"The rich people have their lobbyists and the poor people have their feet."- Nathalie Des Rosiers, General Counsel of Canadian Civil Liberties Association speaking at a post-show panel at after You Should Have Stayed Home at The 2011 SummerWorks Festival.
This summer I directed You Should Have Stayed Home, a play about theatre artist Tommy Taylor's experience over 48 hours of the G20 weekend in Toronto presented at the 2011 SummerWorks Festival. While trying to return home from his first ever protest as a law-abiding citizen at the "Free Speech Zone" at Queen's Park, Taylor was swept up in a mass arrest, caged with 40 other people in a 10ft by 20ft cage and denied drinking water until he passed out from dehydration.
Taylor contacted me in February to talk about collaborating on a piece of theatre adapted from his Facebook note, How I Got Arrested and Abused at G20 in Toronto. Having read the post, I knew the story presented an excellent opportunity to dramatize and address the deterioration of civil rights in Canada.
The question for me was how to present the narrative in way that could not be mistaken for propaganda. Our approach was to eliminate all editorial content and stick to the story of what happened to Tommy: These things happened to this guy and his friends. Draw your own conclusions.