Montreal Gazette

• During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the character Oedipus and the ancient Greek drama based on his tragedy was suddenly everywhere.
• My new edited volume follows global trends in how theatre artists receive and interpret Greek tragedy in contextualizing a Montréal-based theatre company’s new translations of Greek tragedy.

Oedipus abounded

• In the first year of the pandemic, public commentary compared former U.S. president Donald Trump to Oedipus.
• In Los Angeles, a Chicanx version of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus El Rey, written by Luis Alfaro and directed by Chay Yew, was streaming live from the Center Theatre Group in partnership with the Getty Museum.
• The excellent Theater of War company, under the direction of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Bryan Doerries, produced a star-studded zoom version in May 2020, The Oedipus Project, dedicated to first responders.

Theban plague parallels

• The play, directed by Bùi Nhu Lai, was performed and streamed at the 6th Asian Theatre Schools Festival held in Beijing, by the Hà Nội Academy of Theatre and Cinema.
• While some revelled in the fresh take on Oedipus these performances brought, at least one critic wondered if maybe we shouldn’t search for a direct parallel between the Theban plague killing Oedipus’s subjects and COVID-19.

Multiple crises

• As if in response, Doerries’ The Oedipus Project named its themes as the pandemic and the climate crisis.
• That is not only true of the pandemic; we are also the origin of an even bigger drama, the drama of our time: global warming.”

Montréal productions

• My edited volume Scapegoat Carnivale’s Tragic Trilogy documents how between 2010 and 2017, the Montréal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale produced Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.
• The Greek tragedies might have been written to work through fifth-century Athens’ own cultural anxieties, but even in Sophocles’ day, they did so through a mythical past, one as removed from Sophocles as he is from anyone today.

Plague concerns folded into myth

• If Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus in part as a response to the Athenian plague, he folded that concern into a myth that accommodates today’s diverse and changing global anxieties just as well as his own.
• As Aristotle says, poetry, unlike history, is not concerned with particular facts, but instead with general truths.

‘The city … unable to lift her head’

• In Scapegoat’s contemporary-set staged reading, Shragge’s clean style perfectly captured Sophocles’ irony, humour and pathos.
• Scapegoat’s minimalist staging favoured people over props, with a massive chorus composed of three local choirs.

Long-suffering Thebans

• To see Oedipus and all his long-suffering Thebans embodied onstage (for me, for the first time), mattered, despite Aristotle’s claim that the play is just as good without actually seeing this.
• And Scapegoat’s new translation, like countless others, waits for readers to find new delights in its words, audiences to find new terrors in its enactment and creators to make new meanings of its myth.

• MONTREAL, March 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For the second year running, Sodexo has been ranked among Montreal’s 2023 Top Employers.
• Winners were announced today in a special section of the Montreal Gazette, basing their decision on an employer’s programs and initiatives focused on attracting and retaining workers in Montreal.
• “Our focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means we develop programs and benefits that attract people at all levels of their career.
• For those in their middle to more senior years we focus on continuing education and retirement planning,” said Johanne Bélanger, CEO, Sodexo Canada.

• TORONTO , Jan. 18, 2023 /CNW/ - Unifor is looking at all options to protect media workers after Postmedia announced restructuring plans today, which includes laying off workers in the media sector.
• Workers became aware of Postmedia's new measures from an internal memo sent hours before a town hall meeting on Zoom Wednesday afternoon.
• Unifor represents more than 10,000 media workers, including journalists in the broadcast and print news industry.
• Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, representing 315,000 workers in every major area of the economy.

• OTTAWA, ON, July 5, 2022 /CNW/ -The Michener Awards Foundation today announced it is awarding three of its prestigious Michener-Baxter Awards for exceptional service to Canadian public service journalism.
• They understood the imperative to serve journalism well and to champion those who came to journalism without the same advantages," said Pierre-Paul Noreau, Chair of the Michener Awards Foundation.
• The Michener Awards honour, celebrate, and promote excellence in Canadian public service journalism.
• Established in 1970 by the late Right Honourable Roland Michener, Governor General of Canada from 1967 to 1974, the Michener Awards are Canada's premier journalism award.