Two plays, one kicking off the new season at the city’s most prominent theatre house, the other marking the tenth anniversary of one of the city’s most prominent theatre companies, together gave a glimpse into the moral and intellectual divide that is splitting this city into two, all over again.

“The Clean House,” by Sarah Ruhl, opened the season at the big, posh downtown theatre, The Playhouse, favoured by Arbutus Club afternoon scotch sippers, while “Diplomacy,” by Tim Carlson, a few days later opened to kick off the tenth anniversary of the Western Theatre Company, produced by the tight, aging, and beloved eastside house, The Vancouver Eastside Cultural Centre, affectionately known as “The Cultch.”

Both houses offered patrons at the opening night nibbles at a reception afterward. The rich Playhouse served up pre-sliced triangles of Great Canadian Superstore mild cheese you couldn’t lift without touching the other pieces, along with discount Bretton crackers served up pre-broken. The Cultch served up cream cheese profiteroles, prosciutto and fruit on bread, and very tasty sliced up latkes. The Playhouse reception was in a room doubling as storage for old office cubicle dividers separating patrons from the one piece of art on the wall; the Cultch reception was in a room previewing some of the best paintings on offer during the upcoming Eastside Cultural Crawl. It’s true what they say, I guess: money doesn’t buy taste; class is no determinant of class.

The plays staged at the two houses reflected and reinforced this observation. “The Clean House” at the Playhouse is about a rich bitch who undergoes sensitivity training when she is forced to care for her husband’s dying mistress. It’s point seems to be that death brings out the best in all of us, though I’m not confident in that evaluation because the script was about as tight as the grip a patron had on a handful of crumbling Brettons at the reception afterward—one of very few who bothered to stay.

“Diplomacy” is also about moral re-examination, this time undergone by an aging American Vietnam War deserter holed up in Ottawa for the last few decades as a professor teaching generations of students about peace. When his wife, a Vietnamese refugee, kills herself in a provocative protest against Canada’s current war in Afghanistan, the former draft dodger transforms into a classic chicken-hawk, squawking to alarmed colleagues and disciples alike about the war of civilizations, Islamo-fascists, and the War on Terror.

Political scripts written from an activist point of view are the hardest to get away with for they almost always sound preachy. So did this script, in a very few places. Otherwise, it was a gripping, wide-ranging and intense examination of many sides of a debate going on at Canadian water coolers and dinner tables across the country. This plays’ point is that Canada is at war in a way it hasn’t been in its history, and that the transformation of the national culture that may arise from this new direction is profound and worthy of the closest scrutiny. Unlike Americans, Canadians have little experience with the moral dilemmas that homegrown wars of aggression bring to the public forums. The script in this case was as tight as my grip on the arm rest of my chair throughout the seemingly too short play, and it wasn’t just because I was in the frighteningly steep balcony section (from where I could surreptitiously keep an eye on the reactions of the city’s most prominent theatre critics, Colin Thomas (Georgia Straight), Peter Birney (Vancouver Sun), and Jerry Wasserman (The Province), who were all—wouldn’t you know it—seated together). The west side of Vancouver voted overwhelmingly in favour of the status quo on democratic representation in civic politics, very heavily in favour of the Olympics, and very strongly for libertarian NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan and no-name do-nothing NPA candidates for council. The Playhouse, which draws its audience from the stock-investing home owners and their modern-day bored and fading (but botox and face-lifted) housewives, knows their audience well: their theatre house promised them a season of nothing to trouble their pretty little minds about. When the rich bitch fires the Brazilian maid on a whim, it’s a moment of comedy: the maid doesn’t like cleaning anyway, and in any event, the husband’s cancerous mistress hires her on the spot, to continue being a pretend maid while she works on her pet project, writing the world’s funniest joke. Ain’t life a brook! It isn’t when seen from the point of view of fired Brazilian maids, I suspect.

The east side of Vancouver voted heavily in favour of a new wards system of representation in civic politics, against the Olympics, and strongly in favour of the left-wing and centrist progressive candidates in civic elections last year. The Cultch knows it’s audiences equally well. The play presumed a working knowledge of pressing political issues confronting the country, and assumes the audience is aware of the plight of Vietnamese boat people, immigrant experiences, draft dodgers, and the shifting sands on the political terrain especially in times of war.

This play is useful to an audience struggling with important questions about how to support peace while not abandoning soldiers willing to defend our country, and how to honour memories of loved ones without reading too much, or too little, in this case, into their untimely deaths. The other play is not useful in any conceivable way.

Each in their own right, the two plays, and the two houses that offered them up, served the needs of their audiences exactly as the doctor ordered: one is prozac for an audience struggling to shut out an increasingly terrifying reality, while the other is truth serum for an audience struggling to face that same reality head on, and to take a full accounting of it. One, at the heavily City-subsidized house, is meant to ease troubled minds; the other, at the thinly-supported house, is meant to rile up our alarmed minds.

One production could have done the city and everyone in it a favour by canceling its show and refunding its patrons’ $53 in drink tickets at the impervious Arbutus Club; the other can do an even bigger favour for us all by rushing more productions like “Diplomacy” onto the stage, because examining these pressing and profound political questions is exactly what we need our arts community to do right now, and a lot more of it, too.

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