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Modern Canadian Plays:
“I don’t see how a play can be Canadian. I don’t think there are any plays that you could call strictly Canadian … What does that phrase mean?”
Now, thirty-three years after Canadian directors spoke their minds, or rather shrugged their shoulders at the seeming hopelessness of de-colonizing Canadian theatre, this fourth edition of the “classic” Modern Canadian Plays sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. Spanning the years from 1967 to 1997, this anthology will likely continue to be the standard anthology for Canadian drama—and not without good reason.
Edited by Jerry Wasserman—professor at the University of British Columbia, theatre critic for CBC, and one of Vancouver’s most recurring (and memorable) faces on television— Volume I still contains plays such as George Ryga’s seminal and highly political The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (first performed in 1967, it was described as a “cicatrice” of Canadian society that “showed the bleeding flesh beneath”), as well as Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs (one of the most critically acclaimed plays in Canada, translated from the original, controversial, joual). But more to the point, this edition of Volume I carries with it an even more distinct flavour of adventurousness in its juxtaposition of plays that are strikingly, even wildly, various—plays that can only be said to cohere around the difficulty of amorphous notions such as social justice, cultural belonging, and the existence of a collective past.
The plays in this fourth edition of Modern Canadian Plays: Volume I date from 1967 to 1986.
Now, thirty-three years after Canadian directors spoke their minds, or rather shrugged their shoulders at the seeming hopelessness of de-colonizing Canadian theatre, this fourth edition of the “classic” Modern Canadian Plays sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. Spanning the years from 1967 to 1997, this anthology will likely continue to be the standard anthology for Canadian drama—and not without good reason.
Edited by Jerry Wasserman—professor at the University of British Columbia, theatre critic for CBC, and one of Vancouver’s most recurring (and memorable) faces on television— Volume I still contains plays such as George Ryga’s seminal and highly political The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (first performed in 1967, it was described as a “cicatrice” of Canadian society that “showed the bleeding flesh beneath”), as well as Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs (one of the most critically acclaimed plays in Canada, translated from the original, controversial, joual). But more to the point, this edition of Volume I carries with it an even more distinct flavour of adventurousness in its juxtaposition of plays that are strikingly, even wildly, various—plays that can only be said to cohere around the difficulty of amorphous notions such as social justice, cultural belonging, and the existence of a collective past.
The plays in this fourth edition of Modern Canadian Plays: Volume I date from 1967 to 1986.
- GenresDrama
464 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2000
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March 23, 2019
The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, by George Ryga: Definitely a 1960s play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe combines some experimental theatre techniques with a socially conscious anti-establishment anger to make a valid social critique. The play follows Rita Joe and Jaimie Paul, who have come to a Canadian city from their reserve. They struggle against the paternalism and cool detachment of the legal system, government, and Christian church, which simultaneously infantilize First Nations people and demand that they conform precisely to the cultural expectations of Anglo-Canada. This is the horrible paradox that dooms both Rita and Jaimie--their fates are circumscribed by a socio-cultural system that demands conformity and simultaneously works continually to remind them of their difference. This is a great example of what Homi Bhabha calls cultural mimicry, where conformity is demanded and yet is never possible, which puts the colonized subject into an unwinnable position.
Fortune and Men's Eyes, by John Herbert: I like Realist plays, so this was an enjoyable read for me. It has a similar feel to Kitchen Sink Realism, something like John Osborne, where the driving emotional force behind the play is clearly rage against the system. Herbert's play is set in a prison, where a young man, Smitty, is sent and over the course of the play goes from being relatively naive and trusting to being hard and brutal--it is a condemnation of the prison system with the violence and inhumanity it imbues in the inmates. Ironically, as brutal as the guards are in this play (they regularly torture the most overtly feminine character, Mona), it is actually the inmates who are the most sadistic. For much of the play, there is a power struggle in the cell between Rocky--who is a racist, homophobic, small-time criminal with delusions of superiority--and Queenie--a drag queen prostitute who uses alliances, relationships, and political maneuvering to maintain power. They each want control over Smitty, who has a different value for each of them. But toward the end of the play, Smitty--who, again, began as quite nice, trusting, and naive--becomes the most brutal of the cell's occupants.
Les Belles-Soeurs, by Michel Tremblay: I don't know that much about the culture of 1950s Quebec, but this plays feels pretty similar to some Irish drama/literature, with the tension between people's poverty and the tenuous hope for some modicum of enjoyment always in contrast with a stringent and rather archaic religious authority which seems dead set against anything enjoyable merely because it is enjoyable. There's also the fact that Irish lit/drama has a strong colonial tension, marked by a kind of deterministic obsession with Ireland's subordination to Britain, which seems to also be a theme in Quebec lit (according to the intro to the play, anyway), because French Canadians sometimes see themselves as a subordinated internal colony within the larger realm of English Canada. The women in this play all have some kind of aspiration or dream, but those dreams are always thwarted by the difficulties of their reality, including social pressure to conform to a Catholic morality, poverty, the rather shitty men in their lives, etc. One interesting element, which the intro to the play pointed out, is that these women could band together and provide mutual support, and yet the continually work against one another, enforcing the moral restrictions that undercut their own happiness.
Leaving Home, by David French: Another really good realist play, Leaving Home reminds me a lot of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. It's a domestic drama, centering on inter-generational and romantic conflicts, with a kind of gritty edge that isn't quite gritty enough for something like kitchen sink realism. A major theme of the play is the conflict between Jacob--the Newfoundland patriarch of a family now living in Toronto shortly after Canada annexed Newfoundland--and his son Ben (and to a lesser extent his other son Billy). Jacob seems devoted to the old, Newfie ways of doing things, and is reluctant to accept that the world Ben and Billy are growing up in is not the working class, fishing town of his own youth, with its conservative values and traditional power structures. For his part, Ben is little interested in his father's wisdom and is actively put off by the demands for him to conform to Jacob's sense of manliness. The other conflict, which really is rather a backdrop, is about whether Billy will marry his fiance Kathy, who was pregnant before miscarrying earlier that day. Jacob is fiercely anti-Catholic, and Kathy's family are Catholics, so that's one source of tension, and there is a weird sexual energy because Minnie--Kathy's mom--was once Jacob's girlfriend, and now she's quite sexually open with her taciturn boyfriend Harold (as well as Jacob and Ben). It's not clear that Billy and Kathy particularly want to get married, apart from the pregnancy, so that storyline sets the stage for the play, which occurs before the wedding rehearsal. Oddly, however, this conflict really doesn't get resolved, as the play just kind of drops it at some point.
1837: The Farmer's Revolt, by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille: I love history plays, so this was a great one for me. The collaboratively devised play took on the Upper Canada revolt in 1837, which--according to Salutin's notes and the critical introduction--occupies a rather difficult part of the Canadian historical consciousness. It was a revolt against the British and aristocratic rulership of what is now Ontario, but because the rebels lost fairly quickly and ignominiously, the revolt doesn't seem to play much of a role in Canada's national consciousness. Canadian culture tends to support deferring to authority, but Salutin and the other members of Theatre Passe Muraille were opposed to British Imperialism (which by the 1970s was politically minor, but the British still played an outsized role in Canadian theatre) and US cultural imperialism (which dominated many other spheres of Canadian life), and they were supportive of trade unions. So they found inspiration in the Upper Canada Revolt, and the play became a way of trying to begin reclaiming some of Canada's distinct history.
The play is generically interesting because it is very funny, but it is also quite serious in its attempt to redefine the Canadian national consciousness. There is a lot of satire, particularly of the British and Canadian upper classes. And the play is theatrically interesting because it is performed with minimal props, minimal scenery, and includes a ton of doubled roles.
The St Nicholas Hotel, WM Donnelly, Prop, by James Reaney: Even though this is more or less a history play, it didn't really do much for me. I think the issue is that the play doesn't read all that well. It's a play with minimal props and much of it occurs against the same backdrop, even though the locations are supposed to be different, and so much of the action seems to depend on seeing how the actors are performing things. For instance, there's a scene where a mob is going to Will Donnelly's house, and his mother is trying to get there first, but it isn't really clear to me how that scene is supposed to look on stage. There are some stage directions, but it doesn't make that much sense to me.
Zastrozzi, by George F. Walker: This is a interesting genre-blending play. It's a kind of absurdist revenge black comedy. The basic story line is about the master criminal Zastrozzi, who is pursuing his revenge against a Christian mystic artiste named Verezzi, and their two sets of supporters are pitted against one another in the fight either for Zastrozzi to take his revenge or be prevented from it. But much of the play is not really devoted to this relatively simple plot line, it takes a theatre of the absurd kind of philosophical meandering through issues like good and evil, religion, justice, judgment, love, and sanity/insanity. Many of the discussions have that absurdist style where they sound deep and insightful, but they actually rely on an almost Wildean surface level of linguistic play.
Billy Bishop Goes to War, by John Gray with Eric Peterson: I'm surprised how much I liked this play considering it combines two genres--a musical and a monologue play--that I normally don't like. Plus, the staging was basically a bare stage with minimal props, which can be tough to appreciate in reading a script. But the play was very interesting. It recounts the experiences of Billy Bishop, a Canadian flying ace in WWI, who transitioned (at least according to the play) from a relatively indifferent soldier to a cold, calculating killer with a huge number of deaths to his credit. It's very much a play of two acts, with the character of Bishop quite different in the first and second acts. In the first act, he is a good-natured bumbler, accident prone, not particularly keen on the army, and something of a shirker. But by the second act he is flying even on his days off, both because the more practice he has at killing the enemy the greater his chances of survival, and because he has come to enjoy killing.
It's interesting, because in the preface to the play, Gray recounts performing the show in Washington D.C. and a bunch of US military, FBI, and higher up government officials came back stage and told him and Peterson how much they enjoyed the show, concluding that it was a pro-war/pro-military play because it wasn't overtly anti-war. But I have trouble seeing this as anything but an anti-war play, though it's certainly not didactic. For me, the contrast in Bishop's attitude between the two acts is certainly a critique of war.
Balconville, by David Fennario: This play didn't do much for me. It's a kind of Angry Young Man kitchen sink realist type play, and I'm not generally that big a fan of these angry protest kind of plays. Also, much of the play is in French, which I don't read, so I was missing decently large chunks of the content.
Doc, by Sharon Pollock: The introduction to this play compared it with O'Neill's Long Days Journey Into Night, and thematically the plays are quite similar, but technically they're pretty different. Both plays deal with a troubled family life, an overbearing/insensitive patriarch, alcoholism, disease, and death. But whereas O'Neill's play is a realist drama, Pollock's is a memory play. So, in Long Days Journey, things happen in real time and it is (in theory) as though we're seeing the events as they unfold, but in Pollock's play the events are fragmented and occur in fits and starts, without a regular chronological sequence--we get a sense of the ending from early in the play, and we see conflicts develop out of order. I'm not particularly a big fan of reading memory plays because I often find the threads a bit hard to appreciate, but on stage I have an easier time keeping the various timelines straight. In this play it's particularly difficult to follow some of the chronology because there is Katie and Catherine--Catherine being an older version of Katie--who both interact in the memories, while Ev switches back and forth between the current moment (i.e., the moment in which he and Catherine are remembering) and being in the memories themselves. On the page it can be a bit difficult to orient oneself to these asynchronous shifts.
Drag Queens on Trial, by Sky Gilbert: This is quite a brilliant satire. Gilbert's drag queens play on the stereotypes of the campy queer to draw attention to the role those stereotypes play in controlling, limiting, and disciplining gendered performance/bodies. The show is over the top, vulgar, and definitely presents the excess of drag queens at their most theatrical, but in doing so self-consciously, Gilbert undermines the stereotypical assumptions that straight society uses to condemn queer people (as well as to police the boundaries of straight people's behavior). The show is meta-theatrical, self-conscious, ironic, and very funny.
The Occupation of Heather Rose, by Wendy Lill: I typically don't care for monologue plays, and while this wasn't the best one I've ever read, it was actually pretty good. The play is from the perspective of a Scottish-descended white Canadian who goes to northern Canada to work as a nurse on a First Nations reservation, and she finds herself isolated, disillusioned, dispirited, and increasingly drunk. Initially, Heather goes north enthusiastically, looking forward to her tenure as a romantic adventure during which she will transform the lives of the impoverished locals as if by magic. But when she finds not only that there is no money, but little will to adopt the specific changes she wants--which are largely based on her own cultural conception of how people should live--Heather's romantic bubble is popped and she begins to detest the people she ostensibly came to help. This actually kind of reminds me of George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant," in the sense that Lill's play is also concerned with how colonialism distorts and undermines the colonizer's self, or of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia where he argues that keeping slaves is bad for the slave masters because they become callous and inhumane. To be clear, Lill's play does seem opposed to colonialism/white superiority, but the focus here is on how the imagined beneficence of colonial "uplift" is detrimental not only to the colonized, but to the colonizer as well.
Fortune and Men's Eyes, by John Herbert: I like Realist plays, so this was an enjoyable read for me. It has a similar feel to Kitchen Sink Realism, something like John Osborne, where the driving emotional force behind the play is clearly rage against the system. Herbert's play is set in a prison, where a young man, Smitty, is sent and over the course of the play goes from being relatively naive and trusting to being hard and brutal--it is a condemnation of the prison system with the violence and inhumanity it imbues in the inmates. Ironically, as brutal as the guards are in this play (they regularly torture the most overtly feminine character, Mona), it is actually the inmates who are the most sadistic. For much of the play, there is a power struggle in the cell between Rocky--who is a racist, homophobic, small-time criminal with delusions of superiority--and Queenie--a drag queen prostitute who uses alliances, relationships, and political maneuvering to maintain power. They each want control over Smitty, who has a different value for each of them. But toward the end of the play, Smitty--who, again, began as quite nice, trusting, and naive--becomes the most brutal of the cell's occupants.
Les Belles-Soeurs, by Michel Tremblay: I don't know that much about the culture of 1950s Quebec, but this plays feels pretty similar to some Irish drama/literature, with the tension between people's poverty and the tenuous hope for some modicum of enjoyment always in contrast with a stringent and rather archaic religious authority which seems dead set against anything enjoyable merely because it is enjoyable. There's also the fact that Irish lit/drama has a strong colonial tension, marked by a kind of deterministic obsession with Ireland's subordination to Britain, which seems to also be a theme in Quebec lit (according to the intro to the play, anyway), because French Canadians sometimes see themselves as a subordinated internal colony within the larger realm of English Canada. The women in this play all have some kind of aspiration or dream, but those dreams are always thwarted by the difficulties of their reality, including social pressure to conform to a Catholic morality, poverty, the rather shitty men in their lives, etc. One interesting element, which the intro to the play pointed out, is that these women could band together and provide mutual support, and yet the continually work against one another, enforcing the moral restrictions that undercut their own happiness.
Leaving Home, by David French: Another really good realist play, Leaving Home reminds me a lot of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. It's a domestic drama, centering on inter-generational and romantic conflicts, with a kind of gritty edge that isn't quite gritty enough for something like kitchen sink realism. A major theme of the play is the conflict between Jacob--the Newfoundland patriarch of a family now living in Toronto shortly after Canada annexed Newfoundland--and his son Ben (and to a lesser extent his other son Billy). Jacob seems devoted to the old, Newfie ways of doing things, and is reluctant to accept that the world Ben and Billy are growing up in is not the working class, fishing town of his own youth, with its conservative values and traditional power structures. For his part, Ben is little interested in his father's wisdom and is actively put off by the demands for him to conform to Jacob's sense of manliness. The other conflict, which really is rather a backdrop, is about whether Billy will marry his fiance Kathy, who was pregnant before miscarrying earlier that day. Jacob is fiercely anti-Catholic, and Kathy's family are Catholics, so that's one source of tension, and there is a weird sexual energy because Minnie--Kathy's mom--was once Jacob's girlfriend, and now she's quite sexually open with her taciturn boyfriend Harold (as well as Jacob and Ben). It's not clear that Billy and Kathy particularly want to get married, apart from the pregnancy, so that storyline sets the stage for the play, which occurs before the wedding rehearsal. Oddly, however, this conflict really doesn't get resolved, as the play just kind of drops it at some point.
1837: The Farmer's Revolt, by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille: I love history plays, so this was a great one for me. The collaboratively devised play took on the Upper Canada revolt in 1837, which--according to Salutin's notes and the critical introduction--occupies a rather difficult part of the Canadian historical consciousness. It was a revolt against the British and aristocratic rulership of what is now Ontario, but because the rebels lost fairly quickly and ignominiously, the revolt doesn't seem to play much of a role in Canada's national consciousness. Canadian culture tends to support deferring to authority, but Salutin and the other members of Theatre Passe Muraille were opposed to British Imperialism (which by the 1970s was politically minor, but the British still played an outsized role in Canadian theatre) and US cultural imperialism (which dominated many other spheres of Canadian life), and they were supportive of trade unions. So they found inspiration in the Upper Canada Revolt, and the play became a way of trying to begin reclaiming some of Canada's distinct history.
The play is generically interesting because it is very funny, but it is also quite serious in its attempt to redefine the Canadian national consciousness. There is a lot of satire, particularly of the British and Canadian upper classes. And the play is theatrically interesting because it is performed with minimal props, minimal scenery, and includes a ton of doubled roles.
The St Nicholas Hotel, WM Donnelly, Prop, by James Reaney: Even though this is more or less a history play, it didn't really do much for me. I think the issue is that the play doesn't read all that well. It's a play with minimal props and much of it occurs against the same backdrop, even though the locations are supposed to be different, and so much of the action seems to depend on seeing how the actors are performing things. For instance, there's a scene where a mob is going to Will Donnelly's house, and his mother is trying to get there first, but it isn't really clear to me how that scene is supposed to look on stage. There are some stage directions, but it doesn't make that much sense to me.
Zastrozzi, by George F. Walker: This is a interesting genre-blending play. It's a kind of absurdist revenge black comedy. The basic story line is about the master criminal Zastrozzi, who is pursuing his revenge against a Christian mystic artiste named Verezzi, and their two sets of supporters are pitted against one another in the fight either for Zastrozzi to take his revenge or be prevented from it. But much of the play is not really devoted to this relatively simple plot line, it takes a theatre of the absurd kind of philosophical meandering through issues like good and evil, religion, justice, judgment, love, and sanity/insanity. Many of the discussions have that absurdist style where they sound deep and insightful, but they actually rely on an almost Wildean surface level of linguistic play.
Billy Bishop Goes to War, by John Gray with Eric Peterson: I'm surprised how much I liked this play considering it combines two genres--a musical and a monologue play--that I normally don't like. Plus, the staging was basically a bare stage with minimal props, which can be tough to appreciate in reading a script. But the play was very interesting. It recounts the experiences of Billy Bishop, a Canadian flying ace in WWI, who transitioned (at least according to the play) from a relatively indifferent soldier to a cold, calculating killer with a huge number of deaths to his credit. It's very much a play of two acts, with the character of Bishop quite different in the first and second acts. In the first act, he is a good-natured bumbler, accident prone, not particularly keen on the army, and something of a shirker. But by the second act he is flying even on his days off, both because the more practice he has at killing the enemy the greater his chances of survival, and because he has come to enjoy killing.
It's interesting, because in the preface to the play, Gray recounts performing the show in Washington D.C. and a bunch of US military, FBI, and higher up government officials came back stage and told him and Peterson how much they enjoyed the show, concluding that it was a pro-war/pro-military play because it wasn't overtly anti-war. But I have trouble seeing this as anything but an anti-war play, though it's certainly not didactic. For me, the contrast in Bishop's attitude between the two acts is certainly a critique of war.
Balconville, by David Fennario: This play didn't do much for me. It's a kind of Angry Young Man kitchen sink realist type play, and I'm not generally that big a fan of these angry protest kind of plays. Also, much of the play is in French, which I don't read, so I was missing decently large chunks of the content.
Doc, by Sharon Pollock: The introduction to this play compared it with O'Neill's Long Days Journey Into Night, and thematically the plays are quite similar, but technically they're pretty different. Both plays deal with a troubled family life, an overbearing/insensitive patriarch, alcoholism, disease, and death. But whereas O'Neill's play is a realist drama, Pollock's is a memory play. So, in Long Days Journey, things happen in real time and it is (in theory) as though we're seeing the events as they unfold, but in Pollock's play the events are fragmented and occur in fits and starts, without a regular chronological sequence--we get a sense of the ending from early in the play, and we see conflicts develop out of order. I'm not particularly a big fan of reading memory plays because I often find the threads a bit hard to appreciate, but on stage I have an easier time keeping the various timelines straight. In this play it's particularly difficult to follow some of the chronology because there is Katie and Catherine--Catherine being an older version of Katie--who both interact in the memories, while Ev switches back and forth between the current moment (i.e., the moment in which he and Catherine are remembering) and being in the memories themselves. On the page it can be a bit difficult to orient oneself to these asynchronous shifts.
Drag Queens on Trial, by Sky Gilbert: This is quite a brilliant satire. Gilbert's drag queens play on the stereotypes of the campy queer to draw attention to the role those stereotypes play in controlling, limiting, and disciplining gendered performance/bodies. The show is over the top, vulgar, and definitely presents the excess of drag queens at their most theatrical, but in doing so self-consciously, Gilbert undermines the stereotypical assumptions that straight society uses to condemn queer people (as well as to police the boundaries of straight people's behavior). The show is meta-theatrical, self-conscious, ironic, and very funny.
The Occupation of Heather Rose, by Wendy Lill: I typically don't care for monologue plays, and while this wasn't the best one I've ever read, it was actually pretty good. The play is from the perspective of a Scottish-descended white Canadian who goes to northern Canada to work as a nurse on a First Nations reservation, and she finds herself isolated, disillusioned, dispirited, and increasingly drunk. Initially, Heather goes north enthusiastically, looking forward to her tenure as a romantic adventure during which she will transform the lives of the impoverished locals as if by magic. But when she finds not only that there is no money, but little will to adopt the specific changes she wants--which are largely based on her own cultural conception of how people should live--Heather's romantic bubble is popped and she begins to detest the people she ostensibly came to help. This actually kind of reminds me of George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant," in the sense that Lill's play is also concerned with how colonialism distorts and undermines the colonizer's self, or of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia where he argues that keeping slaves is bad for the slave masters because they become callous and inhumane. To be clear, Lill's play does seem opposed to colonialism/white superiority, but the focus here is on how the imagined beneficence of colonial "uplift" is detrimental not only to the colonized, but to the colonizer as well.
November 5, 2013
good edition of Canadian plays. it seems they chose ones that were easy to read (some plays are hard to read because they are meant to be performed).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews