that ‘audiences tend to find [the identity card scene]
amusing rather than threatening,’ and one should not underestimate
the degree to which audience members’ pleasure relies on spatial legi-
bility and regulation; even if Tamara offered a degree of choice in the
rooms that audience members could enter and the scenes they could
watch, it was important for the success of the theatre event – and for
successful planning – that such choices be transparent but limited.26
The identity cards signalled a theatrical and spatial contract that
helped ensure the higher and better use of the property.
The other productions in Necessary Angel’s environmental reper-
toire mapped this sense of higher and better use across the downtown
area as a whole. Taken together, productions like Tamara, Seagull, and
Newhouse practically and symbolically produced new theatre spaces
where none existed before, temporarily increasing the supply of per-
formance space in a city characterized by a scarcity of such space. Nec-
essary Angel’s environmental work was seductive not only because it
articulated an inventive spatial dramaturgy, but also because that dra-
maturgy appeared to give an individual theatre company the ability to
solve a problem of space that was urban and systemic. In an urban
environment marked by a scarcity of performance space, the theatre
company that can create surplus is endowed with authority. Indeed,
one might argue that Necessary Angel’s near cessation of environmen-
tal performances after Coming Through Slaughter signified that the com-
pany’s legitimacy was secure.
Buddies in Bad Times
The success of Buddies in Bad Times should not be underestimated.

Like Necessary Angel, it was one of the founding members of the The-
atre Centre, and was also associated closely with a long-time artistic
director (in Necessary Angel’s case, Richard Rose, and in Buddies’
case, Sky Gilbert). Buddies, however, was the only company of the
small theatre generation that grew significantly in size during the
1990s, a fact made all the more remarkable because of its explicit
embrace of dissident sexual politics. Productions like Drag Queens on
Trial (1985) and Ban This Show (1990) not only made gay and lesbian
identities visible on the Toronto stage to a greater degree than ever
before, Buddies actively took pleasure in exploring what Gilbert once
described as the ‘cornucopia of queer life: drag, man/boy love, pro-
miscuity, prostitution, nudity and masturbation.’27 In spite of the com-
pany’s ‘history as a whipping boy of outraged city politicians and
tabloid columnists,’ as the Toronto Star put it, Buddies became a well-
established member of the city’s mid-sized theatre sector, and plausi-
bly claimed to be the continent’s – and possibly the world’s – largest
queer theatre.28
In 1994 Buddies moved into the former home of Toronto Workshop
Productions, 12 Alexander Street. The property had been vacant since
TWP’s collapse and had been bought by the City of Toronto in 1989. A
selection committee comprising artistic and political representatives
was formed to determine the facility’s future use, invite proposals for
its management, and make recommendations to the City of Toronto.
The committee’s main objective was ‘to maintain a facility at 12 Alex-
ander Street, primarily for non-profit performing arts uses.’29 The com-
petition for the property was fierce, since 12 Alexander Street was a
major theatrical landmark in a downtown location (even if the build-
ing needed repair), and the city’s shortage of theatre space had not
lessened during the previous decade. In its report to Toronto city coun-
cil, the selection committee stated that it was ‘acutely conscious’ of the
fact that, even if 12 Alexander Street remained a home for non-profit
theatre, there remained an ‘unmet demand for appropriate, accessible,
and affordable space to house Toronto’s thriving small and medium
sized non-profit performing arts community.’30
Buddies’ bid for the property was unsuccessful at first. Although the
committee shortlisted The EDGE, the alliance of companies that Bud-
dies led, a management team of producers called the 12 Alexander
Street Project was initially awarded the long-term lease to operate the
facility.31 The Project planned to use the facility to house touring pro-
ductions of plays from across the country. A ‘roadhouse’ for touring
Canadian productions had never succeeded before and it did not suc-
ceed this time; more than a year after the project had assumed the
management of 12 Alexander Street little had happened, and it was

clear that the facility was not achieving a higher and better use. As Sky
Gilbert recalls, Buddies’ general manager Tim Jones saw the opportu-
nity to resuscitate The EDGE proposal, which involved Buddies as the
lead tenant providing support to a number of smaller, experimental
companies that would program a substantial number of weeks each
season. Buddies approached the City of Toronto when it became
apparent that 12 Alexander Street was little closer to being revitalized,
and the City agreed to transfer responsibility to Buddies and its associ-
ates. The 12 Alexander Street Project name remained, but its mission
was effectively transformed into that of The EDGE.
Buddies undertook extensive renovations to the facility, and, when
the building reopened in 1994, it was a far cry from the leaky and
uncomfortable venue that it had been in the time of TWP.32 It now
boasted well-equipped and flexible performance spaces, expanded
workspace, a public bar, and a complete interior and exterior restyling
that opened the building to the street to a greater degree. The redesign
did not attempt to obliterate the building’s past use (its aesthetics
remained rough), but Buddies’ new home was intentionally sexier and
more user-friendly than it had previously been. With renovations com-
pleted, Buddies had undoubtedly achieved a higher and better use for
12 Alexander Street, not only for itself but also for the small companies
that benefited from Buddies’ support. It had realized a better physical
arrangement of the facility than had previously been the case, and its
use of the building to support small experimental companies arguably
improved the health of Toronto’s wider theatrical ecology.
Furthermore, Buddies’ suitability for 12 Alexander Street was geo-
graphically persuasive to a wider urban constituency. Buddies’ pro-
motion of 12 Alexander Street as its ideal home, and its occupancy of
the building as a ‘homecoming,’ hinged on a homology between the
property, the theatre company, and Toronto’s urban geography of sex-
uality. During the years that TWP had occupied 12 Alexander Street,
the surrounding neighbourhood had become the locus of a vibrant gay
and lesbian community. While other bidders for 12 Alexander Street
could claim that they possessed the administrative capacity to run 12
Alexander Street, only Buddies could argue that the property reflected,
and would supplement, the identity of the neighbourhood in which it
was located. Indeed, Robert Wallace argues that 12 Alexander Street
physically spatialized Buddies’ queer subjectivity in a way that its pre-
vious, smaller home on George Street could not, and that the company
self-consciously represented its move to Alexander Street as a marker

of its cultural ascendancy.33
A sign of how appropriate the fit between Buddies and 12 Alexander
Street was perceived to be can be seen in the geographical inflection
that Buddies’ self-promotion gained following its move. Now the com-
pany, property, and neighbourhood were represented as being in a
kind of urban symbiosis. Buddies’ fund-raising effort to restore the
building was named the ‘Coming Home’ campaign, which implied
that Buddies was returning to its point of origin and ideal dwelling.34
The president of the company extended this sentiment in the promo-
tional literature for Buddies’ inaugural season at 12 Alexander Street,
claiming that Buddies was ‘back home where we belong,’ and that it
had ‘landed right smack dab in the middle of our community’ after a
‘sixteen year diaspora.’35
Of course, Buddies had never been in exile, just as it had never lived
at 12 Alexander Street before. This discourse, however, did not rely on
historical accuracy for its efficacy but rather on the persuasiveness of
its sentimental geography. Buddies’ language of homecoming commu-
nicated its confidence that the higher and better use of 12 Alexander
Street had been achieved and that the company was fully integrated
into its neighbourhood. The plausibility of this discourse signalled
Buddies’ legitimacy as a cultural enterprise; this legitimacy was
enhanced not only through the alliance with other experimental com-
panies that Buddies’ new building made possible, but by the com-
pany’s new-found affiliation with the urban fabric of the city. Buddies’
move to 12 Alexander Street was impeccable urban planning, and the
company made sure that its audiences knew this.
Conclusion
For at least three decades, the calculus of theatrical legitimacy in Tor-

onto has incorporated a spatial element. A theatre company achieved
greater cultural equity by occupying – and preferably owning – a prop-
erty downtown. But the inflationary real estate markets of the 1980s
and 1990s meant that property ownership was an unattainable ideal
for the generation of smaller companies that grew up during this
period, since the cost of buying a property rose at the same time as the
supply of theatrically amenable properties dwindled. The response of
theatre companies to this situation re-inscribed the centrality of down-
town to the urban geography of theatre in Toronto, but their spatial
intransigence also made the shortage of performance venues more

acute. By extension, they also made it more difficult to trade on the
affirmative valences that have historically been gained in Toronto by a
theatre company being associated with a particular place.
Two companies, however, demonstrated that it was possible to
achieve a significant amount of cultural equity through the built envi-
ronment without recourse to property ownership. This involved mak-
ing monopoly claims over particular spaces, whether temporarily
(Necessary Angel) or recuperatively (Buddies). In both instances, these
companies self-consciously implied that their occupation of a place
achieved a higher and better use of the built environment, and skirted
the problematic issue of ownership by exerting a geographical rather
than legal authority over performance space. For Necessary Angel,
this involved explicitly linking dramaturgy with geography in order to
create new theatre spaces during a time of their scarcity, an accom-
plishment that secured the company’s legitimacy as a theatrical enter-
prise and, ironically, meant that it no longer felt compelled to create
environmental productions anymore. Even when Necessary Angel did
stage an environmental production – a re-mount of Tamara in 2003 as
Richard Rose’s swansong as artistic director – this only emphasized
and commemorated the degree to which the company’s success had
been spatially secured. For Buddies, its civically sanctioned occupancy
of 12 Alexander Street seemed to achieve an urban harmony by bring-
ing together a mutually sustaining geography of theatre company,
neighbourhood, and sexuality. This homology not only implied that
the gay village would be more complete with Buddies in residence,
but also suggested that Buddies could only really gain its greatest cul-
tural equity through residing at 12 Alexander Street. Whether home-
less or coming home, Necessary Angel and Buddies illustrated how
theatre companies in Toronto could still achieve legitimacy through
the built environment, even if their success demanded inventive uses
of space and, at the same time, sophisticated modes of geographical
self-fashioning.
Conclusion
To title this book City Stages is to identify a conjunction between the

urban and the theatrical. But exploring this conjunction is by no means
straightforward, as this urban history of theatre in Toronto has repeat-
edly demonstrated. Time and time again, I have found that what
appeared initially to be relatively contained case studies were far more
complex than I anticipated. When I first became vaguely aware that
there might be a link between theatre and urban planning (in its nar-
rowest sense) in Toronto some years ago, I did not foresee that this
would lead to a wider investigation that encompassed everything from
theatre buildings to property markets to arts administration to civic
ideology to staging practices to political economy (and more). Yet the
deeper I examined these issues the more I become convinced of their
connection and their relevance to the history of theatre in Toronto,
though perhaps not in ways I initially had envisaged.
This is partly because the link between theatre and the city is not
always direct, and not always explicit. To invoke Louis Althusser’s
schema of effectivity, the relationship between the theatrical and the
urban in Toronto has been as much structural as mechanical.1 Exam-
ples of mechanical (or direct) links between theatre and the city are
easy enough to find in Toronto, and I have examined a number in this
book: when a municipal government provides money to construct a
civic theatre facility, for example, or a theatre company finds a broken-
down mansion in which to perform. In cases like these it is quite easy
to see that theatre and the city intersect. In other cases this intersection
occurs in ways that are more ‘transitive’ (to use Althusser’s term), but
no less consequential: when transnational economics, urban develop-
ment, and a theatre company’s spatial requirements meet, for example,
134 City Stages
or when systems of theatrical value and a local real estate market

negotiate each other. I have tried to trace some of the many direct and
refractory links that have occurred, and been made, between theatre
and the city in Toronto since 1967, but always in the interest of show-
ing the material effects – some unexpected – of these connections.
As a result, I have argued that certain things are key to explaining
the development of Toronto as a city stage. The first is political econ-
omy. Whether at the transnational level or the neighbourhood level,
economics matter to the urban geography of theatre in Toronto. At the
same time, however, economics do not exist independently of political
structures. Different levels of the state have served a number of func-
tions in helping to make Toronto a city stage: patronage, regulation,
economic stimulation and restraint, and, perhaps most importantly, as
the ultimate legal and financial guarantor of many theatrical and civic
enterprises. I have also argued that Toronto functions as a city stage
through a combination of empirical and ideational practices. The senti-
mental economies of theatre in Toronto have been at least as important
as the market economies of theatre in Toronto; in fact, Toronto’s devel-
opment as a city stage has been constituted through the ways that
these economies have often been in negotiation with each other.
Finally, the spatialization of the relationship between theatre and the
city in Toronto has occurred in a variety of forms, and not only those
that might seem most immediately familiar. It is possible to recognize
Toronto as a city stage not only because of the physical contours of its
theatre buildings and the neighbourhoods in which they reside, but
also by the ways in which a city stage depends on valuing certain
places in certain ways, privileging some places over others, and work-
ing to create, sustain, and defend places.
In addition, I have undoubtedly privileged certain modes of analy-
sis and types of historical artefacts over others. I have been more con-
cerned with the urban conditions of theatrical production (and,
equally, the theatrical conditions of urban production) than I have
been with the analysis of individual plays. While I hope that my peri-
odic discussion of paradigmatic or particularly illustrative perfor-
mances furthers my analysis, my approach to individual plays has
been much the same as my approach to individual people: they are
always part of greater political, economic, and cultural processes. This
does not diminish their importance, but it does affect the way that
their role is understood and their efficacy measured. For me, one of the
more consistently intriguing features of the people, performances, and
Conclusion 135
practices that I have examined is the way that their efficacy often bears
only a tangential relationship to the intentions driving them in the first
place. This recurring incommensurability of intention and effect has
been a constant feature of theatre in Toronto, and, from my perspec-
tive, a fascinating one.
How might any insights gained here be useful elsewhere? In the
introduction to this book I warned against falling into the cognateness
trap, and I also warned against automatically seeing my findings as
nationally or regionally transposable. I have also tried to avoid a kind
of urban synecdochic fallacy that would be equally debilitating: seeing
Toronto as representative of all city stages. Many of the findings here
are specific to Toronto, and, in my view, are more illuminating because
of their spatial and historical particularity. This does not, however, pre-
clude examining city stages in other times and places – Toronto is a dis-
tinctive city stage, but it is not an exceptional one. The methodology
employed here may also be transposed elsewhere – working in a simi-
lar way with different case studies could yield illuminating results that
might offer the basis of a wider geography of theatre in urban space.
That this book might contribute to a greater diversity of urban analyses
of theatre would be very welcome indeed.
Notes
Introduction
1 Harvey employs this distinction fairly consistently through his work, at

least beginning with Social Justice and the City, though he is less concerned
with place as a conceptual category than he is with the materiality of partic-
ular types of places: a factory as opposed to a residence, or a shopping mall
as opposed to a skyscraper.
2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), 117–18.
3 Peter B. Evans, Theda Skocpol, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Bringing the
State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4 Jane Jacobs attributes the comparative stability of Toronto’s downtown to
four ‘virtues of omission’: first, ‘Canadian banks did not adopt the practice
of “redlining” various city neighbourhoods, designating property in them
to be ineligible [for mortgage lending] henceforth’; second, ‘although radi-
cal prejudices and discriminations infest Toronto too, these evils were not
exacerbated and intensified by creation of racial ghettos’; third, ‘the Cana-
dian federal government has financed only one major automotive artery,
the TransCanada Highway,’ and while Toronto has suffered from some
expressway building, ‘saving Toronto from these juggernauts was accom-
plished more speedily than if the federal government and its largesse had
been involved too’; fourth, ‘urban renewal schemes and programs were less
destructive to Toronto than to cities across the border’ because ‘Canadian
politicians soon perceived what a horrendous generator it was of civic dis-
sentions and other nasty problems.’ See John Sewell, The Shape of the City:
Toronto Struggles with Modern Planning (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1993), x–xi.
138 Notes to pages 7–12
5 The use of ‘Fordism’ and ‘Taylorism’ can also be considered to be broadly

interchangeable, although, as Graeme Salaman points out, there may be
useful analytical distinctions between them. See Rosemary Deem and
Graeme Salaman, Work, Culture, and Society (Milton Keynes, UK: Open Uni-
versity Press, 1985).
6 Though I prefer ‘flexible accumulation’ to post-Fordism (and Harvey offers
a convincing explanation of why this is a more precise term in The Condi-
tion of Postmodernity), for the most part I use the term ‘post-Fordist’
throughout this project. The rationale for this use is largely a pragmatic
one: it is difficult to use ‘flexible accumulation’ in the adjectival form.
7 For the economic case for this transition, see Robert Boyer, The Regulation
School: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
For the best explanation of the shift, see David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 119–97.
8 For even the barest outline of this debate, see Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism:
A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Boyer, Regulation; Daniel Drache, and
Marc S. Gertler, eds., The New Era of Global Competition: State Policy and Mar-
ket Power (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); J.K. Gibson-
Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity;
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994);
and Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism (Lon-
don: Verso, 1987).
9 See Gunter Gad, ‘Toronto’s Financial District,’ Canadian Geographer 35, no. 2
(1991); David M. Nowlan, ‘The Changing Toronto-Area Economy,’ in
Toward an Industrial Land Strategy: A Forum on the Future of Industrial Land
(Toronto: Metropolitan Toronto, 1994).
10 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in The Glasgow Edition of the
Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith 1, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L.
Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982).
11 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-
American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 13.
12 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Black-
well, 1996), 123.
13 Marvin Carlson, ‘Theatrical Audiences and the Reading of Performance,’ in
Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed.
Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1989), 85.
14 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Robert C. Tucker, The Marx–Engels Reader,
2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 595.
Notes to pages 12–20 139
15 Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London, New
York: Routledge, 1993), 83.
16 Imre Szeman, ‘Introduction: A Manifesto for Materialism,’ Essays on Cana-
dian Writing, no. 68 (1999): 66.
17 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 79.
18 Anton Wagner, Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criti-
cism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). For a discussion of the
epistemological and methodological split within Canadian theatre histori-
ography, see my review of Wagner: Michael McKinnie, ‘Rev. of Establishing
Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism,’ Essays on Canadian Writ-
ing, no. 70 (2000).
19 Robert Wallace, Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada
(Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990), 128–34.
20 Ric Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary
Canadian Dramaturgies (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999).
21 Craig Stewart Walker, The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination
and Western Tradition (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2001).
22 See, for example, Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern
Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Elinor Fuchs and
Una Chaudhuri, Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2002); Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the
Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and David Wiles,
A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
23 Readers are also likely to observe that there are no photographs in this
book. This is partly due to the economics of present-day academic pub-
lishing – incorporating photographs is expensive – but there is some
intellectual justification for it as well, at least within the context of this
project: photographs, especially of individual theatre buildings, often
privilege the type of architectonic perspective that I try to acknowledge,
but go beyond. They can also visually hive off individual sites from their
environment in ways that could prove problematic given my emphasis on
structural conditions.
24 Although it is technically just beyond the Dupont Street border of the
downtown theatre area, I would include Tarragon Theatre among down-
town theatres. It is located on Bridgman Avenue, a small street one short
block north of Dupont Street.
25 Don Rubin, ‘John Juliani’s Savage God,’ Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 20 (1975–6):
152.
1. Urban National, Suburban Transnational
1 Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond, Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture
Odyssey (Scarborough: Prentice Hall Canada, 1996), 50.
2 D.P. Schafer and André Fortier, Review of Federal Policies for the Arts in Can-
ada (1944–1988) (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of the Arts, 1989), 19.
3 Factory Theatre Lab was founded in May 1970 with a mandate to produce
only Canadian plays.
4 Sewell, Shape of the City. These struggles include the successful fight to stop
the Crosstown and Spadina expressways, which was finally achieved in
1971; the renovation, rather than demolition, of Trefann Court, a working-
class neighbourhood in the east end of downtown; the development of infil
housing in Baldwin Village near the intersection of Dundas Street and
Spadina Avenue; the imposition of strict frontage requirements on new com-
mercial office towers in the financial district; and the building of the St
Lawrence Neighbourhood, a popular mixed-use and mixed-scale neighbour-
hood built on reclaimed railway lands in the southeast end of downtown.
5 In a sign of how much control Livent held over the facility, Ford purchased
the right to name the facility from Livent and not from the municipal own-
ers; however, this meant that when Livent went bankrupt Toronto was
under no contractual obligation to retain the Ford Centre name. See
Michael Valpy, ‘Livent Got Ticket Money before Curtain, City Finds,’ Globe
and Mail, 5 Dec. 1988, A17.
6 Denis W. Johnston, Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto’s Alternative
Theatres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 12.
7 Ibid., 12.
8 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aes-
thetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 10. I do not want to elide the ‘rebel-
lious’ sense of art that Marcuse argues coexists with an affirmative sense,
but this sense is more appropriately used in the context of Toronto theatre
companies like Toronto Workshop Productions.
9 Stacy Wolf, ‘Civilizing and Selling Spectators: Audiences at the Madison
Civic Center,’ Theatre Survey 39, no. 2 (1998): 11.
10 Ibid.
11 Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 14–37.
12 H.D.F. Kitto, ‘The Polis,’ in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. Legates and
Frederic Stout (London: Routledge, 1996), 35.
13 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1925), 240.
14 John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of
Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 62.
15 Ibid., 77.
16 Ibid., 60.
17 Before amalgamation, the majority of municipal services were provided to
city residents by the metropolitan government, but a great deal of urban
planning remained in the hands of the individual city government.
18 For historical perspectives on Toronto’s downtown development and urban
reform struggles, see Jon Caulfield, City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s
Gentrification and Critical Social Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1996); Graham Fraser, Fighting Back: Urban Renewal in Trefann Court
(Toronto: Hakkert, 1972); John Sewell, Up Against City Hall (Toronto: James
Lorimer & Co., 1972); David Lewis Stein, Toronto for Sale: The Destruction of a
City (Toronto: New Press, 1972).
19 ‘Brutalism’ is the accepted term for the architectural style, most popular in
the 1960s and 1970s, where poured concrete exterior walls are left largely in
the form that they possess when unmoulded. The style emphasizes mass
and angularity, and, though many successful examples exist, poorly
designed brutalist buildings can sometimes appear forbidding and impene-
trable from street level.
20 Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibili-
ties for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 11–13.
21 Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 12.
22 For a perceptive analysis of the historical emergence of this discourse in a
Canadian context, see Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Com-
mission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). The Massey Commis-
sion is the popular name used for the Royal Commission on National
Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, which was chaired by Vin-
cent Massey. The royal commission’s report, issued in 1951, prompted the
creation in 1957 of the Canada Council, an arm’s-length body established to
extend national state sponsorship of the arts and scholarship. Though to
many the commission’s recommendations represented a welcome call for
increased investment in cultural production, its cultural model had a dis-
tinctly paternalist air that others resented.
23 Stephen Johnson, ‘St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts,’ in The
Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, ed. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 502.
24 Herbert Whittaker, ‘The Crest Theatre,’ Oxford Companion, ed. Benson and
Conolly, 119.
25 Ibid., 120.
26 Mavor Moore resigned after his nationalist programming proved finan-

cially disastrous in the first season, and his replacement, Leon Major,
sharply reduced the ‘Canadian content’ onstage.
27 The City of Toronto created a stand-alone, not-for-profit theatre company
called Toronto Arts Productions (TAP), to which it then provided an annual
subsidy. The City also transferred responsibility for the company’s debts to
TAP itself, ending a previous arrangement whereby the City was liable for
cost overruns. TAP was renamed CentreStage in 1983, and CentreStage
merged with Toronto Free Theatre to form Canadian Stage Company in
1988. Canadian Stage Company (or CanStage, as it has more recently pro-
moted itself) now occupies the SLC’s main theatre space and Toronto Free
Theatre’s former premises on Berkeley Street.
28 Gad, ‘Toronto’s,’ 203–7. Gad suggests that the best architectural marker of
Toronto’s changing downtown core is the Toronto-Dominion Centre, the
Mies van de Rohe–designed skyscraper whose first tower opened in 1967.
29 Ibid., 205.
30 Ibid., 205.
31 Ibid., 206.
32 Patricia McHugh, Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, 2nd ed. (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 33.
33 It is interesting to note that the Hummingbird Centre, the 3223 seat audito-
rium opened in 1960 as the O’Keefe Centre (the O’Keefe Brewery originally
built and owned the space), is just west of the Front Street commercial strip
at Front and Yonge Streets, but has never seemed to take part in the
changes in Front Street. Perhaps this is because its architectural design, a
massive block in the International Expressionist style, ensures a high mod-
ernist aloofness that is difficult to reconcile with the surrounding area. It
also occupies its own small block, sitting on a sliver of land between Yonge
and Scott Streets, which physically separates it from the bulk of the devel-
opments on Front Street. The building itself, though, has undergone some
interesting changes over the years, which suggest that it too has negotiated
the transformation from Fordism to post-Fordism. Early in the Centre’s life
O’Keefe turned the building over to Metropolitan Toronto. The O’Keefe
Brewery no longer exists as an independent company, having been taken
over by Molson in the mid-1980s (this is not insignificant economically,
since breweries are big business in Canada, and Molson’s purchase of
O’Keefe ensured that over 90 per cent of the national beer market was in
the hands of Molson and Labatt – a move to duopoly capitalism, at least).
Molson has subsequently become part of the Coors empire in a merger that
formed one of the world’s largest brewing conglomerates. The name
‘O’Keefe’ became increasingly anachronistic. The metropolitan government

renamed the building the Hummingbird Centre in 1994, after a payment of
$5 million from a software development company. Perhaps the economic
giants of an age can be traced through their inscription on cultural institu-
tions.
34 See P. Filion, ‘Metropolitan Planning Objectives and Implementation Con-
straints: Planning in a Post-Fordist and Postmodern Age,’ Environment and
Planning A 28 (1996): 1637–60; and Malcolm R. Matthew, ‘The Suburbaniza-
tion of Toronto Offices,’ Canadian Geographer 37, no. 4 (1993): 293–306.
35 Peter Gorrie, ‘North York’s Instant Downtown,’ Canadian Geographic April/
May 1991, 70.
36 Lynne Ainsworth, ‘Lastman Deals for No-Cost Centre for Arts,’ Toronto
Star, 14 Jan. 1986, N2.
37 Gorrie, ‘North York’s,’ 70.
38 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine
Forge Press, 2000).
39 Unlike American cities, Canadian cities are usually prevented by their
provinces from issuing bonds to finance infrastructure projects.
40 Ainsworth, ‘Lastman Deals.’
41 It is worth noting that higher levels of government refused to contribute
directly to the cost of the arts centre. The Province’s forms of subsidy, while
substantial, operated according to an economic logic similar to that of
North York: the land donation was effectively a grant-in-kind to the City of
North York that it was unwilling to make directly. Purchasing the density
rights at least gave the Province an asset that it could subsequently sell. The
cost of the Ford Centre was ultimately met through a combination of City
sources that included the density-rights fund, which, due to construction
delays, had grown to approximately $30 million; the sale of naming rights
to the facility for nearly $8 million (though the rights to name the facility
were actually sold to Livent, who resold them at a higher price to Ford); the
City’s municipal land acquisition fund, from which $5.5 million was
diverted to pay construction costs (again, the City diverting money rather
than being seen to spend it); and some private donation.
42 Although private sponsorship of the arts is increasingly common in Can-
ada, the amount of this support that is directed through a network of pri-
vate foundations remains quite small.
43 Filion, ‘Metropolitan planning,’ 1647. In 1996 Filion stated that 67 per cent
of all peak-hour trips into downtown North York where made by car, com-
pared with 36 per cent in the older Toronto core.
44 North York City Centre also ensures that citizens realize that they are on
private property. When I first researched downtown North York, I took a

series of photographs inside the City Centre. I was stopped by a security
guard, who informed me that the City Centre was private, not public,
property, and that if I wished to take pictures I had to request permission
from the Centre’s owners, a property development and management com-
pany.
45 Gorrie, ‘North York’s,’ 73.
46 Appropriately, the architect of the Ford Centre is Eberhard Zeidler, who
also designed the Eaton Centre.
47 On time-space compression as a feature of capitalism, see Harvey, The Con-
dition of Postmodernity, 260–307.
48 Quoted in Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles, ‘Herbert Whittaker,
Reporting from the Front: The Montreal Gazette, 1937–1949, and the Globe
and Mail, 1949–1975,’ in Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian The-
atre Criticism, ed. Anton Wagner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999), 225.
2. Good Times, Inc.
1 Dale Anne Freed, ‘Push Comes to Shove in Assault Crackdown,’ Toronto

Star, 5 Aug. 1998.
2 The term ‘Central Industrial District’ was used by the former City of Tor-
onto for planning purposes, and referred to the area between University
Avenue to the east, Bathurst Street to the west, Queen Street to the north,
and the lakeshore railway tracks to the south.
3 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: King-Spadina’ (City of
Toronto, 1977), 11.
4 For a useful summary of the neighbourhood’s historical development in
terms of its construction, see McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 44–6.
5 Even with the advent of the railway, a significant residential population
remained in the area. In the latter half of the nineteenth century more than
half the buildings between Simcoe Street and Spadina Avenue were
houses, and by 1890 over 800 houses had been constructed between
Bathurst and Simcoe Streets. See Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan
Proposals,’ 11.
6 Ibid.
7 The present-day shoreline of Lake Ontario is not Toronto’s original lake-
shore, which was Front Street (hence the street’s name).
8 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals,’ 12.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 13.
13 Ibid., 12.
14 Ibid., 69.
15 Ibid., 71.
16 Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of Industrial Land Uses in the
King-Spadina District’ (City of Toronto, 1987), 2. The committee defined
‘communications and information technology’ as
Film/video (including broadcasting); printing/publishing; and high
technology. ‘High technology’ is here understood to comprise the following
activities:
– Computer services – such as programming, planning, systems work and
consulting;
– Computer rental and sales;
– Data processing;
– Software and hardware development and production;
– Computer maintenance and repair;
– Other office automation-related activity.
17 Toronto, Council, Planning and Development, ‘King-Spadina: Official Plan
Part 2’ (City of Toronto, 1996), 5.
18 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals.’
19 Ibid.
20 McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 49.
21 Toronto Entertainment District Association (TEDA), Toronto Entertainment
District (2000 [accessed 31 May 2000]); available at www.toronto.com/e/v/
toron/0050/02/02/.
22 The area also benefited from the fact that, in the early 1990s, the Toronto
Blue Jays won consecutive World Series titles and were one of the most suc-
cessful teams in professional baseball. This benefited area businesses by
extending the season into the playoffs and ensuring that SkyDome was
consistently sold out.
23 Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Indus-
trial Market’ (City of Toronto, 1987), 4. It should be noted that making like-
to-like comparisons with earlier data is not always possible, since the
industrial classifications used in the Metro Employment Survey are not
standardized over time. I have made comparisons where categories con-
form over time or where slight alterations in their composition do not alter
pronounced historical trends.
24 Nate Hendley, ‘The Law of Clubland,’ eye online, 29 Aug. 1999. Accessed
1 June 2000, http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue07.29.99/news/

clubland.html.
25 The closest popular retail strip is along Queen Street West between Univer-
sity and Spadina Avenues.
26 TEDA, Toronto.
27 Adele Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ Toronto Life, August 1999.
28 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies
(London: Sage, 1990), 2.
29 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 352.
30 Ibid., 353.
31 Ibid.
32 Paul Moloney, ‘Two Men Go Up Against a Brick Wall,’ Toronto Star,
24 March 1997.
33 TEDA, Toronto.
34 Gayle MacDonald, ‘An Entertaining Kind of Guy,’ Globe and Mail, 13 Nov.
1999.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ 100.
39 Ibid., 102. Bringing malls into the city core has not made them any more
‘urban.’ Toronto’s Eaton Centre, the major example of a mall in the city
core, is widely considered to have been a disastrous example of downtown
redevelopment The Eaton Centre drained the long block of Yonge Street
between Queen Street and Dundas Street of a mix of commercial and
pedestrian streetlife, a fact that the Centre’s owners have more recently
acknowledged through a (flawed) attempt to re-introduce shop entrances
on Yonge Street.
40 MacDonald, ‘Entertaining.’
41 Freedman, ‘Future Schlock,’ 104.
42 TEDA, Toronto.
43 Ibid. The claim that Toronto is the third-largest theatre centre in the
English-speaking world is made so often and so casually that those who
employ it rarely feel the need to provide evidence in support. Whether it is
true or not (and, given the substantial number and combination of large
commercial productions and smaller not-for-profit shows, it may well be
true) is of less concern than the fact that the claim figures so prominently
and frequently in civic self-promotion.
44 Herbert Whittaker, ‘Royal Alexandra Theatre,’ in Oxford Companion, ed.
Benson and Conolly, 476.
45 Ed Mirvish, Honest Ed Mirvish: How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate or,

121 Lessons I Never Learned in School (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1993), 77.
Richard Paul Knowles illustrates this high-market demographic appeal in
his description of a Royal Alex program as containing ‘glossy, full-colour
ads for Cadillac and Mercedes Benz and eroticized photographs of scantily-
clad (white) women selling Smirnoff vodka.’ Knowles, ‘Reading Material:
Transfers, Remounts, and the Production of Meaning in Contemporary Tor-
onto Drama and Theatre,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 51–2 (1994): 283.
46 Robert Crew, ‘A Night of Honest Appreciation,’ Toronto Star, 5 March 1996.
47 Bullseye, ‘Toronto: A Calendar for the Year 2000; Photographs from the
20th Century’ (Toronto: Bullseye, 1999).
48 Mirvish, Honest Ed, xi.
49 Ibid., viii.
50 Ibid., vii–viii.
51 Mirvish is not so much the philanthropist that he is willing to lose money
regularly on artistic ventures. He sold the Old Vic because the theatre could
not turn a profit consistently.
52 Mirvish, Honest Ed, 7–8.
53 Sarah Hampson, ‘All in the Family,’ (Globe and Mail, 11 May 2000).
Mirvish’s son, David, is largely responsible for the family theatre-produc-
tion company, Mirvish Productions. Hampson’s description of the
Mirvishes also somewhat misleadingly implies that there are other compet-
itors for the title of ‘Canada’s premier theatre family.’
54 Crew, ‘Night.’
55 One moment that revealed to me who actually controlled the Entertain-
ment District occurred when I phoned the TEDA phone number in Febru-
ary 2000 to request promotional material about the District. In its early
days, callers to TEDA who required information were asked to call another
number, which, when dialled, was for the King Street Holiday Inn. Further-
more, the paper documents that I was sent promoted the Holiday Inn. For
information on the Entertainment District at that time, one could only visit
their website.
56 For more on the history of theatre buildings in New York, see Mary C.
Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses: A
250 Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square, rev. and expanded ed.
(New York: Back Stage Books, 2004).
57 Two examples of this anxiety are the public division over Canada’s mem-
bership in the North American Free Trade Agreement and attempts by the
World Trade Organization to limit the Canadian government’s ability to
regulate cultural production to favour Canadian creators.
58 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 152.

59 Ibid.
60 See Barbara Aarsteinsen, ‘Curtain Rises on Plans for City Core Theatre
Area,’ Toronto Star, 20 Jan. 1994.
61 John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of
the Impresario (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 101.
62 Ibid., 157.
63 The political power of this coalition, and the municipal government’s
eagerness to ally itself with TEDA, was revealed when a resident and a
business owner in the Entertainment District protested to the Ontario
Municipal Board (OMB) in 1997 that Festival Hall, then about to be built,
would shroud their buildings in darkness for much of the day and create
a wind tunnel along the sidewalk (the OMB is a provincial board of ar-
bitration made up of panellists appointed by the province, which can re-
view and overturn municipal land-use decisions). To compensate, they
requested that the rear wall of Festival Hall be stepped back from the side-
walk. Festival Hall’s developers objected to the Toronto Star newspaper that
it was too easy for citizens to provoke a public review of development
projects: ‘All you need is a 45-cent stamp and $125 for the fee ... We’re
ready to go. We could have been in the ground eight months ago ... It’s a
bloody shame that what are narrow and not credible issues can delay a
project like this.’ See Moloney, ‘Two Men.’ When one arbitrator suggested
moving the wall back by three metres, the architect responded (appropri-
ately for a District so enamoured of high technology) with a sarcastic
space-age metaphor: he said that the question was analogous to NASA
being asked to shrink the space shuttle. ‘Would you prefer we take off the
guidance system or the propulsion?’ he queried (see Freedman, ‘Future
Schlock,’ 102). City planners strongly supported the development on the
basis that it would implement ‘exactly the spirit and intent of the whole
planning philosophy’ for the Entertainment District – namely, the construc-
tion of leisure complexes – and that it would be ‘a catalyst for other private
sector investment’ that would further entrench the District. One city coun-
cillor accused the OMB applicants of being ‘whiners and complainers.’ The
applicants were aggrieved by the close links between the City and Enter-
tainment District advocates, claiming that District developers ‘basically
have the city in their pocket and they can steamroll over you,’ and that the
‘worst apologist’ for the development was the City of Toronto. See Molo-
ney, ‘Two Men.’ The OMB ruled in Festival Hall’s favour.
64 Mirvish, Honest Ed, 176.
65 Ibid., 175–6.
66 Christopher Hume, ‘Bright City Lights,’ Toronto Star, 20 Dec. 1997.
67 Ibid.
68 See Metropolitan Toronto, ‘Towards an Industrial Land Strategy: A Forum
on the Future of Industrial Land’ (Metropolitan Toronto, 1994); Toronto,
Council, Planning and Development, ‘King-Spadina: Official Plan Part 2’
(City of Toronto, 1996); Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of
Industrial Land Uses in the King-Spadina District’ (City of Toronto, 1987);
Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Indus-
trial Market’; Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: King-
Spadina’; Toronto, Urban Development Services, ‘Tracking the Kings: A
Monitor Statement on the King-Parliament and King-Spadina Reinvest-
ment Initiative’ (Toronto, 1998).
69 Toronto, Planning Board, ‘Official Plan Proposals: King-Spadina,’ 70.
70 Toronto, Planning and Development, ‘Survey of the King-Spadina Indus-
trial Market,’ 1.
71 Sewell, Shape of the City, 4.
72 Ibid., 5–10. Sewell’s exceptions to the norm include Morley Callaghan,
Hugh McLennan, and Mordecai Richler.
73 Ibid., 10. The nobler response to this conclusion was the ambitious
improvements in public services that took place in Toronto under the aus-
pices of Dr Charles Hastings, medical officer of health for Toronto from
1919 to 1929. Hastings oversaw the building of new facilities for water and
sewage treatment, government-sponsored housing, and city-owned abat-
toirs. The less noble response (though much in line with progressive think-
ing of the time) was the Depression-era Bruce Report’s proposal to raze
housing in downtown Toronto in response to the poverty of many of its
working-class residents. This impulse, with its focus on so-called ‘slum
clearance,’ would be realized in Regent Park, the huge and latterly infa-
mous housing project in the east end of downtown.
74 Moloney, ‘Two Men.’
75 Saskia Sassen, ‘Identity in the Global City: Economic and Cultural Encase-
ments,’ in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 1996).
76 See Paul Moloney, ‘Hall Vows Ed Will Have His Day after Mirvish Week
Rejected,’ Toronto Star, 25 Jan. 1996; ‘Thumbs Down on Honest Ed Day,’
Toronto Star, 13 Feb. 1996.
3. Space Administration
1 Ric Knowles and Jennifer Fletcher, ‘Towards a Materialist Performance

Analysis: The Case of Tarragon Theatre,’ in The Performance Text, ed.
Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Legas, 1999), 209n9.
2 See, for example: Johnston, Up the Mainstream; Don Rubin, ‘The Toronto
Movement,’ in Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings, ed. Don Rubin
(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996); Renate Usmiani, Second Stage: The Alternative
Theatre Movement in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983).
3 Knowles and Fletcher, ‘Towards,’ 210.
4 Alan Filewod, ‘Erasing Historical Difference, the Alternative Orthodoxy in
Canadian Theater,’ Theatre Journal 41, no. 2 (1989).
5 Quoted in Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 34.
6 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘A Request for a Contribution towards the Renova-
tion of the New Theatre Passe Muraille for 16 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto,’
n.d., XZ1 MS A781152, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of
Guelph Library.
8 Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille, 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and
the Canadian Revolution (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1976), 201.
10 Rubin, ‘Toronto Movement,’ 396.
11 Toronto, Council, ‘Minutes of Proceedings for the Year 1977; Consisting of
By-laws Passed during the Year; Appendix B’ (City of Toronto, 1978), 1235.
12 Under the Ontario Heritage Act, cities could refuse to issue permits for
demolition or for alterations that modify the architectural or historical
character of a designated building.
13 Toronto, ‘Assessment Roll, Ward No. 4, Div. No. 1, 1903’ (City of Toronto,
1903), 233–4.
14 Wilkinson-Kompass relocated to 167 Bentworth Avenue, and Sol Friendly
Sheet Metal Works to 797 Sheppard Avenue West.
15 See Filion, ‘Metropolitan’; Gad, ‘Toronto’s’; Matthew, ‘Suburbanization.’
16 David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Arnold, 1973), 168.
17 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976), 284.
18 Ibid., 285–6.
19 Doreen B. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geog-
raphy of Production, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
20 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79–80.
21 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Request for a Contribution.’
22 I mention the ability to drill holes in the floor because of a story of an inci-
dent that occurred when Passe Muraille was in residence at Trinity Square
with A Company, a group led by Chris Brookes (who would later found the
Mummers’ Troupe in Newfoundland). To Passe Muraille’s consternation,
A Company cut a hole in the floor of the hall for a production, something
that Passe Muraille would likely have to explain to its landlord. See
Johnston, Up the Mainstream, 53.
23 John Reilly, ‘Letter to Theatre Passe Muraille Outlining the Canada/
Ontario Employment Development Program,’ n.d., XZ1 MS A781047,
Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library.
24 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Funding Profile for the Theatre Passe Muraille
Renovation Project,’ 10 Sept. 1983. XZ1 MS A781159, Theatre Passe Muraille
Archives, University of Guelph Library.
25 Theatre Passe Muraille and Leonard Kalishenko and Associates, ‘Renova-
tions to Theatre Building, 1983,’ 1983, XZ1 MS A781047, Theatre Passe
Muraille Archives, University of Guelph Library.
26 Under the Ontario Heritage Act, changes to the interior of a designated
building were allowed, but changes to the exterior were required largely to
reproduce the aesthetic character of the building at the time of its construc-
tion.
28 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Request for a Contribution.’
29 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status of Theatre Passe
Muraille,’ 18 April 1990, XZ1 MS A781181, Theatre Passe Muraille
30 Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia, The Noam Chomsky Lectures
(Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991), 54.
31 ‘Banking on Theatre,’ Theatrum, Feb.–March 1991, 6.
32 Even though 16 Ryerson Avenue is not a residential building, its appropri-
ate property-value comparison is with residential property values. The
building has little value as a commercial space for a private developer as it
is unlikely to be renovated for commercial use. It is as residential space,
likely in the form of condominium development, that the building has the
greatest potential value. Demand for housing in central Toronto has been
strong for many years, and the neighbourhood is already zoned residential,
so conversion to housing would be much more straightforward than it
would be, say, along Bathurst Street (though some of this difficulty was
mitigated by changes to Toronto’s zoning regulations in the mid-1990s that
loosened planning restrictions on how properties could be used). Contrary
to the Theatrum article, it is not at all clear that the heritage designation
depresses the building’s value by placing development restrictions on its
exterior. Other industrial-to-residential conversions in downtown Toron-
to have marketed the heritage status of their buildings as value-added
features.
33 Allen Trent Realty, ‘Appraisal Report: Theatre Passe Muraille; a Two-Storey
Semi-Detached Warehouse Used as a Theatre; 16 Ryerson Avenue in the

City of Toronto in the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Ontario,’ 1983,
XZ1 MS A781101, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, University of Guelph
Library.
34 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status.’
35 There is some discrepancy here in the value of the property. The report dis-
cussed by the company in April 1990 refers to a recent appraisal of
$890,000. Passe Muraille’s financial statements for the year ending 30 June
1990 place the value of the property at $586,906. If the latter figure is ac-
curate, then Passe Muraille’s financial position was even worse than it
appeared in April, since the major asset against which most of its borrow-
ing was secured was worth less than had been previously claimed. See
Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Financial Statements for the Year Ended June 30,
1990,’ 29 Jan. 1991, XZ1 MS A781180, Theatre Passe Muraille Archives, Uni-
versity of Guelph Library.
36 Theatre Passe Muraille, ‘Report on the Financial Status.’
37 The Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), as of its 1999 boundaries,
stretches to the western edge of Burlington, the eastern edge of Durham
County, and from Lake Ontario north to Lake Simcoe.
38 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 218–19.
39 Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contempo-
rary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 5.
40 By ‘mid-sized’ I mean companies that largely produce their own work (as
opposed to bringing in the work of other companies), and whose main
auditorium seats between 200 and 400 seats. All of the theatre spaces occu-
pied by the ‘alternative’ theatres fit into this category.
4. A Troubled Home
1 George Luscombe, ‘Statement to Crisis Meeting,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908001,

Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library.
2 Neil Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1995), 161.
3 Denis W. Johnston, ‘Rev. of Harlequin in Hogtown: George Luscombe and Tor-
onto Workshop Productions,’ Canadian Theatre Review 87 (1996): 66.
4 Ontario Arts Council, ‘Consultants’ Comments,’ 1981, RG 47-11 TB1,
Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of Ontario.
5 Urjo Kareda, ‘Our Father,’ Toronto Life, June 1999, 75.
6 Calculating the exact financial position of TWP in the 1980s is difficult. The
Notes to page 95 153
company’s record-keeping was inadequate for many years, and the rele-
vant documents that remain in the TWP archives and with its various fund-
ing bodies (to whom TWP would report financial data in grant
applications) are fragmentary and incomplete. For example, I could locate
only a partial set of audited financial statements, and, in one case, these
data are contradicted by another document. In this case, I have chosen fig-
ures from financial statements, and noted the discrepancy. The archivists at
the Archives of Ontario, which should maintain TWP’s yearly grant appli-
cations to the OAC (and therefore the financial data enclosed with those
applications), were unable to locate these funding requests. No completed
grant applications were available from the Toronto municipal archives, and
the National Archives of Canada has not, at the time of writing, processed
TWPs records from the 1980s.
Carson cites a number of deficit figures at different points in Harlequin in
Hogtown, but frequently does not provide their original source. This makes
confirming his figures difficult, though some are clearly drawn from the
sources listed in table 1. The figures that I have compiled in table 1 should
be seen as best estimates given the data available. I begin with the financial
year 1980 because this is the point at which TWP’s accumulated deficit
began to worsen significantly and provoke concern at the funding councils,
which had, due to accounting errors, previously believed that TWP was
operating in surplus (the company revealed that the deficit had been accru-
ing over the previous few years, but the exact figures are unavailable – see
Jack Merigold, ‘Letter to John Salvis,’ 1981, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto
Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library). It is less
important that the figure in an individual year is absolutely precise; it is
more important that the figures demonstrate, over the long term, a trend of
unsustainable growth in TWP’s accumulated deficit.
7 Canada Council, ‘Letter to Toronto Workshop Productions,’ 25 June 1982,
XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of
Guelph Library.
8 These administrators were, in order, Mona Luscombe, Marguerite Knisely,
Catherine McKeehan, and Marcia Muldoon.
9 In a letter to Walter Pitman, then executive director of the OAC, theatre
officer William Lord noted that ‘when Board members join TWP George
demands that they give him, at the time of joining, an undated letter of res-
ignation. I find it absolutely amazing, Walter, that any person would join a
Board under that condition.’ See William Lord, ‘Letter to Walter Pitman,’ 21
Nov. 1984, RG 47-11 TB1, Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of
Ontario.
10 Luscombe, ‘Statement.’
11 Graeme Page Associates, ‘A Management Study for Toronto Workshop
Productions,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A908001, Toronto Workshop Productions
12 Luscombe compresses the time frame slightly here. Toronto did not actu-
ally designate 12 Alexander Street a theatre in perpetuity until 1982.
13 Luscombe, ‘Statement.’
14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), xxxv.
15 Ibid., xxxv–xxxvi.
16 Ibid., xvi.
17 Ibid., xv. Alan Read frames the politics of Bachelard slightly differently: in
terms of their ethical potential. Read argues that Bachelard believed in the
transformative potential of the ‘imagining consciousness’ of the subject,
and that this could be emancipatory. See Read, Theatre and Everyday Life,
84–5.
18 Mira Friedlander, ‘Survivor: George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Pro-
ductions,’ Canadian Theatre Review 38 (1983): 45.
19 Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre,’ in Brecht on Theatre, ed.
John Willett (London: Methuen, 1986), 204.
20 Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 8.
21 Alan Filewod, Collective Encounters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987), 56.
22 Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 42.
23 Ibid., 184.
24 Filewod, Collective Encounters, 55.
26 See Robert Rooney, ‘Policy, Aims and Development,’ July 1987, XZ1 MS
A916 [unprocessed material], Toronto Workshop Productions, University
of Guelph Archives; Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Promotional Docu-
ment,’ n.d. [after 1982], XZ1 MS A916 [unprocessed material], Toronto
Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library.
27 Financial difficulties meant that Penaloza could not fulfil his part of the
agreement and so it collapsed.
28 Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 168. Carson draws this description from an
interview with Jaffery in 1988.
29 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 3.
30 Kareda, ‘Our Father,’ 78.
31 Toronto Workshop Productions and June Faulkner, ‘Letter to Arthur Gel-
ber,’ 14 March 1968, XZ1 MS A916, Toronto Workshop Productions, Univer-
sity of Guelph Library.
32 Toronto Workshop Productions and June Faulkner, ‘Fundraising Letter,’

12 March 1969, XZ1 MS A916, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives,
University of Guelph Library.
33 Ibid.
34 TWP signed an agreement to purchase 12 Alexander Street with Fobasco in
1981 and the deed was eventually transferred three years later.
36 Ibid., 7.
37 Ibid., 17.
38 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘A Parable: The Year of the Golden Egg,’
1980, RG 47-11 TB1, Ontario Arts Council Archives, Archives of Ontario.
39 Ibid.
41 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meeting,’ 2 Jan. 1986,
Guelph Library.
42 George Luscombe, ‘Letter to John Salvis,’ 13 Nov. 1981, XZ1 MS A908000,
Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph Library.
43 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Report to Council [Unnamed, probably
Ontario Arts Council],’ 1985, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Produc-
tions Archives, University of Guelph Library.
44 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meeting,’ 27 Nov. 1981,
Guelph Library; Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Minutes of Board Meet-
ing,’ 13 Jan. 1982, XZ1 MS A908000, Toronto Workshop Productions
Archives, University of Guelph.
45 Toronto Workshop Productions, ‘Transcript from Board Meeting,’ 1982,
Guelph Library.
46 Graeme Page Associates, ‘Management.’
47 Canada Council et al., ‘Joint Response to Toronto Workshop Productions
from Representatives of the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council,
Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, Metroplitan Toronto
Cultural Affairs Division and Toronto Arts Council,’ 1986, XZ1 MS
A908001, Toronto Workshop Productions Archives, University of Guelph
Library.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement between the Profes-
sional Association of Canadian Theatres and Canadian Actors’ Equity, to
which TWP was a signatory, actors’ salaries rise according to the number of
seats in the house.
51 Ray Conlogue, ‘Theatre Sells Its Land to Foundation,’ Globe and Mail, 30
June 1988.
52 Quoted in Carson, Harlequin in Hogtown, 194.
53 Conlogue, ‘Theatre Sells Its Land.’
54 Chris Dafoe, ‘TWP-Vari Land Deal Falls Through,’ Globe and Mail, 22 July
1988.
55 Ray Conlogue, ‘Offer to Buy Theatre No Longer Binding, Developer Says,’
Globe and Mail, 17 Sept. 1988.
56 Ibid.
57 Ray Conlogue, ‘TWP Board Turns Down Offer,’ Globe and Mail, 7 Sept. 1988.
58 Ibid.
59 Luscombe and a group of supporters locked out the board of directors,
general manager Pam Rogers, and Leon Pownall, the new artistic director.
To the fury of Pownall and the board of directors, the police at first refused
to intervene. Later, at a meeting between representatives of the Commit-
tee, the board of directors, and the board of trustees at the Toronto police
force’s 52 Division headquarters, Luscombe again refused to surrender the
building. The trustees finally produced legal documentation of their ulti-
mate responsibility for all matters relating to TWP and were allowed to
reclaim the building that night.
60 Rick Salutin, ‘Putting George Luscombe Back on the Map Where He
Belongs,’ Globe and Mail, 25 Feb. 1999.
62 Ibid.
63 Quoted ibid.
5. Movin’ On Up
1 I would not want to diminish the difficult conditions under which many
small companies operated during the 1980s, often moving from one mod-
est project grant to another. There is little doubt that the proliferation of
small companies was, in part, due to the fact that funding bodies may have
given them just enough to live on, but rarely enough to grow. For a useful
discussion of the material effects of funding structures – and the cultural
values embedded in them – during the 1980s, see Wallace, Producing Mar-
ginality, 107–20.
2 Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small The-
atres: The Other Housing Crisis; a Brief Submitted to Mr. Arthur Gelber,
Special Advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Culture to Review

Demand for Toronto Arts Facilities,’ 1986, XZ1 MS A970006, Theatre Centre
Archives, University of Guelph Library. The Small Theatres Caucus of the
Toronto Theatre Alliance, at the time of this quotation, consisted of compa-
nies in Metropolitan Toronto whose operating budgets were under $150,000
per year. The TTA itself was renamed the Toronto Alliance for the Perform-
ing Arts in 2004.
3 Malcom Burrows, ‘Necessary Theatre,’ Stage Free Press, 3 Nov. 1989.
4 Vit Wagner, ‘Theatre Companies at a Glance,’ Toronto Star, 28 Feb. 1995.
5 At the time of writing, Soulpepper is developing the Young Centre for the
Performing Arts as a joint venture with George Brown College in the
Distillery District (both the company and the college operate actor train-
ing programs, and so an educational imperative informs their alliance).
Soulpepper and George Brown own the building together, and lease the
land from the Distillery District on a 120-year term lease. The joint venture
is a registered, not-for-profit company that is governed by a board of direc-
tors and Soulpepper is the facility’s prime tenant. The company also holds
the contract to manage the facility, though this is a renewable contract that
could be transferred to a third party in the future. I am grateful to Leslie
Lester of Soulpepper for providing this information.
6 The Theatre Centre has occupied a number of different buildings over the
years, often having been moved on when a landlord could gain a greater
return through increased commercial rent or redevelopment for condomin-
iums. While its service to Toronto’s theatre community has been laudable
(and its longevity remarkable), the spatial history of the Theatre Centre has
been unstable, at best.
7 Although Nightwood has produced a substantial and influential body of
work since the company’s inception, its use of performance spaces has
largely conformed to the dominant model established during the 1980s:
renting out a variety of existing theatre spaces on a short-term basis, some-
times in co-production with larger companies that own their properties.
Necessary Angel and Buddies undoubtedly followed this route as well
(during some periods more than others), but they are also notable for the
ways in which their uses of the built environment turned the unlikelihood
of their owning performance spaces into virtues, at least partially.
8 Arthur Gelber, ‘A Personal Assessment of Capital Needs for Facilities Used
by the Professional Performing and Visual Arts Community in Metropoli-
tan Toronto and Surrounding Area and Shaw and Stratford Festival The-
atres,’ 1986, Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small
Theatres,’
14 Ibid. In 1990, Wallace cited an even higher number of companies in the
Small Theatres Caucus: 66. See Wallace, Producing Marginality, 115.
15 Toronto Theatre Alliance, Small Theatres Caucus, ‘Facilities for Small
Theatres.’
16 David Harvey, ‘On Planning the Ideology of Planning,’ in Planning Theory
in the 1980’s: A Search for Future Directions, ed. Robert W. Burchell and
George Sternlieb (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research,
Rutgers University, 1978), 213.
17 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City
(London: Routledge, 1996), 62.
18 Don Vale is the neighbourhood bounded by St Jamestown to the north,
Regent Park to the south, the Don Valley to the east, and Parliament Street to
the west. Technically, Cabbagetown begins west of Parliament Street,
although now the name is popularly used to refer to both areas and the Don
Vale nomenclature appears to be disappearing, at least in colloquial use.
19 Michael McKinnie, ‘The State of This Place: Convictions, the Courthouse,
and the Geography of Performance in Belfast,’ Modern Drama 46, no. 4
(2003): 586.
20 David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York:
Routledge, 2001), 404–5.
21 Jeff Ellis, ‘All the World’s a Stage,’ Arts Scarborough, March 1989; Sarah B.
Hood, ‘The New Worlds of Necessary Angel,’ Toronto Theatre Magazine, Fall
1988; Necessary Angel Theatre, ‘Unique Aspects of Necessary Angel,’ 1986,
XZ1 MS A979017, Necessary Angel Theatre Collection, University of
Guelph Library; Vit Wagner, ‘Drama Packs Arena with Sex, Plague and
Politics,’ Toronto Star, 14 April 1989.
22 While one might argue that the various ‘Shakespeare in the park’ projects
that occur each summer in Toronto are the most constant examples of envi-
ronmental theatre in the city, these do not involve new plays.
23 John Krizanc, ‘Innocents Abroad,’ Saturday Night, November 1984, 35.
24 Ibid.
25 John Krizanc, Tamara (Toronto: Stoddard, 1989), 21. This excerpt from
Tamara is taken from the published script, which is based on the 1987
New York production. The passage is still illustrative, however, because
this scene was present in all productions of Tamara.
26 Knowles, Theatre of Form, 187. Knowles argues that this scene reminds spec-
tators of the ‘real limitations on audience freedom’ that the play imposes,
and serves as an important check on any romanticization of the terms of
their participation in the event.
27 Vit Wagner, ‘Buddies in Big Bucks Move to Centrestage: ‘Queerest’ Play Yet
to Open Season at City-Owned Theatre,’ Toronto Star, 8 Oct. 1994.
28 Ibid.
29 Toronto, Council, Executive Committee, ‘Report of the 12 Alexander Street
Selection Committee,’ 1 Oct. 1990, City of Toronto.
30 Ibid.
31 Three groups were shortlisted by the committee: The 12 Alexander Street
Project, Théâtre Français de Toronto, and The EDGE (an alliance of Bud-
dies, DNA Theatre, Platform 9 Theatre, Augusta Company, Cahoots The-
atre, and Native Earth Performing Arts). Sky Gilbert’s autobiography,
Ejaculations from the Charm Factory, contains a fuller account of the process
by which Buddies ultimately came to be the lead company at 12 Alexander
Street. See Sky Gilbert, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory: A Memoir (Tor-
onto: ECW Press, 2000).
32 The renovations were budgeted at approximately $3 million, which Bud-
dies raised from a combination of public and private sources.
33 Robert Wallace, ‘Theorizing a Queer Theatre: Buddies in Bad Times,’ in
Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama, ed. Per Brask (Winnipeg: Blizzard,
1995), 140–2.
34 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, ‘The Alexander Street Update,’ n.d., XZ1 MS
A135021, Sky Gilbert Collection, University of Guelph Library.
35 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, ‘Promotional Brochure, 1994–95 Season,’
1994, XZ1 MS A135021, Sky Gilbert Collection, University of Guelph
Library.
Conclusion
1 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1997),
119–97.
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Index
Adorno, Theodor, 100 built form, 20

affluence, 11, 29 Burrows, Malcolm, 117
agency, historical, 12, 14
Agnew, Jean Christophe, 10 Cabbagetown, 124, 158n18
AKA Performance Interfaces, 118 Canada Council, 35, 36, 45, 95, 96,
alternative theatre movement, 74 102, 108–9
Althusser, Louis, 133 Canadian Broadcasting Corpora-
anti-urbanism, 68–9 tion, 49, 56, 67, 70
architecture, theatre, 15 Canadian Crest Players, 35
Autumn Leaf, 118, 126 Canadian Players, 34, 35
avant-garde, 85, 126 Canadian Stage Company (Can-
Stage), 40, 74, 75, 142n27
Bachelard, Gaston, 87, 99–100, 104–5, Canon Theatre, 66. See also Pantages
106, 107, 154n17 Theatre
Bennett, Susan, 87 CanStage. See Canadian Stage Com-
Brecht, Bertolt, 100, 101 pany
Brooks, Daniel, 85 Capital, 81–2. See also Marx, Karl
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre: 17, 20, capitalism: operations of, 10; role
114, 116, 118–19, 124–5, 128–32, of theatre within, 10–11, 29, 41,
157n7; acquisition of 12 Alexander 42
Street, 125, 129–30; and higher and Carlson, Marvin, 29–30
better use, 130–2; self-promotion Carson, Neil, 91–2, 97, 103, 104, 113,
by, 131; and urban planning, 131. 153n6
See also 12 Alexander Street Casa Loma, 127
built environment: monopoly claims centennial, Canada, 5, 25–7, 32
on, 119, 124–5, 132; and Toronto, Central Business District (Toronto),
27 26, 49
172 Index
Central Industrial District (Toronto), 48–55; relationship of theatre to,

49–51, 144n2 31–2, 45–6, 123, 131–2
CentreStage, 142n27 Drabinsky, Garth, 63, 65, 66
citizenship, 29, 30 dramaturgy, 128, 132
civic: development, 19, 26–8; har-
mony, 59–66, 70; ideology, 29–31; Eaton Centre, 47, 144n46, 146n39
performance economy, 49; pride, economy: of downtown Toronto and
64; self-fashioning, 19, 49 North York, 31–2; and leisure, 55–
civic theatre: 20, 123; and consump- 9, 69–70; market, 9–11, 30–1, 32, 41,
tion, 49; and Ford Centre, 44; ide- 64, 70, 93, 104–10, 112, 113–15, 134;
ologies of, 28–32; and state, 28–9, sentimental, 9–11, 31–2, 41, 64, 70,
133; St Lawrence Centre as, 27 93, 104–10, 112, 113–15, 131, 134;
class: and Entertainment District, transition from Fordist to post-
66–8, 69–70; and St Lawrence Fordist, 7–9, 38–40, 63, 79–80
Centre, 37–9 EDGE, The, 129–30
CN Tower, 48, 52, 53–4, 56, 67 edifice complex, 20, 73–5. See also
cognateness trap, 15, 135 Juliani, John
Cohen, Nathan, 35 effect, measuring, 133–4, 135
collective creation, 77, 78, 88 Elgin Theatre, 66. See also Wintergar-
commemoration, 76, 87–90, 113 den Theatre
consumption: as civic practice, 59, Entertainment District: 7, 17, 19, 20,
66–9; and Entertainment District, 48–70, 147n55, 148n63; as Busi-
56–9, 66–9, 70; role of theatre in ness Improvement Area, 65; and
promoting, 19, 38, 49; of space, civic affirmation, 59–70; and civic
56–7; urban, 21, 56, 69, 70 corporatism, 64–6; and class anxi-
Crest Theatre, 6, 34, 35, 36, 93 ety, 66–9; development of, 53–5;
criticism, theatre: analysis of space Festival Hall, 55–6, 58, 59, 148n63;
within, 14–15; English-language geography of, 48; and historical
Canadian, 12, 13–15; and interdis- revisionism, 66–9; and hygiene,
ciplinarity, 12, 14–16; materialist, 66–9; and play economy, 55–9; role
12–14, 99; methodologies of, 12–16 of theatre in, 58–70
environmental performance, 15, 119,
Desrosier Dance Theatre, 63 125–8, 131
Deutsche, Rosalyn, 29 equity, cultural, 21, 118–19, 124–5,
Don Vale, 124, 158n18 131–2
downtown (North York), 41–7, Expo 67, 5, 25–6, 33
144n44
downtown (Toronto): as civic ideal, Factory Theatre, 73, 74, 75, 112
18, 26, 28, 29, 31–2, 122, 123; and Faulkner, June, 105
economic change, 7, 17, 37–40, Filewod, Alan, 74, 101, 103
Index 173
financial district (Toronto), 37, 39 Harvey, David, 7, 10, 63, 80, 87, 125,
flâneur, 38, 39, 46 126, 137n1, 138n6
flexible accumulation. See Post-Ford- Healey, Michael, 88
ism heritage, 75, 79, 86–90, 150n12,
Fobasco, 104 151n26, 151n32
Ford Centre for the Arts: 18, 19, 27–8, higher and better use, 123–32
32, 40–7, 49, 59, 63, 140n5; built historiography: and role of retro-
form of, 45–6, 144n46; financing spective testimony, 14; and space,
of, 43–4, 143n41; ownership of, 44; 16, 92–3
Ragtime, 27, 45. See also North York history: and agency, 12, 14; of Cana-
Performing Arts Centre dian theatre, 13; spatialization of
Fordism: 7, 138n5; and downtown Canadian theatre, 16
Toronto, 37–9, 51, 79; and Enter- Holiday Inn, 49, 63, 70, 147n55
tainment District, 63; and St home: and other housing crisis, 119–
Lawrence Centre, 28, 38–40 23; and Theatre Passe Muraille,
Fox, David, 88 75, 79, 105; and Toronto Work-
Freedman, Adele, 55, 58 shop Productions, 91, 98, 104–
Free Trade Agreement, 42 10
Front Street: economic transforma- Horkheimer, Max, 100
tion of, 26, 37–40, 48, 142n33; and Hotel Employees Restaurant
flâneur, 46 Employees Union, 70
Hume, Christopher, 67, 68, 69
Gad, Gunter, 37, 142n28 Hummingbird Centre, 18, 142–3n33.
Garrard, Jim, 75–6, 77, 88 See also O’Keefe Centre
Gass, Ken, 112
Gelber, Arthur, 119–20 ideology: aesthetic, 93, 99, 100–1, 103;
gentrification, 9, 124 civic, 19, 20; domestic, 106; guard-
geography: cultural, 15; and drama- ianship, 93, 97–110, 111; propri-
turgy, 132; economic, 121; materi- etorship, 110–15; theatrical, 10, 16,
alist, 13, 81–2, 87, 90; physical, 16; 75–6, 99, 100, 103
theatrical, 3–4, 18, 19, 121–3, 131–2, industry (Canada): historical
135; urban, 4, 6, 13 changes in, 8; manufacturing sec-
Gilbert, Mallory, 112 tor, 8; service sector, 8–9
Gilbert, Sky, 129, 130 industry (Toronto): manufacturing
global city, 70. See also world city sector, 50–2, 54, 55–6, 68–9, 75,
Griffiths, Linda, 88 79–80, 90; service sector, 54, 55, 64,
growth machine, 5, 30–1 145n16; suburbanization of, 51, 75,
guardianship, 93–7, 110, 111. See also 79–80, 90, 122
ideology industry, theatre (Toronto): demogra-
Harbourfront Centre, 18 phy of, 120–1; facilities in, 119–22;
174 Index
mid-sized sector, 88, 123; relation- Lord, William, 153n9

ship between commercial and not- Luscombe, George, 35, 92, 93–4, 95,
for-profit sectors, 19; relationship 97–8, 100, 101, 103, 107–10, 112,
to Fordism and post-Fordism, 7–9; 113, 154n12, 156n59
relationship to property develop-
ment, 117; small-sized sector, Major, Leon, 35
116–23, 124, 129, 131–2 Manitoba Theatre Centre, 73
institutions, cultural: building of, 7, manufacturing industry. See under
20; economic role of, 10–11 industry (Toronto)
Marcuse, Herbert, 29, 100–1, 140n8
Jacobs, Jane, 137n4 Marx, Karl, 12, 81–2
Jaffery, Karl, 104 Massey, Doreen, 82
Johnston, Dennis, 28, 33, 92 Massey Hall, 65
Jones, Tim, 130 Massey Report (Royal Commission
Juliani, John, 20, 73, 74, 75 on National Development in the
Arts, Letters and Sciences), 34, 73,
Kareda, Urjo, 92, 105, 117 141n22
King-Spadina: and class anxiety, materialism, 12–14, 99
66–9; economic history of, 49–55, Meyerhold, Vsevelod, 100
66–9; and hygiene, 66, 68–9 Mirvish, Ed, 52–3, 60–6, 67–8, 69, 70,
Kirkland, Michael, 58 147n51
Kitto, H.D.F., 30 Mirvish Productions, 60, 64, 147n53
Knowles, Ric, 13, 73, 128, 147n45 Miss Saigon, 60, 62
(Richard Paul), 159n26 Molotch, Harvey, 30–1
Krizanc, John, 125, 127, 128 Montreal, 5, 7
Moore, Mavor, 26, 34, 35, 142n26
labour: and Entertainment District,
66–70; instruments of, 81–4; pro- nationalism (Canadian), 13, 25, 26,
cess, 10, 81–4, 90 27, 36, 78
Lastman, Mel, 42–4 nation-state, 6, 19, 28
Layton, Jack, 54 Necessary Angel Theatre: 3–4, 19, 20,
Lefebvre, Henri, 15, 56–7, 82, 87 116, 117, 118–19, 124–9, 132, 157n7;
legitimacy, theatrical, 21, 78, 83, environmental productions, 126,
105–6, 117–19, 124–5, 126–8, 130–1 128; Newhouse, 3, 125, 126, 128;
leisure, 53, 54, 55, 57–9, 70 Tamara, 3, 125–8, 132; and urban
Litt, Paul, 141n22 planning 126–9, 132
Littlewood, Joan, 94, 100 Nightwood Theatre, 116, 118, 156n7
LivEntertainment Corporation Noam Chomsky Lectures, The, 85
(Livent), 27, 44–5, 65, 140n5 North American Free Trade Agree-
Logan, John, 30–1 ment, 42, 147n57
Index 175
North York, City of, 27, 40–1, 42–4, Centre, 28, 40–7; and St Lawrence
80, 143n41 Centre, 38–40; and Theatre Passe
North York (downtown), 27, 32, Muraille, 86, 87, 89; and Toronto,
41–7, 144n44 7–9
North York City Centre, 46–7, 143n44 Potter, Miles, 88–9
North York Performing Arts Centre, Pownall, Leon, 97, 156n59
27. See also Ford Centre for the Arts Princess of Wales Theatre, 59–60,
nostalgia, 87 62–3, 67
property: and Buddies in Bad Times,
O’Keefe Centre, 34, 142n33. See also 128–32; and Ford Centre, 42–4; ide-
Hummingbird Centre ologies of, 80–1, 83, 110, 119; mar-
Old Vic Theatre, 62, 63, 67, 68 ket, Toronto, 76, 95, 121–3, 124; and
Ontario, Province of, 42–3, 94, 119, Necessary Angel, 125–8, 131–2;
143n41 ownership patterns of, 74–5,
Ontario Arts Council, 45, 92, 97, 83, 116–23; and Theatre Passe
108–9, 112, 153n9 Muraille, 74–90; and theatrical
legitimacy, 78, 117, 131–2; and
Page, Graeme, 97, 108 Toronto Workshop Productions,
Pantages Theatre, 66. See also Canon 92, 93, 110–15; value of, 9, 30–1,
Theatre 43–4, 75, 85–6, 86, 120–3, 131
Paramount Corporation, 55, 63
Penaloza, Domingo, 104, 154n27 Read, Alan, 154n17
performance: ideology, 75–6; sites, real estate market: deflation in, 64,
75–7 65, 85–6; inflation in, 85–6, 93, 104,
Pirenne, Henri, 30 110, 121, 131–2; and North York,
Piscator, Erwin 100 43–4; and Toronto 9, 20, 79, 110,
Pitman, Walter, 112, 153n9 112, 114–15, 116, 134
place, 4–5, 98–104. See also space Red Barn Theatre, 34
place patriotism, 30–1 regional theatres, 20, 73–4, 75, 77
play: as civic act, 59; as type of econ- rent gap, 123–4
omy, 55–9, 69–70 Rochdale College, 77, 83
Playdium, Sony, 49, 63, 55, 58 Rockwell, David, 58, 59
political economy: and Canada, 71, Rogers, Pam, 111, 156n59
91, 95, 98, 109, 111; and geography, Rogers Centre, 48. See also SkyDome
15; and theatre studies, 16; and Rooney, Robert, 95, 97, 110
Toronto, 6, 7–9, 74–5, 79–80, 81, 90, Rose, Richard, 3–4, 127, 128, 129, 132
110, 133; and transnationalism, 7–9 Rosselli, John, 64
Poor Alex Theatre, 112 Royal Alexandra Theatre, 34, 52–3,
post-Fordism: and Entertainment 59–60, 62–3, 67–8, 147n45
District, 56, 63, 65–6; and Ford Royal Commission on National
176 Index
Development in the Arts, Letters 106; and performance ideology,

and Sciences. See Massey Report 75–6; and physicality, 93, 99, 104;
Roy Thomson Hall, 52–3, 67 in theatre studies, 14–15; and
Rubin, Don, 78 Toronto Workshop Productions,
92–3; and sacredness, 99, 103–4
St Lawrence Centre for the Arts: 5, spectatorship, 49, 60
16, 19, 25–40, 44, 45, 46, 47–8, 49, state: Canada, 6, 25–8, 41–2; Toronto,
59, 73; built form of, 36, 38, 39–40; 42, 44, 45, 133
and municipal state, 36; and urban Strachan House, 125, 126–28
planning, 28–9 synechdochic fallacy, 135
Salutin, Rick, 77–8, 113
Sassen, Saskia, 42, 70 Tarragon Theatre, 16, 17, 19, 73, 74,
Savage God, 20 75, 112, 122, 123, 139n24
service industry. See under industry Taylorism. See Fordism
(Toronto) theatre: and affluence, 11; and capi-
Sewell, John, 32, 68–9 talism, 10–11; and economic devel-
site-specific performance. See envi- opment, 55; and everyday life,
ronmental performance 100–1, 103; relationship to the
16 Ryerson Avenue: 76, 78–90; civic, 28–32; relationship to trans-
administration of, 76; built form nationalism, 28, 38–47; role
of, 78–9; and fundraising, 84; and within Entertainment District,
heritage, 79, 84, 86–90; as instru- 58–70; and social relations, 10–11
ment of labour, 81–4; purchase of theatre (Toronto): geography of, 4,
by Theatre Passe Muraille, 76; 17–19, 121, 124; industrial struc-
value of, 85–6, 151n32, 152n35. See ture of, 34
also Theatre Passe Muraille Theatre Calgary, 73
SkyDome, 42, 48, 53–4, 55, 58, 67, Theatre Centre, 118, 121, 157n6
145n22. See also Rogers Centre Theatre Columbus, 116
Smith, Adam, 9–10 Theatre Passe Muraille: 16, 17, 19, 20,
Smith, Neil, 123–4 21, 73–90, 91, 107, 110, 123, 124,
Soja, Edward, 13, 15 150n22; The Drawer Boy, 88–90;
Sol Friendly Sheet Metal Works, 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt, 77–8, 88;
79–80 The Farm Show, 77, 88; Futz, 77, 78;
Soulpepper Theatre, 18, 117, 157n5 and financial crisis, 76, 85–6; I Love
space: and aesthetics, 93, 99; concep- You, Baby Blue, 78, 88; and labour
tualizing, 4–5; of consumption, process, 81–4, 90; and property
56–7; and historiography, 92–3; ownership, 76–7, 78; Tom Paine, 77.
as instrument of labour, 82–4; See also 16 Ryerson Avenue
monopoly control of, 79–80, 119, Theatre Toronto, 35
124–5; and ontology, 93, 99, 102–3, Theatre Workshop, 94
Index 177
Thompson, Paul, 75–6, 77, 78, 88 19, 133; and Entertainment Dis-
time, 5 trict, 63, 70; and Ford Centre, 28;
Toronto: and civic self-fashioning, and St Lawrence Centre, 40–7
18; and downtown, 7, 17, 18; and 12 Alexander Street (Buddies in Bad
suburbanization, 7, 9, 17–18, 79– Times): acquisition of, 129–30; as
80; theatrical geography of, 3–4, home, 125, 130–1; as queer space,
120–3, 131–2; urban economy of, 130–1; renovations to, 130; role in
120–3; urban geography of, xi, 119 promotion of Buddies, 130–2; 12
Toronto, City of, 27, 51–2, 54, 66, 68, Alexander St Project, 129–30
94, 97, 98, 107, 113–14, 116, 127, 12 Alexander Street (Toronto Work-
129, 130, 148n63 shop Productions): as aesthetic
Toronto, Metropolitan, xi, 27, 31–2, space, 99; condition of building,
42, 51, 68, 119, 145n23 97–8, 105, 107, 108–9; as domestic
Toronto Alliance for the Performing space, 99, 104–10; as home, 91, 98,
Arts. See Toronto Theatre Alliance 104–10; as ontological space, 99,
Toronto Arts Council, 45, 97, 108–9 106–7; and physical space, 99, 104;
Toronto Arts Foundation, 26, 34, 35, as property, 91, 92, 93, 94, 110–15;
36 purchase of by City of Toronto, 97;
Toronto Arts Productions, 142n27 purchase of by TWP, 94, 95, 96,
Toronto Blue Jays, 54, 56, 145n22 106, 110, 155n34; as sacred space,
Toronto Centre for the Arts, 27–8. See 99, 103–4; value as real estate, 97,
also Ford Centre for the Arts 99, 104, 108–9, 110–15
Toronto Entertainment District Asso-
ciation, 48–9, 60–1, 66, 147n55, Union Station, 48
148n63 urban development: 3, 4, 16, 20–1,
Toronto Free Theatre, 73, 74, 142n27 133; and Central Industrial Dis-
Toronto Theatre Alliance, 17, 116–17, trict, 50–5; and cultural institution
120, 121, 157n2 building, 29, 32–47; and Entertain-
Toronto Workshop Productions: 6, ment District, 49; and leisure, 65;
16, 20, 21, 34, 35, 91–115, 116, 117, and North York, 41–7; and reces-
129, 130, 140n8; finances of, 95, 96, sion, 64, 65; and regeneration, 7;
97, 104–11, 114, 152n6; and guard- and St Lawrence Centre, 27; and
ianship, 97–110; Hey, Rube! 94, urban reform movement, 5–6, 26
101–3; and historiography, 91–2, urban planning: and consumption,
93; politics of, 94, 109, 111, 112; and 56; and higher and better use, 123–
property, 92, 93; and proprietor- 32, 133; and St Lawrence Centre,
ship, 110–15; purchase of 12 Alex- 28–9; and Toronto, 28–9, 51–5,
ander St, 94, 95, 96, 155n34 151n32
tourism, 9, 45, 57–9 urban reform movement (Toronto),
transnationalism: economics of, 7–9, 26, 31, 36
178 Index
Wagner, Anton, 13 Wolf, Stacy, 29

Walker, Craig Stewart, 13 world city, 9. See also global city
Wallace, Robert, 13, 130
welfare state (Canada), 5, 25–8, 33, Yonge Street, 41–4, 45–7, 59, 65–6,
38, 40, 42 146n39
Whittaker, Herbert, 47, 60, 103 York, Town of, 50
Wilkinson and Kompass, 79–80
Wintergarden Theatre, 66. See also Zeidler, Eberhard, 144n46
Elgin Theatre
CULTURAL SPACES
Cultural Spaces explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theo-
retical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies. Culture has long been
understood as the force that defines and delimits societies in fixed spaces. The
recent intensification of globalizing processes, however, has meant that it is no
longer possible – if it ever was – to imagine the world as a collection of au-
tonomous, monadic spaces, whether these are imagined as localities, nations,
regions within nations, or cultures demarcated by region or nation. One of the
major challenges of studying contemporary culture is to understand the new
relationships of culture to space that are produced today. The aim of this
series is to publish bold new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture, as
well as investigations of the historical construction of those cultural spaces
that have influenced the shape of the contemporary world.
Series Editors:
Richard Cavell, University of British Columbia
Imre Szeman, McMaster University
Editorial Advisory Board:

Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University
Hazel V. Carby, Yale University
Richard Day, Queen’s University
Christopher Gittings, University of Western Ontario
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina
Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto
Heather Murray, University of Toronto
Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney
Rinaldo Walcott, OISE/University of Toronto
Books in the Series:

Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the
Frankfurt School
Sarah Brophy, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning
Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies
Jasmin Habib, Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging
Serra Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market
Evelyn Ruppert, The Moral Economy of Cities: Shaping Good Citizens
Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, Utopian Pedagogy: Radical
Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization
Michael McKinnie, City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City

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C I T Y S TA G E S :

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to

Dennis Lee, ‘Civil Elegies’

Introduction: Towards an Urban Analysis of Theatre in Toronto 3

PART ONE: CIVIC DEVELOPMENT

1 Urban National, Suburban Transnational: Civic Theatres and the

2 Good Times, Inc.: Constructing a Civic Play Economy in the Enter-

PART TWO: THE EDIFICE COMPLEX

3 Space Administration: Locating an Urban History of Theatre Passe

4 A Troubled Home: Spatializing the Demise of Toronto Workshop

5 Movin’ On Up: Spatial Scarcity, Cultural Equity, and the Geography

to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Drama and The-

A number of historical events in this project involve municipal bodies

1 Harbourfront complex 12 Distillery District

Figure 1 Key performance and entertainment sites in downtown Toronto and

If it is true that theatre has become an important part of Toronto over

Nonetheless, there are a number of concepts and themes that recur

that space is not an independent, ahistorical entity – space does not

Theatre History, Geography, and Political Economy

Despite beginning in the centennial year, this investigation is con-

political economy of Toronto. It is easy to forget that, for most of Can-

Figure 2 Proportion of Canada’s national workforce in manufacturing and

Toronto is now the third-largest urban centre for English-language the-

where he attempts to theorize how social bonds between people are

Accounting for such a variety of issues raises significant methodologi-

because it attempts a crude restoration of the economic ‘base’ to art’s

A further historiographic problem one encounters when writing

the intersection of theatrical and geographical inquiry. In theatre stud-

materials against the grain: considering companies like Theatre Passe

This book examines a number of theatrical sites and enterprises, both

atre sites in Toronto, so when it has happened on any significant scale

influence, while attempting to construct a plausible, if not always con-

this development has been part of the city’s adaptation to economic

After nearly two decades of continental economics and the recurring

TCA is now marketed as a rental facility, though without a resident

Ideologies of Civic Theatre

were as much in favour of the St Lawrence Centre as city planners

which civil society might be formed (particularly in the nineteenth and

The growth machine avidly supports whatever cultural institutions can

developments contrary to their interests ... rentiers and their associates

municipal government in 1998. Many downtown residents feared that

The St Lawrence Centre for the Arts

small-theatre sector at this time was simply too modest to provide

more important in stressing the importance of the civic at a time when

the local compensation for the increasingly transnational development

construction. These housed a grocery wholesaler, a tea and coffee mer-

The Ford Centre for the Arts

The Ford Centre, in contrast, has no anxieties about transnationalism.

and cultural development intersected in the construction of the Ford

developers if sold for commercial office development. The Province

Toronto not-for-profit theatres reside, includes the federal Ministry of

invoke: an urban space of related but relatively autonomous urban

corporations like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and tran-

From Factories to Fun: Spatializing the History of King-Spadina and

be subsumed under an expansion of manufacturing at any moment,

This is one of the city’s most arrogant buildings, a Neo-Expressionist extrav-