Anna Fuerstenberg is a Montreal playwright, actress and teacher.

It was the early nineteen fifties and my grade three class was at a performance of Peter Pan when I excused myself to go to the bathroom, got lost and came upon Peter Pan smoking a cigarette in one of the hallways. It was then that I realized that I could do this thing: transform reality and make magic with it.

At Northmount High school in Montreal, in the early sixties, as part of the "Cultural Committee," I invited The Mountain City Four to perform a  concert on Mayday. The teachers, expecting Morris dancers and a Maypole, were shocked to hear songs about unions and the mayor's cost over runs for  the future subway. I was kicked out of school for the third time. The lesson was clear; this music scared people and these songs were dangerous to young ears. Words and music could terrify adults.

In Chicago years later, I was asked to start a theatre program in Franklin Park a poor white neighbourhood. Many of the young men had already served in Viet Nam, others were waiting for their turns. The young women were out of synch with the times, lost without the tradition of marriage and childbearing they had expected as their due. The Institute of Juvenile Research asked only that I "do theatre". I invented socio-drama and let loose a change so threatening to the Scots-Irish poor of that  district, that they burned down the store front which had been provided for us. The group of twenty to thirty young adults researched the people they feared most: bankers, police officers, landlords, college teachers, and army officers. They researched, interviewed and re-invented the lives of people with power from birth to the moment when one of these authority figures might encounter one of "us". The results were amazing. The recidivism of the young men in that area was drastically reduced. The young women were working to get post secondary education and small groups were moving downtown together, supporting each other through school, jobs and young adulthood. This was achieved through the double-edged sword of empathy and empowerment.

By learning about the lives of "the feared" and talking about the likelihood of a policeman having a nagging girlfriend and  haemorrhoids, the figure of authority was humanized and the interaction with the youth community became less violent and fraught. It was not surprising that  the community was threatened. Young men, who had always believed that union jobs awaited them when they came back from the war in Viet Nam, were suddenly faced with affirmative action, and a union, which was closing its doors to them, ironically, because they were not the right colour. Re-imagining the reality of  other people from a different class background or ethnicity was an act of creation. It was possibly the hardest act. Abstract thinking, creativity and inventiveness were linked, and once these youth got the hang of it, they were able to re-invent their own lives as
well.

In the nineteen eighties, in Toronto I was horrified by the stories of the Latin American population. Refugees with physical marks of torture still fresh on their bodies were being warehoused in immigrant hotels and many were turned back to certain death. I founded Teatro Sin Fronteras to tell their stories. During the first sessions, (we were not even rehearsing, and I had no idea what this would become,) I had a translator with me. By the third month I realized that these people had so little control over their lives that I could not count on them to appear at any given time for a performance, so we created modular theatre where everyone could do all the roles and scenes could be added and deleted.

I asked the forty or so charter members of the group to go to their communities, hotels or neighbourhoods and just ask people for their stories. Then they were to come back to the group and tell those stories in the voices of the family, friends or neighbours whom they had interviewed. Some of the stories were hair-raising and awful, others were like stand up comedy. At first we just collected the stories and told them to each other, but soon a pattern came out in haute-relief. CAMINOS CONGELADOS or FROZEN ROADS was the first play we presented. It could be done as a whole, or pieces of it were powerful enough to be done separately in refugee cafes, theatres and once, on the steps of the Ontario legislature.

We worked in Spanish and English, one character speaking one language and the next responding in the other. The group had a large following in both the Hispanic and Anglo communities. Out of this original group, there evolved others. Teatro de las Marias was a spin off group of women who toured a show about spousal abuse right across Canada. The most astonishing thing about this group was that many of the women had never spoken in public or outside their immediate family, let alone performed in a foreign language on stage before thousands of strangers.

I believe that art has the potential to be subversive, that when the first middle class audiences walked out of a brand new production of FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES by John Herbert, they were cheering for the newly aggressive and gay hero of the play. I think that DOES A TIGER WEAR A NECKTIE, made audiences re-think the meaning of addiction, and ONE FLEW OVER THE COUCKOO'S NEST caused everyone to reconsider institutions of mental health and the inordinate power they had over individual lives. When a large group of individuals sit in the dark while a strong series of lights cast a different symbolic universe before them, they are in a near hypnotic state. This allows the artists to reshape and revision the values the large group of people arrived with in the first place.

Theatre, since Brecht has not been the absolutely passive act of suspended disbelief it was in the early twentieth century. Theatre has the power to bend reality, redesign it and ultimately to ask the most difficult questions. When I visited a theatre company in Nicaragua during the civil war in the eighties, I was amazed that a company was able to live in a small community in the war zone, create a play about the problems in that community, and then perform it for the leadership of that country. That was theatre addressing the  immediate issues within a community and it did work. I try to imagine Mr. Harper at a popular theatre performance complaining about the diminishing rights of immigrants, and then I remember that between THIS HOUR HAS TWENTY-TWO MINUTES, and THE RICK MERCER report, he does have a chance to hear what many Canadians think about him.

Since that day in the halls of the theatre, when I saw Peter Pan smoke a cigarette, I have believed that magic is available to any who would use it and that art is subversive and that theatre is a powerful weapon which uses empathy of the audience and the empowerment of the performers to instigate change. That is what is so very subversive about it.