Readership Survey
Study to look at how queer people are depicted in theatre
BY REBECCA KENDALL
PhD student Tony Berto is the winner of U of G's inaugural scholarship for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered studies. The award was presented March 26 during the Guelph leg of the Wilde About Sappho touring literary festival.
Sponsored by U of G and the Ottawa-based Lambda Foundation, the award is a step in the right direction for students who are passionate about evoking change and promoting understanding at a time when society is opening up its collective mind, says Berto. “I can only hope that it is encouraging for students who study queer subjects.”
Berto, who is also an accomplished playwright, is embarking on a project that will investigate every gay character seen in a play on a professional stage in Canada in the past 10 years. Among the theatres he will examine are Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times, founded by U of G drama professor Sky Gilbert; Calgary's Teatro Berdache; and Vancouver's Pink Ink Theatre.
“I'm sure I would have had a difficult time finding an adviser if I'd wanted to do the kind of work I'm doing now when I first started university in the 1980s,” says Berto. He earned a degree in wildlife biology from U of G in 1986, worked as an ornithologist for 13 years and completed a master's degree in theatre at York University in 2003. “I don't think there would have been a support system or the general opinion that what I was doing was valuable.”
Through his research, Berto aims to gain insight into how queer people are depicted in theatre and the public perception of those characters. He says the work is important because there's little information available in this area and no canon of queer theatrical writing in Canada.
“I'll be looking at it from the front line,” he says. “The way these characters are written reflects not only how the public views queer identities but also how the artist feels he or she is being viewed by the public. We've gone through so much change in the past 10 years, and we need to know what that's done to our public perception. I haven't come across anything in academic literature about that in terms of theatre.”
With the passing of gay marriage legislation and queer-based theatres becoming more visible in the arts landscape, Berto says people should not be lulled into thinking that the struggle for gay rights and research on queer issues is no longer necessary.
“People think the battle is done and there's no need to continue the struggle, but that's not the case.”
Berto is not just a student of theatre; he's also a creator. His first play, BASH, won the City of Toronto Fringe Festival's Best New Play Prize in 2000, and his play Skate It Off, Bobby was staged at U of G's George Luscombe Theatre in 2001. The following summer, his one-woman show, Gypsies, was produced at the Toronto Fringe Festival and his one-man show, The Fifth Option, was selected for the exclusive Summerworks Festival, where it played to sold-out audiences.
Since then he has written and produced a number of works, including To the Earth, Due Process, The Painted Bird, Guantanamara and Captured. In 2005, he received an Ontario Arts Council grant for his work Fourways Until Rain.
Berto is currently writing a play about the B.C. ghost town of Anyox and recently finished a project commissioned with seed money from Canstage, Canada's largest non-profit contemporary theatre company.
This summer he'll travel to Alberta, where his play The Singularity of Being will make its debut as a workshop performance at the University of Lethbridge.
