The CTR Anthology Read online

  The plays by women in this volume show clearly that the region of experience shared by women is itself pluralistic and must be considered in terms of cultural difference. Jennie’s Story, This is for You, Anna, A Woman from the Sea, and Boom, Baby, Boom! can all be analysed as feminist plays but their notions of women’s experience and the construction of gender in them are very different. Both Jennie’s Story and This is for You, Anna, for example, deal with abuse and violence against women but in two very different contexts. In Jennie’s Story, by the late Betty Lambert, notions of region, in this case of gender and geography, intersect and draw strength from the localist specificity of the script’s dialogue and characterizations. Its realist form and use of dialect expand the parameters of conventional dramaturgy by resituating the marginalized (the victims of sexual and institutional abuse) into the centre. Like many realist plays written by women, it reclaims a dramatic form that has long been dominated by male concerns. The same holds true of Cindy Cowan’s A Woman from the Sea, which modifies realism with poetic sparseness to imbue traditional dramaturgy with mythic resonances that the play defines as essentially feminine. Anna, in contrast, is a collective creation that repudiates realist dramaturgy as the aesthetic technology of patriarchy and therefore incapable of expressing women’s experience. Its imagistic, nonlinear structure is both an expression of subjectivity and a process of discovering a feminist performance vocabulary.

  The concern for cultural difference and the redefinition of the conceptual boundaries of Canadian drama have led the editors of CTR to examine other regions of experience, many of which can no longer be analysed in terms of an essentialist national culture. Zero Hour is included here as an example of the topical political drama typical of the popular theatre movement that emerged in force during the 1980s; Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home is an example of the distinct genre of gay parody encouraged by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. In both cases, as with many feminist plays, the “regional” concerns of the play are trans-national; Zero Hour examines American intervention in Central America, and Lola Starr expresses a gay cultural experience that must be understood in a broader North American context. This is also true of many of the Native plays that have been written in recent years (several of which have been published in CTR in the course of the past two years, too recently to be included in this anthology). Although they do not explicitly address questions of Canadian culture and regionalism, they call into question the critical premises that have evolved to explain the development of Canadian drama. There is, for example, a growing body of plays that reflect the experiences of immigrants and cultural minorities, and while these can be analysed in terms of changing perspectives on Canadian identity, they might be more usefully read along with similar Australian, Caribbean and British plays in terms of global post-colonialism.

  Taken together, the plays in this anthology can be read as a narrative of the development of the idea of Canadian nationalism, which progresses from the essentialist notion of a national identity arising out of regional difference, to a pluralistic intersection (and often conflict) of community interests. As such, this volume both constructs an idea of Canadian culture and deconstructs it as a contradictory notion that may in the end elude any attempt at definition (or in narrative terms, at closure). No longer can an editor of CTR write confidently, as could Rubin in 1974, of “our culture,” because “our” today implies a monolithic and hegemonic analysis that many of these plays resist.

  This same principle can be read into the narrative of theatrical practice the plays offer. The rapid expansion of Canadian theatres over the past several years can be traced in the Canada On Stage series initially published by CTR and more recently by the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres. In its first volume covering the 1974 season, Canada On Stage recorded the seasons of fewer than 100 theatres; in its latest (covering the seasons of 1986-8) it documents close to 350. This in part reflects improved documentation, but it also demonstrates that the breadth of theatrical production has so expanded that no one person can assume to comprehend the totality. This blossoming (to return to horticultural imagery) has brought with it an unprecedented diversity in theatrical and dramaturgical styles which undermine any generalizations about Canada playwriting.

  The earliest plays in this volume are typical of the dominant approaches to playwriting in the early 1970s, although CTR was quick to publish alternative textualities. The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance may be considered representative of the traditional displacement of the playwright from the theatre that CTR sought to rectify in its early years. When Cook wrote his play, Newfoundland had no professional theatre (other than the collective Mummers Troupe) that might have worked with him to explore other modes of writing, nor did he miss it. (In his preface to the play, he wrote, “I don’t, mind you, give a damn if someone decides to alter this or switch that in production. The Director has carte blanche. I just want to be left out of it, that’s all.”)5

  But as theatrical practice evolved, mainly in small companies committed to new drama, the traditional understanding of literary textuality was enriched by a growing awareness of the textuality of performance. CTR saw this happening as early as the second issue, which published James Reaney’s Sticks and Stones, still a model of theatricalist collaboration between a writer and a collective. Ten Lost Years, originally produced in the same year that CTR was founded (but not published until a decade later) similarly owed much to collaborative creation; the textuality that delighted audiences across the country was as much a product of George Luscombe’s unique staging techniques as it was of Barry Broadfoot’s oral histories, Jack Winter’s narrative adaptations, and Cedric Smith’s songs. (In this case, the complexities of the collaboration resulted in a long and bitter dispute over the ownership of the play, between the accredited authors of the written text, which CTR published, and the author of the mise-en-scène, which is essentially unpublishable.) Hrant Alianak’s Passion and Sin can be read as a clever inversion of the traditional approach to textuality: the playwright has specified the physical actions and subtexts of his characters in minute detail, with occasional lines of dialogue included in the manner of stage directions. This playing with dramatic conventions is representative of the adventurous spirit that governed the early years of Toronto Free Theatre, a company founded by playwrights to create opportunities to work closely with actors and directors. Similarly, George F. Walker’s ironic fable of colonialism, Rumours of Our Death, characterizes the break-the-rules attitude of Factory Theatre (before it dropped the “Lab” from its name). Walker has always written his plays with a close relationship to an ensemble of actors and directors, but Rumours is without question the least conventional, the least “textual” of his plays – so much so that the published text can only provide a glimpse of the play as seen on stage, for it omits the songs that gave the performance its distinct theatrical style. The text itself is nevertheless of interest for its witty examination of colonialism and for its place in Walker’s development as one of Canada’s foremost playwrights.

  The centrality of music, which defies reproduction on paper, is also a factor in Love is Strange and Boom, Baby, Boom! Love is Strange is a rare published example of the new approach to musical theatre, in which music is contextualized in the realist confines of the play but defines the style of the production. Love is Strange (which was in its first version called I Love You, Ann Murray until legalities forced a major revision) uses popular songs to interrogate mass culture, as did the authors’ subsequent hit musical Fire. Boom, Baby, Boom! is a post-modern reflection on multiculturalism in the 1950s, which uses a jazz band to establish performance ambience. As in Love is Strange, music is used in this play as an integral element of both the narrative and the performance. In this case, music had an even more intangible result: Bauta Rubess, who directed as well as wrote the play, imposed on the production a stylized movement pattern to the rhythms of the band which expressed meaning that can only be suggested in the
published text.

  Music may be the most elusive textual element to be considered in the publication of a play, but it is not the only one. Robert Wallace originally published Being at Home with Claude in an issue that focused on what he called “image theatre,” an approach which locates textual meaning in the visual and aural images of the performance. Being at Home with Claude may seem at first glance to be a naturalistic two-hander, but René-Daniel Dubois’ extremely precise stage directions reveal the play to be a dense choreography of visual imagery; without careful attention to these imagistic structures, the play might well collapse under its own weight in performance. This same principle of imagistic performance is taken even further in Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage’s Polygraph, which uses filmic techniques (including montage, shifting angles, and changing speeds) to challenge the structures of perception we bring to performance, and to the unravelling of its narrative mystery.

  The final example of non-literary textuality in this volume is Newhouse, in which two canonized texts, Oedipus and de Molina’s Don Juan, are plundered to construct a political fable of a near-future Canada in the grip of political crisis caused by an AlDS-like sexual plague. Newhouse can be read in strictly literary terms; in fact, its use of the source texts invites such a reading. In performance, however, the “literary” quality of the text was subverted by the environmental staging (in which actors processed their way to various platforms, around which the audience wandered at will) and by the integration of live-feed video.

  For a number of the plays in this volume, then, the published text derives from the conditions of the performance itself, and is presented in a tentative form offering tantalizing clues to the variables of performance. In some cases, the written text changed considerably over the course of performances. In particular, the versions of Ten Lost Years, This is for You, Anna, and Polygraph published here are best read as documentations of performances at one point of development.

  In a sense, this is true of all published playtexts. Because the development of modern Canadian playwriting was made possible by the expansion of theatres committed to producing their work, even the most traditional dramatic forms are created with a strong awareness of the textuality of performance. It has always been an editorial principle of CTR that plays are normally selected because of significant productions, and very often playwrights have been approached after an editor has seen the play performed. It sometimes happens that the qualities that attract notice in the first place are the very ones that cannot be captured on the page. What published text can suggest the theatrical intensity and centrality of Sky Gilbert’s drag performance in Lola Starr, the jazz band in Boom, Baby, Boom!, the actor-created sound effects of Ten Lost Years, or the chilling presence of the television monitors of Newhouse? In such cases the texts are offered as a glimpse of what struck us as important theatrical events. It is hoped that they will be read in that light. And it is hoped that all of the plays in this volume will be read not only for their historical and critical values, but also for the considerable pleasure they can offer the reader.

  This volume would not have been possible without the active collaboration of a number of valued colleagues, beginning, of course, with the playwrights themselves, and their agents. In the process of editing the anthology, I have been keenly aware of the debt owed to the editors to CTR who over the years have worked passionately to document the theatre they love: to Don Rubin, Robert Wallace, Natalie Rewa, and Ann Wilson I offer my deepest respect and admiration. I could not hope for finer colleagues, and I have learned much from all of them.

  This book was made possible by University of Toronto Press, who as publishers of Canadian Theatre Review encouraged its compilation. Two colleagues from the Press have been invaluable; Olive Koyama’s painstaking copy-editing and Beth Earl Rose’s visual design are as important to this book as they have been to CTR over the years.

  Finally I would like to thank Floyd S. Chalmers, who provided the subvention that made this project feasible, and to whom it is dedicated.

  NOTES

  1 A more complete analysis of the process and implications of canonization as it pertains to CTR can be found in my article “Undermining the Centre: The Canon According to Canadian Theatre Review” in Theatre History in Canada 11, 2 (1990): 178-85

  2 Don Rubin, “Creating the Impossible,” CTR 2 (Spring 1974): 6

  3 Michael Cook, preface to The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance, CTR 1 (Winter 1974): 74

  4 Ann Wilson, “Notions of Nationalism,” CTR 62 (Spring 1990): 3

  5 Cook: 75

  THE CTR ANTHOLOGY

  The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance

  Michael Cook

  Anglo-Irish in origin, and born on Valentine’s Day in the year of the Reichstag fire, Michael Cook was educated at various Catholic/Jesuit schools before he enlisted in the British army in 1949. In twelve years he saw servicein Korea, Japan, Malaya, and Europe. Upon his release he studied Drama at Nottingham University. Emigrating to Canada in 1966, he worked as Drama Specialist for Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Extension Service, before transferring to the Department of English Language and Literature, where he remains as an Associate Professor. He is the author of a dozen stage plays and over a hundred radio and television plays and adaptations. His plays have been performed across North America (including Mexico), and in Poland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. In 1977 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Service to the Arts; he is also the recipient of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Achievement Award 1985, the National Radio Award for best original play 1990, and the Labatt’s Award for best original play, which he has won three times. In 1989 he was Playwright in Residence at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival.

  PHOTO CREDIT: RICHARD STOKER

  The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance was first performed at the Arts and Culture Centre, St John’s, Newfoundland, 4 March 1973.

  PRODUCTION

  Director / Tony Chadwick

  Set Design / John Roddis

  Lighting / Tony Duarte

  Sound / Sharon Buehler

  CAST

  Clyde Rose / Skipper Pete

  Pat Byrne / Uncle John

  Flo Edwards / Rachel

  Dick Buehler / Absalom

  Kelly Buehler, Paul Kelly, Perry Fowler / Children

  Geoff Seymour / Lew

  Leslie Mulholland / Aiden

  CHARACTERS

  Skipper Pete, 80

  Uncle John, 60

  Absalom, 60

  Aiden, Lew, men of the village

  Child

  Wife to Uncle John

  ACT ONE

  The curtain rises on a typical splitting room on a fishing stage. The room rises from the landward side and runs generally to one third of the way out on the stage. At high tide, water runs beneath its whole length. At low tide, the seaward end (rear) still is far enough over the water for guts to be emptied, buckets hauled to wash down. They’re low, noisome, dank. The external timbers are skeleton grey. Inside a luminous green dampness masks the same grey. The largest entrance is at backstage centre. When the door opens the platform can be seen – widely spaced pine logs dropping smartly into the sea after a few yards. Inside, stage right is a jumble of gear of all kinds, rope, barrels, heaps of netting, buoys. Downstage right is the second entrance, effected by climbing (or jumping) a few feet from the outside up onto the main platform level. At centre right is an ancient pot-bellied stove. Backstage left is the splitting table. Down from that, a couple of salt barrels. The left wall has a ragged window, once a church window, saved from an abandoned church somewhere and put to use by a crude insertion into the room. Low beams spread the rear towards the auditorium. From them too hang a variety of implements, pots, grapples, gaffs. Downstage left is a frame from which hangs a net in the process of completion. At left centre a small trap, opened, reveals a drop to the sea. The whole effect must be one of apparent mess and confusion, an immense variety of gear re
presenting man, and fish, and the sea in a tottering, near-derelict place, and yet also reveal, as we become accustomed to it, an almost fanatical sense of order.

  Morning light. A faint sound of sea. Skipper Pete enters downstage right (does not yet open the door). He stands listening. An explosive screech of gulls. It dies away. He tramps on upstage and disappears. Another explosive screeching of gulls. He opens the door at rear, takes one pace into the room. The door swings back on him. He swears.

  Skipper Pete: God damn door!

  (He disappears back through the door. Seizes it from behind, and fastens it -out of sight from the audience. Re-appears in the door frame. Takes one pace inside then turns his back. Looks seawards. Gives a deep grunt – perhaps of satisfaction. Turns – moves a few paces downstage. Pauses. Scratches himself in the crotch. Shakes his head. Unzippers his fly. Turns. Moves back to the doorway. Urinates over the water. Turns. Does up his fly. Gives another grunt of satisfaction. Moves towards the stove. He lifts the stove lid. Puts it to one side. Moves into the jumbled stage right straight to a barrel containing splits. Takes a yaffle. Moves back to stove. Puts the wood in the stove. Moves back up stage right, straight to bottle containing stove oil. Moves back to stove. Pours the oil liberally but carefully onto the wood. Takes back the bottle. Returns to the stove. Extracts a match and throws it in. Stays a moment, waiting to make sure the oil has caught. Grunts again. Replaces the lid. Moves across to net and frame. Picks it up exactly where he left off and begins to knit the net. He stands facing off stage left through the cracked frame of the church window. The light, growing stronger, betrays the presence of sun. He begins to sing, fragments of an old ballad … Looking out as his fingers move amongst the netting …)