The Great Canadian Theatre Company, known for short as GCTC, is a professional theatre company based in Ottawa, Canada. It was established in 1975 by a group of professors and graduate students at Carleton University. Riding a wave of cultural nationalism, founders Robin Matthews, Larry McDonald, Bill Law, Greg Reid and Lois Shannon envisioned a theatre company that would produce only Canadian plays, especially those with social and political relevance. Driven by a dream to place Canadian stories and Canadian history front and centre in our country’s universities and theatres, the company launched its first production in August of 1975.
The group has its origins in a season of Canadian theatre produced by the Sock 'n' Buskin Theatre Company at Carleton University. From Carleton, the company moved to a converted firehall in Ottawa South (presently the Ottawa South Community Centre) and then, in 1982, to the Gladstone Theatre on Gladstone Avenue. In September 2007 the company moved into a larger venue called the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre
The Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, which includes a 262-seat mainstage theatre, a flexible black box studio theatre, and two spacious lobbies, has allowed GCTC to expand its community-based activities. More than 35,000 people visit the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre every year to see productions by GCTC and other live performing arts companies, for concerts such as the Acoustic Waves music series, to visit the Lorraine Fritzi Yale Art Gallery, rent the facility, or to enjoy local homemade fare at the Viva Loca Café.
The September 2007 issue of (Cult)ure Magazine described the GCTC as "Ottawa’s pre-eminent promoter of Canadian theatrical content."
Among playwrights whose works have been performed by the company are:
- Jean-Marc Dalpé
- David French
- Linda Griffiths
- Wendy Lill
- Ann-Marie MacDonald
- Arthur Milner
- Morris Panych
- Judith Thompson
- Michel Tremblay
- George F. Walker
Famous quotes containing the words canadian, theatre and/or company:
“We’re definite in Nova Scotia—’bout things like ships ... and fish, the best in the world.”
—John Rhodes Sturdy, Canadian screenwriter. Richard Rossen. Joyce Cartwright (Ella Raines)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)