Castrato

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and director of La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Audiences in western Canada may well be acquainted with plays from the
pen of Greg Nelson. Productions have ranged from modest fringe festival
offerings to plays fully workshopped by the Saskatchewan Playwrights
Centre and the Playwrights’ Colony of the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Castrato went through an extensive dramaturgical process and emerged as
the 1992 winner of the Theatre B.C. Canadian National Playwriting
competition before its premiиre at Theatre Network’s NEWrites
Festival in 1993.

The title at first blush might suggest only the religious body willing
to descend to barbarism in order to give peculiar voice to its
ecclesiastical rituals. Yet in the aftermath of the Bobbitt trials, it
is a title bound to arouse contemporary interest and curiosity. In fact,
the title is supremely apt, for the subject matter involves the politics
of extreme right-wing Christianity and the accommodations it makes to
achieve its goals (emotional abuse, abuse of power, and, finally,
personal actualization made into event by the media). Nelson packs a lot
into this play, including heavy doses of soap-operatic (or should we say
“evangelistic”) metaphor and symbolism: one character literally
being advised to close his eyes to the truth; the arrival of the
ministerial archvillain being announced by the words “speak of the
devil”; and that same figure viewing a large urban church from the
heights of a real estate tower and remarking, “Looks pretty small from
up here, doesn’t it?”

It is rather unclear, in the midst of a richness of possible themes,
which is actually the central issue. Is it the issue—that is, the
question of the ordination of homosexuals? Or is it the question of
under-the-table arrangements in an institution supposedly dedicated to
upholding justice and morality? Or is it the question of public and
private selves? Or the question of the effects of abuse on people’s
lives? Or manipulation of news by the media? The confusion may indeed be
a reflection of the contemporary conjunction of all of these. What is
certain is that the play has a strong forward impulse (“I only have a
minute” almost becomes a leitmotif) and will cause discussion and
controversy. The ending of the play is very inconclusive, a kind of
Godot without the name.