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All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players – now competing against each other.

Toronto’s top theatre, dance and opera awards are going gender neutral in 2019, the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (TAPA) announced on Wednesday morning - making this June’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards the last where male actors will compete against male actors and female actors will compete against female actors.

While it will no doubt provoke the ire of a Jordan Peterson or two, retiring these outdated gender silos is the most sensible decision that the TAPA, which runs the Doras, has made in a decade.

After all, male and female directors, designers and playwrights already go up against one another in the same categories – and we’re living in a theatrical time in Toronto where you might as easily find a woman playing Hamlet as a man.

Why not have Christine Horne (who played the melancholy Dane for Why Not Theatre and will reprise the role next season at Canadian Stage) and Noah Reid (who was a rock’n’roll Hamlet at Tarragon Theatre in January) go head to head come awards time?

The coming changes to the Dora Awards – which will also see the number of nominees in each acting category increased to eight from the current five - are the result of a year-and-a-half review process that TAPA undertook, consulting with its diverse membership that includes the commercial Mirvish Productions and major not-for-profits such as Canadian Stage and Soulpepper, as well as tiny indie companies that produce out of storage lockers and storefronts.

“We were seeing this desire from the TAPA members in conversations that we had - and wanted to reflect the way they are thinking and also be reflective of the way art is being created on our stages,” TAPA’s long-time executive director Jacoba Knaapen told me in the advance of the official announcement.

Of course, the primary reason why the Doras are changing now after decades of debate about gendered acting awards is that there are an increasing number of performers in the city who identify as transgender, gender-fluid or non-binary.

Where do they fit in? TAPA’s move toward gender-inclusive acting awards smartly gets ahead of a question that will sooner or later engulf the folks that run the Oscars, the Emmys, the Canadian Screen Awards and theatre awards around the globe.

The old objection to considering male and female performances together has been one of numbers and fairness: With so much storytelling focused on male characters played by men, you’d have a few women going up against many men for best actor - or, as the Dora prefers, “outstanding performance.”

This has, traditionally, been an even bigger problem on the stage than on the screen thanks to the place of honour held by playwrights such as William Shakespeare – who wrote in a time when women weren’t even allowed to be actors.

But, in today’s Toronto, where contemporary work dominates and gender-blind casting is becoming more common for classical plays, we’re now almost at gender parity in casting, according to TAPA. This past season, there were 246 male performances and 231 female performances eligible for Dora Awards. And, over the past two years, the performing arts group calculates that motr 48 per cent of performances eligible for acting Doras have been by women.

To deal with the fear that the change might, good intentions aside, nevertheless lead to sexist results, TAPA also plans to introduce anti-bias training in collaboration with Egale Canada Human Rights Trust going forward for its volunteer Dora jurors – to help them conquer any unconscious sexism that might make them favour male over female performances.

The Doras are ahead of the curve here - but they aren’t breaking entirely new ground. Last year, the MTV Movie and TV Awards gave out gender-neutral acting prizes – with Emma Watson beating out Daniel Kaluuya and Hugh Jackman for best actor in a movie. The Non-Equity Jeff Awards in Chicago and the Theatre Bay Area Awards in and around San Francisco have also recently gone gender-inclusive.

But, if I’m unabashedly enthusiastic about the coming changes to the Doras, it’s because Toronto’s theatre awards have been a mess for years – and a streamlining of them will have the side effect of solving many other problems.

With awards in opera, dance and four separate categories of theatre (general, musical theatre, independent and theatre for young audiences), the Doras can seem to go on forever.

But to help cut down on the length of the ceremony, TAPA stopped giving out awards for featured performances after their last review five years ago – and many great supporting performances went unrewarded.

Now, in the general theatre and musical theatre divisions, we’ll have one award for outstanding performance in a lead role and another for outstanding performance in a featured role. The ceremony will be shorter, but we won’t see a Hamlet competing with a Claudius any more.

Though, who knows, we might see a Claudius up against an Ophelia.

The indie and TYA divisions will stick with a single outstanding performance award, alas – but no awards are perfect. This year’s Dora nominations, the final where male and female actors will be nominated separately, will be announced on May 31 – and the winners will take place at a ceremony on June 25 at the Winter Garden Theatre hosted by Come From Away’s Astrid Van Wieren.

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