OTL Blog

This month marks the 10th anniversary of OTL’s infamous CAR STORIES show getting ejected from the St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival, and already the media are taking note of this disturbing milestone. The story is one of the most recounted in Montreal’s anglophone theatre community – it is the story of unethical corporate interests steamrolling artists at what [...]

From May 28th – 31st the Société de Développement du Boulevard Saint-Laurent (SDBSL) hosted a four day party known as the Mainfest. Despite bad weather reports, the sun shone radiantly throughout most of the festival. This was wonderful for local merchants, musicians, performers, and pedestrians who converged at the Mainfest to participate in a multitude [...]

With the Tax Day Tea Party, it looks like Fox News and the Republicans have now embraced a form of activism: the theatrical culture jam.  Now co-opting activist tools for corporate purposes is nothing new, in fact stealth marketers have been doing it for years, but using an activist technique to bolster a right-wing message [...]

Six years ago this past Monday, 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, who grew up in Olympia, Washington and traveled to the Gaza Strip as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she defended the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Rafah.  Her memory, though, seems like [...]

So what’s the Montreal infringement festival going to be like this year?  Good question! While the infringement may have been mentioned several times on this blog already and anyone who knows OTL has heard of the festival, we have never really discussed it in any detail in this space.  The sixth consecutive edition of the [...]

Of all the projects OTL has created, Car Stories is most certainly the longest-running, at times has been the most controversial and if it wasn’t for the infringement Festival, a true viral phenomenon, it would undoubtedly be the best known. In a nutshell, Car Stories is a play containing several shorter plays, a piece of [...]

In 2003, a group of New York City-based theatre artists got together in an attempt to organize a theatre-based city-wide protest against the war in Iraq.  The group stuck together and formed Theaters Against War, or THAW, a group whose goal is to nurture a pro-peace culture by standing up to attacks on civil liberties, [...]

Harold Pinter, who died this past Christmas Eve at the age of 78, was not only an acclaimed playwright, actor, director and poet, he was an activist who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.  He was also someone who saw how art could be used as a tool for social change and recognized, as an [...]

Even though we’re known for guerilla-style culture jams and highly improvised performances like Car Stories, OTL also has also produced a significant amount of text over the years, some of it theoretical material and some of it scripts for theatre. We’ve started collecting some of this in what we’re calling the Optative Library.  Just like [...]