Tribute: Fennario slammed the door on Centaur and returned to his roots

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My first encounter with David Fennario was in 1983. I had written one thing in The McGill Each day about his newest play on the Centaur Theatre, Shifting, and offended younger leftist that I used to be on the time, I advised perhaps it was time for this bard of the working class to get off of his excessive horse on the lofty bourgeois theatre in Outdated Montreal and return to his roots in Pointe-St-Charles and Verdun.

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Fennario died Saturday at age 76.

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The encounter was by way of the middleman of a Centaur publicist. I obtained a name from the publicist, who advised me Fennario was not happy with what I wrote however given the ferocious tone of the column, he did marvel if I used to be from the Pointe. I needed to bashfully admit I developed my revolutionary indignation rising up within the relative consolation of western Lachine and Pointe-Claire.

After Shifting, Fennario did, certainly, slam the Centaur door shut and return to Verdun to make left-wing neighborhood theatre with out having to fret about pleasing Centaur’s well-heeled suburban crowd. Within the early Nineteen Eighties, he had helped discovered the Black Rock Group Centre, a creative and neighborhood group, and he then created the Black Rock Theatre, which produced his first main post-Centaur play, Joe Beef.

The play was a vibrant historical past of Montreal filtered by way of Fennario’s imaginative and prescient that every one historical past is actually class battle. It featured working-class Montrealers, but additionally among the metropolis’s most well-known upper-crust sorts, notably John Molson, James McGill and Simon McTavish. The inspiration got here from the real-life determine Joe Beef. Charles McKiernan grew to become often known as Joe Beef from his days as quartermaster within the British military throughout the Crimean Struggle. If the troops wanted nosh, he’d in some way get it for them.

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He ended up in Montreal, the place he opened a tavern close to the waterfront and he’d feed whoever confirmed up, whether or not they may pay for the grub or not. In different phrases, simply the sort of man Fennario admired.

I confirmed as much as see Joe Beef someday in 1985 at Columba Home in Pointe-St-Charles and after we have been launched, he snapped at me: “I simply need you to know, I’m not doing this due to what you wrote.”

It was classic Fennario. As an outdated buddy mentioned Thursday, he was famously cranky, a little bit of a malcontent. However that wasn’t essentially a unfavourable. That fury fuelled a few of his greatest work. John Lydon, who known as himself Johnny Rotten when he was within the Intercourse Pistols, famously sang “Anger is an power” in his Public Picture Ltd. tune Rise. And it’s.

Balconville is Fennario’s most well-known play and as that very same buddy mentioned, it broke down a glass wall right here by having its working-class characters communicate in English and French. However Joe Beef is perhaps his defining work as a result of it was the primary play the place Fennario completely let unfastened, free from the shackles {of professional} business theatre.

That second is what Fennario was all about. He stormed out of the Centaur and it price him. He most definitely would have had a extra comfy life if he had stayed at Montreal’s main English theatre. However politics got here first with Fennario, artwork second and monetary safety a distant third. He put his cash the place his mouth was, and it’s a must to admire him for that.

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“He wrote performs and for him it was a part of the category battle,” mentioned Man Sprung, who directed three Fennario performs, together with Balconville. “What motivated him was the politics. He mainly thought theatre was la-di-da shit.”

Sprung thinks probably the greatest issues Fennario did was Bolsheviki, a 2010 play that Sprung produced at Montreal’s Infinitheatre. It’s centred on a First World Struggle veteran who rails towards the horrors of warfare and hyperlinks his expertise to the difficulty of Canadian troops in Afghanistan on the time.

Playwright Marianne Ackerman mentioned Fennario left Centaur as a result of he wanted to make one other sort of theatre.

“I feel he simply wanted to develop and get away from writing the basic outdated three-act sensible play,” Ackerman mentioned. “I imply, what number of of these can one particular person write? My feeling with David is ultimately, theatre didn’t do for him what he needed. It didn’t change the world. Individuals consumed the performs and went dwelling. He was an activist. He needed the world to alter, and it very not often does. The world modifications, however you’re not essentially the one who did it.”

That 1985 manufacturing of Joe Beef was directed by Albert Nerenberg.

“When the model I did grew to become profitable and ran in additional business areas, he felt this was the extra sold-out glitzy model and that was unhealthy,” Nerenberg mentioned.

We laughed on the idea that Nerenberg, all the time a unusual unique artist, was in some way the massive, unhealthy sellout.

“I keep in mind pondering it was humorous on the time, like I’m Mr. Hollywood,”  Nerenberg mentioned.

He underlined the irony that immediately if you say “Joe Beef,” you’re often not referring to the Fennario play however to certainly one of Canada’s most well-known eating places, a really expensive eatery identified for attracting A-list celebrities.

That’s sort of excellent. Fennario gave the single-finger salute to bourgeois theatre, went again to the hood to do radical theatre, and the outcome was a superb play and a haute-bourgeois restaurant.

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