The CTR Anthology Read online

  THE CTR ANTHOLOGY

  Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review

  THE CTR ANTHOLOGY

  Fifteen Plays from

  Canadian Theatre Review

  Edited by Alan Filewod

  Individual plays © the authors

  Introduction © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1993

  Toronto Buffalo London

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 0-8020-6812-X

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Main entry under title:

  The CTR anthology : fifteen plays from Canadian

  theatre review

  ISBN 0-8020-6812-X

  1. Canadian drama (English) – 20th century.*

  2. Canadian drama (French) – 20th century – Translations into English.* I. Filewod, Alan

  D. (Alan Douglas), 1952-

  PS8307.C88 1993 c812'.5408 C92-095004-3

  PR9196.3.C88 1993

  This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Woodlawn Arts Foundation.

  This volume is dedicated to

  FLOYD S. CHALMERS

  Journalist, publisher, and indefatigable supporter of the arts, his patronage has recognized and benefited a great many artists, and his generosity and enthusiasm have left an indelible mark on all the arts in Canada. His many honours, including Companion of the Order of Canada, the Order of Ontario, and various honorary degrees, are tributes to the wide range of his philanthropy. This volume attests to his love for Canadian theatre.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Michael Cook: The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance

  John Palmer: Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama

  Hrant Alianak: Passion and Sin

  George F. Walker: Rumours of Our Death

  Jack Winter and Cedric Smith: Ten Lost Years

  Betty Lambert: Jennie’s Story

  The Anna Project: This is for You, Anna

  Paul Ledoux and David Young: Love is Strange

  Cindy Cowan: A Woman from the Sea

  René-Daniel Dubois (translated by Linda Gaboriau): Being at Home with Claude

  Arthur Milner: Zero Hour

  Bauta Rubess: Boom, Baby, Boom!

  Sky Gilbert: Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home

  Richard Rose and D.D. Kugler: Newhouse

  Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage (translated by Gyllian Raby): Polygraph

  Acknowledgments

  Caution: The plays in this volume are protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and all performances are subject to royalty. Rights to produce, film, or record, in whole or in part, in any medium and in any language, by any group, amateur or professional, are retained by the authors.

  The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance © 1974 Michael Cook. Originally published in CTR 1

  Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama © 1976 John Palmer. (Author’s agent: Rhonda Cooper, The Characters Talent Agency, 150 Carlton St, Toronto, Ont., M5A 2K1.) Originally published in CTR 14

  Passion and Sin © 1976 Hrant Alianak. Originally published in CTR 19

  Rumours of Our Death © 1979 George F. Walker. Originally published in CTR 25

  Ten Lost Years © 1974 Jack Winter and Cedric Smith. Originally published in CTR 38

  Jennie’s Story © 1981 the estate of Betty Lambert. Rights are retained by The New Play Centre, P.O. Box 34091, Station D, Vancouver, BC, v6j 4M1. Originally published in CTR 40

  This is for You, Anna © 1985 The Anna Project (c/o Bauta Rubess). Originally published in CTR 43

  Love is Strange © 1984 Paul Ledoux and David Young. Originally published in CTR 44

  A Woman from the Sea © 1986 Cindy Cowan. Originally published in CTR 48

  Being at Home with Claude English-language version © 1987 René-Daniel Dubois and Linda Gaboriau. (Authors’ agents: L’Agence John C. Goodwin et Associés, 839, Sherbrooke est, suite 2, Montréal, Que., H2L 1K6.) Originally published in CTR 50

  Zero Hour © 1986 Arthur Milner. Originally published in CTR 53

  Boom, Baby, Boom! © 1988 Bauta Rubess. Originally published in CTR 58

  Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home © 1989 Sky Gilbert. Originally published in CTR 59

  Newhouse © 1989 Richard Rose and D.D. Kugler. Originally published in CTR 61

  Polygraph English-language version © 1990 Robert Lepage, Marie Brassard, and Gyllian Raby. Originally published in CTR 64

  Introduction

  Alan Filewod

  Of the fifteen plays in this anthology, most have been out of print since they originally appeared in the pages of Canadian Theatre Review. A few have been republished elsewhere but are no longer available; a smaller number are currently available in book form or in other anthologies. This volume therefore serves two purposes: to recover a number of significant plays that have gone out of print, and to offer a representative overview of the development of Canadian drama and theatrical practice as recorded by the several editors of CTR since 1974.

  These fifteen plays, which comprise approximately twenty per cent of the journal’s canon to date, represent the tastes, prejudices, and analyses of three different editorial regimes at CTR. Four of them (The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance, Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama, Passion and Sin, and Rumours of Our Death) were published while CTR’s founder, Don Rubin, served as editor (with occasional associates, most notably Alan Richardson) from 1974 to 1982. Six (Ten Lost Years, Jennie’s Story, This is for You, Anna, Love is Strange, A Woman from the Sea, and Being at Home with Claude) were originally published under the direction of Robert Wallace, editor from 1982 to 1987. The remaining plays (Zero Hour, Boom, Baby, Boom!, Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home, Newhouse, and Polygraph) have appeared since 1987, when Wallace was succeeded by an editorial collective consisting of Alan Filewod as editor, and Natalie Rewa, Wallace (until 1988), and Ann Wilson (until 1992) as associate editors. Although the selection of the plays for this volume was made by one person, in a very real sense it is a collective effort that reproduces the work of all of the editors who have been involved in the journal since its inception.

  Each year CTR has normally published four plays – with occasional fluctuations – and the choice of plays has always been subjective. They were published because the editors involved considered them significant, either because of their textual and thematic values, or because they documented important developments in theatrical production.1 Each editor’s choice is justified by a personal analysis of Canadian drama and theatre. In that sense, CTR’s mission has consistently been one of advocacy: to publish deserving plays that demonstrate what we as editors have seen as important in Canadian theatre, and to record how Canadian theatre changes.

  At the same time, the selection of plays to be reissued raises the question of canonization, a topic that has provoked considerable debate in recent years. The process of canonization is necessarily exclusive, for certain texts are made available at the expense of others, and during the existence of CTR the field of new Canadian plays to choose from has expanded rapidly. The canon of Canadian drama – the body of available texts that together define the conceptual borders of the discipline – is in a constant state of change, somewhat stabilized by the lists of the playtext publishers and the few anthologies available for use in university and college courses.

  All canons enshrine identifiable values and in this CTR is no exception. At the same time every addition to or rehabilitation of the canon both expands and subverts notions of Canadian theatre. The CTR canon represented here offers several narratives of Canadian theatre. In particular, these
plays can be read in terms of the evolution of CTR’s discourse of nationalism and regionalism as the defining conditions of modern Canadian drama, and as an expression of the changing nature of theatrical practice in Canada. In both cases, these plays document a growing pluralism that corresponds to the phenomenal growth in Canadian theatre since the early 1970s, a period which has seen Canadian playwrights move from a marginalized minority to become the dominant presence on Canadian stages. That growth has produced a diversity of styles, thematic concerns, and theatrical approaches that has radically transformed the conceptual notions that informed CTR at its founding.

  In its first years, under Don Rubin, CTR advocated a notion of Canadian theatre in terms of the arrival of a professional institution committed to producing Canadian drama. In Rubin’s analysis the idea of a canon was crucial; although the “alternate” theatre movement of the 1970s produced hundreds of new plays, few of them were seen on the boards of the larger institutionalized theatres that accounted for the lion’s share of theatrical funding. In his editorial in CTR 2, Rubin addressed this issue directly, using the horticultural vocabulary of cultural maturity common to post-colonial societies:

  We’re speaking here about developing a culture and the fact is that until we have a strong culture of our own to share with the world, we must be extraordinarily careful not to let its potential disappear through colonial thinking or misguided liberalism. The Massey Commission was well aware of this danger nearly a quarter century ago and it aided immeasurably in planting the seeds for a truly Canadian culture. But we can have no real culture until these seeds reach some kind of maturity. And theatrical maturity means the creation of a drama (playwrights) as well as the continued growth of a theatre (actors, designers, directors). Canada does have a Canadian theatre right now, and the possibility of creating a Canadian drama to go with it is closer now than ever before.2

  Rubin’s choice of plays articulated a cultural nationalism that accorded with the prevailing theory that Canadian culture was best comprehended in terms of aggregate regional cultures. The orthodoxy of regionalism that CTR (which by 1976 was calling itself “Canada’s National Theatre Journal”) helped define in the 1970s implied an ideological centrality, its emblem, the unde-finable phrase “national unity”; the decentralizing impulse of regionalism was stabilized by the proposal of a national community that finds its unity in nationalism, multiculturalism, and bilingualism. In effect, this was the ideology of the Trudeau Liberal governments that subsidized the formative years of the contemporary Canadian theatre.

  Rubin departed from the Trudeau vision in one important regard. In his selection of plays, Rubin made it clear that while CTR’s mandate was to cover the whole of Canada, it could not pretend to speak for Quebec, where the jeune theatre movement offered incontrovertible proof that, in the theatre at least, Quebec had already achieved cultural autonomy. CTR’s subsequent editors continued this recognition of Quebec as a distinct culture, to be addressed on its own terms. Robert Wallace and Natalie Rewa in particular brought a close familiarity with Québécois theatre to CTR, but a journal that defined Canadian theatre in terms of colonialism was from its beginnings sensitive to Québécois cultural autonomy. When CTR published Quebec plays, they were plays that had enjoyed success in translation in English Canada, and therefore could be counted in the anglophone repertoire. Such was the case with René-Daniel Dubois’ Being at Home with Claude and Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage’s Polygraph, both of which are included in this volume.

  Canadian federal governments, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative, have adhered religiously to the idea that Canada cannot exist without Quebec, neither materially nor ideologically; in accepting the existence of two separate cultures, CTR proposed an idea of an essential anglo-Canadian cultural identity. The journal has continually been engaged in a project of defining, interrogating, and documenting that culture, which now appears much more complex and pluralistic than it did in the mid-1970s.

  The complexity of that pluralism can be seen in CTR’s evolving understanding of the significance of regionalism. As Trudeau’s policies were inscribed into legislation and critical orthodoxies, the contradiction between regionalism (seen at its most extreme in Quebec, where regional difference could be seen as the expression of a separate nation) and the need for a unifying national sentiment was apparently resolved in the cliché, “unity in diversity.” For CTR, regional difference was the defining condition that proved the existence of a Canadian culture. Only by legitimizing a national mythos could the hegemony of the colonizing “other” be resisted. CTR defined that “other” in the same way it was defined by the new theatre movements: the “other” was superficially British but substantially American. The earliest issues of the journal were preoccupied with the question of nationalism and colonialism; in fact the first issue coincided with the hiring of Robin Phillips at Stratford, a move seen at the time as one more example of what Tyrone Guthrie had called “the send-for-the-governor syndrome” afflicting Canadian middle-class theatres. Rubin perceived the Phillips hiring as the colonial antithesis proving the legitimacy of an imperilled indigenous theatre. (One marker of the ideological distance we have since travelled is the changing meaning of “indigenous,” which then meant “Canadian” and now pertains almost exclusively to the aboriginal First Nations.)

  On the face of it, Canadian theatre in the 1970s was subject to British colonialism: the artistic directors of the larger theatres were British, the repertoires were largely derived from British experience, and as CTR never failed to point out, the largest theatres in the country were dedicated to the work of dead British playwrights. But this colonialism was in a sense self-imposed; it had nothing to do with Britain per se, and everything to do with the obsessive post-colonial construction of a “mother” culture. Nowhere was this attitude more clearly, nor more cleverly, expressed than in John Palmer’s one-act dramatic lecture, Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama, in which Ibsen methodically demolishes the cultural arguments that kept Canadian playwrights marginalized and argues that a dramatic canon is the proof of nationhood.

  The colonialism that afflicted theatre often spoke with a British accent, but as critics had observed from the beginning of the century, the real hegemony to be resisted was that of American commercial culture. More than anything else, it was the threat of absorption into American popular culture that gave the nationalism of the 1970s its sense of urgency. This in turn led to an essentialist notion of Canadian culture that defined itself in terms of historical experience and localism. It is in this context that CTR’s emphasis on regionalism can be understood: regionalism sought to prove the existence of specific cultures that combine to form a coherent cultural narrative with, at its core, a repudiation of the narrative of American culture. Significantly, the first play published in CTR (and the play that begins this volume) was written by a British immigrant to Newfoundland, which had joined Canada only twenty-five years earlier. Michael Cook’s The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance seemed to define a new genre of regionalist drama in its use of dialect, its minimalist plot, and its localist specificity, all expressing a deeply romantic cultural myth of survival and (as Cook wrote in his original preface) a “satanic struggle to impose order upon experience rendered frequently chaotic by a blind or savage nature.”3

  Rubin’s choice of plays in those first issues continued to express the notion of a national community making itself known through the process of canonization. Gradually, however, CTR began to interrogate the premises of its nationalism. Rubin’s analysis began to examine the class distinctions within Canadian theatre, between the heavily subsidized “regional” theatres and the small new theatres that produced the bulk of Canadian plays; in his last issues, when the issues of nationalism seemd less urgent, he broadened his scope to embrace international topics.

  When Robert Wallace assumed the role of editor in 1982, the process of interrogation accelerated. Canadian theatre had evolved to the point
where a quarterly journal could not pretend to cover it comprehensively. Wallace therefore began focusing on a particular theme in each issue, and often sought plays that illuminated that theme. For example, Ten Lost Years was selected to complement an issue on Toronto theatre; Cindy Cowan’s A Woman from the Sea was chosen by guest editor Richard Paul Knowles to illustrate the work of the Mulgrave Road Co-op in an issue on “Atlantic Alternatives”; and This is for You, Anna was the centrepiece of an issue on feminist theatre. This policy of thematically related playtexts, which continues to this day, has not always been applied rigidly but in each issue editors have generally tried to establish a relationship between the play and the cover topic.

  This principle had the effect of further questioning the premises upon which CTR had been founded, because the theme issues attempted to dig beneath the surface and offer several different perspectives on their respective topics. Critical notions that in 1974 seemed straightforward could be seen in retrospect as ideologically situated; the 1970s idea of nationalism, for example, had in the 1990s fragmented into several interconnected discourses. In CTR 62, on the subject of “Nation and Theatre,” Ann Wilson argued that the idea of nationalism, which not too many years before had seemed self-evident, was in fact a cipher for “that which reinforces and perpetuates the power of those whose status within the society is predicated on a particular sense of the political entity called the nation.”4 If in the 1970s CTR was radical because it called for cultural nationalism, in the 1990s it was radical in its questioning of “whose nation(s)?” In this regard, the editorial team that succeeded Wallace has continued his practice of interrogating the vocabularies and conceptual frameworks in which Canadian theatre operates.

  Reconsideration of the meaning of nationalism may be seen to indicate that the battles that had launched CTR had been won: by the 1980s the primacy of the Canadian playwright was an established fact, and critical attention could turn to the task of defining the trends and developments that were constantly changing the theatre. The earlier idea of regionalism was supplanted by a new understanding that accepted the principle of regional difference but freed it of geographic determinism. The first indication of this in the CTR canon came early with the recognition of women playwrights as a struggling minority within the theatre who express their own “region” of experience. Although CTR has always sought and published women playwrights, they comprised a minority in the journal’s evolving canon, as they did on the stages of Canadian theatres. Happily that trend has been reversed, or at least substantially modified, in recent years, but the disproportionate ratio of male to female playwrights in this volume reflects the overall ratio throughout CTR’s history.