FEATURED REVIEW

Don’t be boring. It’s a simple concept, but one that is woefully hard to deliver upon. This is especially the case if you work in theatre. In Jordan Tannahill’s Theatre of the Unimpressed (Coach House Books), the acclaimed Toronto playwright and director seeks to solve this problem. Tannahill shines a light on the so-called “Well-Made Play,” a format created centuries ago to churn out content. You may be unfamiliar with the name, but you know what it looks like in contemporary theatre. “Middle-class white people arguing in living rooms. Middle-class white people arguing over dinner. Middle-class white people arguing at a backyard barbecue,” Tannahill writes. The constructs have been done to death not because people love them, he argues, but because audiences have been conditioned to expect them.

But theatre doesn’t have to be this way. Tannahill shares some of his own transcendental experiences ...