Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre

By Sherrill Grace

If you have ever wondered why the Scots love Michel Tremblay or what Sharon Pollock has to say to Japanese audiences, or just how a Canadian play—or being Canadian—is viewed in England or the United States, you should read this volume. Each author holds a mirror up to Canadian theatre, but the images in those mirrors differ in fascinating ways. The cumulative result is a multi-faceted reflection, coming from some of the world’s most astute critics, on how Canada performs its national identities.

Performing National Identities is a collection of 18 original essays on contemporary Canadian theatre by scholars and drama specialists in Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Australia and Japan. The international scope of the volume, reflected in its co-editors (Sherrill Grace from Canada, Albert-Reiner Glaap from Germany), confirms the new importance of Canadian plays on the world stage. This is the first volume of its kind, and it celebrates the variety and vitality of Canadian theatre.

Among the playwrights whose works are discussed here are Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock, George F. Walker, Joan MacLeod, Tomson Highway, Marie Clements, Michel Marc Bouchard, Morris Panych, Monique Mojica, and Djanet Sears. There are also interviews with theatre practitioners in Hungary, Germany and Canada, including one with the late Urjo Kareda. The contributors consider many of the challenging issues addressed by contemporary Canadian playwrights—issues of race and racist stereotypes, of gender and violence, of historical events and identity politics—and all agree that Canada’s playwrights mine their local or individual situations to explore universal problems. It is this large vision, as well as the quality of the plays, that enables Canadian drama to move audiences all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Nov 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228740

Book preview

Performing-National-Identities_9780889224759_0003_001

Urjo Kareda.                                 Photo by Guntar Kravis.

PERFORMING NATIONAL IDENTITIES

International Perspectives

on Contemporary Canadian Theatre

EDITED BY

SHERRILL GRACE AND ALBERT-REINER GLAAP

Talonbooks

2003

Performing-National-Identities_9780889224759_0004_001

Urjo Kareda (1944–2001)

In memoriam

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Texts and Contexts: An Introduction

       Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap

PART 1: PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR WORKS

Performing Lives: Linda Griffiths and other Famous Women

       Susan Bennett

Michel Tremblay in Scots: Celebration and Rehabilitation

       Martin Bowman

Imagining Canada: Sharon Pollock’s Walsh and Fair Liberty’s Call

       Sherrill Grace

"Some Kind of Transition Place Between Heaven and Hell": George Walker’s Aesthetics of Hybridity in Heaven

       Marc Maufort

A Different ‘Othello Music’: Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet

       John Thieme

Joan MacLeod and the Geography of the Imagination

       Jerry Wasserman

PART 2: PRODUCTIONS AND RECEPTION

Canadian Plays on a German Stage: A Production of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Le Chemin des Passes-Dangereuses

       Albert-Reiner Glaap

The Alarming/Boring Binary Logic of Reviewing English-Canadian Drama in Britain

       Jen Harvie

Imagination Import: Reception and Perception of the Theatre of Québec in the United Kingdom

       Colin Hicks

Theatre as National Export: On Being and Passing in the United States

       Erin Hurley

Canadian Plays on the Japanese Stage

       Yoshinari Minami

The Story of Morris Panych’s 7 Stories in Hungary: A Documentary Production Analysis

       Péter Szaffkó

Maintaining the Alternative: An Interview with Urjo Kareda

       Cynthia Zimmerman

PART 3: MOVEMENTS AND ISSUES

Naming the Movement: Recapitalizing Popular Theatre

       Alan Filewod

The Hearts of its Women: Rape, Residential Schools, and Remembering

       Ric Knowles

Performing History: The Reconstruction of Gender and Race in British Columbia Drama

       Richard Lane

Can Weesageechak Keep Dancing? The Importance of Trickster Figures in the Work of Native Earth Dramatists, 1986–2000

       Mark Shackleton

Yellow Claw, Yellow Fever, Yellow Peril: Performing the Fantasy of the Asian- Canadian

       Joanne Tompkins

Notes on Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Urjo Kareda (photo by Guntar Kravis)

For Glaap: (photos by Kai Wolters)

1. The new Rheinisches Landestheater at Neuss

2. Gefahrenzone (Le Chemin des Passes-Dangereuses by Michel Marc Bouchard) at the Rheinisches Landestheater

3. Gefahrenzone at the Rheinisches Landestheater

For Minami:

1. The Tomorrow Box by the Bunkaza Theatre Company

2. Waiting for the Parade by Maple Leaf Theatre Company

3. Blood Relations by Half-moon Theatre Company

4. Anne of Green Gables by Maple Leaf Theatre Company

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume could not have been conceived and prepared without the assistance and enthusiasm of many people. First, and most important, we want to thank Kim Snowden and Michael Heinze for their help with checking quotations and citations, proof-reading and word-processing, and also for their unfailing good cheer. It is also a pleasure to thank our publisher, Karl Siegler of Talonbooks. We are grateful to Talon for their confidence in our Canadian/German collaborative project and for agreeing to publish it. To our contributors our thanks—for their hard work, their patience, and their stimulating contributions. For permission to reproduce photographs, we are indebted to Urjo Kareda, Half-moon Theatre Company, Bunkaza Theatre Company, Maple Leaf Theatre Company, and the Rheinisches Landestheater. For permission to quote from previously unpublished material it is a pleasure to thank Michael Devine, Monique Mojica, Jani Lauzon, and Michelle St. John. For helping us produce such a handsome volume we owe great thanks to Christy Siegler for her meticulous copyediting and to Adam Swica for designing the cover. Finally, we are grateful to the University of British Columbia, as well as to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Embassy in Germany, for their funding in support of this collaborative project.

TEXTS AND CONTEXTS:

AN INTRODUCTION

Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap

Three years ago we sat together at a Canadian Studies Conference in Iceland and reflected on the seeming unawareness, amongst Canadianists, of a great enthusiasm that we shared: Canadian drama. We wondered why so few presentations included plays or productions in their papers, especially when we both knew that national and international interest in contemporary Canadian theatre was high. Over lunch we decided to do something about this state of affairs, and the result is this book. Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre brings together scholars, theatre practitioners, translators, editors, and reviewers from Canada and many other countries in what we believe is a bench-mark exploration and celebration of contemporary Canadian drama that recognizes the success, at home and abroad, of this creative work.

Canadian drama and dramatists have travelled widely over the past twenty-five years. The works of the writers examined here have appeared on stages in Japan, Germany, and Hungary, as well as on the English-speaking stages of England and the United States and, in the case of Michel Tremblay, in Scotland in Scots. But our chief aim in this collection was to include as many voices, perspectives, and approaches to the subject, from as many people and places as we could. The result is a volume that brings together eighteen essays and many more voices in a sustained conversation about the current state of Canadian drama. We hope this book will lead to others, with other voices. We also hope it will encourage more attention—at conferences like the one that sparked our project, and among students and lovers of good theatre generally—to the playwrights and plays discussed by our contributors.

Of course, no single volume can do it all, and there are many things we did not try to accomplish. By no means is every talented young playwright or every fine new play examined here. There are, indeed, some quite notable absences, such as Wendy Lill, Sally Clark, Drew Hayden Taylor, and George Elliott Clark. Nor is every theatre company of importance mentioned; that would have been impossible. Similarly, only a few productions are discussed and only a few practitioners interviewed. It is entirely possible, even likely, that some of these plays have been mounted in places and languages of which we are not aware, and there are quite possibly scholars out there whom we just did not know were busy working on Canadian drama. What is happening in France, Italy, Mexico or China, for example? In order to balance our collection between contributors from Canada and those from around the world, we had to select and, alas, we could not include pieces from many excellent people. As we say: another volume of essays is needed.

But if we have not been able to do everything, we feel that this volume does cover a great deal. By focussing on the work of the last twenty-five years, our contributors capture some of the most recent developments in Canadian theatre. And this time frame was a conscious and deliberate choice; much has been done and said on the twentieth century history and criticism of Canadian drama and excellent anthologies exist for anyone interested in the longer view.¹ At the turn of the new century we are keen to assess the contemporary scene and to ask where Canadian drama is going in the years ahead. Moreover, this time frame opens a valuable window on to the production and reception of Canadian plays beyond Canadian borders and enables our contributors and, thus, our readers to see this work in a wide context. Beyond this requirement—be contemporary!—our contributors were given free rein to discuss what interested them or struck them as of urgent concern for theatre studies and for Canadian theatre. In our title and in this introduction, we use the terms Canada and Canadian to refer to plays by both Anglophone and Francophone playwrights, but it is a well accepted fact that the Quebec theatre scene and its playwrights represent significant differences from the English-language scene across the rest of the country.

Few readers will proceed straight through, from start to finish, so perhaps a few general comments about the contents and organization of the volume are in order. We have been greatly intrigued to notice certain common threads that run through the entire volume. For example, it is clear that Canadian theatre has made an increasing impact abroad even though the reasons for this impact vary and the reviewing of Canadian plays seems, to some contributors, to be contradictory. Michel Tremblay has been adopted in Scotland because his themes and use of language resonate deeply for the Scots; Sharon Pollock has found sympathetic audiences in Japan because her plays address issues of current importance to Japanese audiences. Over and over again, our contributors talk in terms of universality, arguing that a play will translate well when it reaches beyond the local—or uses the local, in which it must be rooted—to address fundamental human concerns. It has also been interesting for us to see the degree to which dramatic realism is challenged and interrogated by our contributors. Over and over we are told that the assumption (by reviewers, critics, audiences, and scholars) that a national drama must be a realist drama, simply does not hold up to scrutiny. Most of the work produced and discussed here is, in fact, more usefully described as non-realist. At the same time, the plays and their authors are seen as ethically serious or engagé; there is very little light fare or breezy comedy discussed in the pages that follow. If any national generalizations can be made about Canada on the basis of the work examined here, then this seriousness may be the chief one, and even that is, at most, a generalization. More to the point, and much more fascinating, are the claims by our contributors that easy nationalist assumptions must be queried by Canadians and non-Canadians alike. Indeed, those contributors who discuss the production or study of Canadian plays outside Canada question the host country’s assumptions about their own national identities as much as they question what it might mean to call a play Canadian.

Perhaps the most rewarding thread running through the volume, however, is the multi-coloured thread of rich variety. The playwrights and plays differ, of course, but so do our contributors, both in what they say and in how they approach their task. While the Canadian contributors are part of the context and culture that produces the plays, the non-Canadian authors write, necessarily, from their own cultural context and often from a very different starting point. For example, it seems to us that the Canadian contributors most often begin with a specific framework in mind and that they situate the play (or plays) they consider into that framework; they work deductively. Many, though by no means all, of the non-Canadian contributors (see, for contrast, Tompkins and Lane) tend to work inductively in that they begin with a specific production of a given play or with close analysis of a text on which they are doing research and develop their inquiry from that concrete starting place. Furthermore, our contributors write in different registers, using many different styles and, while we have edited for a high degree of consistency across the chapters, we have tried not to erase the particularities of individual authors’ voices. Each chapter, we hope, retains a strong flavour of its particular origin and bears the marks of the cultural context and approach of its writer.

The richness of subject matter is equally important and stimulating. Many of contemporary Canada’s most significant playwrights are examined in the following pages, from senior writers like Michel Tremblay, Sharon Pollock, Morris Panych, and George F. Walker to younger, but prominent, writers like Joan MacLeod, Judith Thompson, Brad Fraser, Linda Griffiths, and Tomson Highway, to a number of writers who are less well known outside Canada such as Djanet Sears, Marie Clements, Robert Lepage, Daniel Danis, Michel Marc Bouchard, and Monique Mojica. There are interviews with important practitioners like Urjo Kareda (whose untimely death coincided with the completion of this volume), Ulrike Schanko, Sylvia Richter, and Michael Devine, among many others. There are discussions of several courageous and ground breaking theatre companies such as Tarragon and Native Earth in Toronto, Traverse in Edinburgh, or the Rheinisches Landestheater in Neuss, to name just a few. And a host of questions and issues are explored within and across the chapters: how, for example, does a Tremblay play work in Scots translation? Or how are Asian-Canadians represented on stage to challenge racial stereotypes? Which playwrights push the realist conventions that are assumed to be integral to a national drama, and how? Why do reviewers in the United States see sameness rather than difference in a Canadian production? How are issues of violence and colonialism contested by First Nations playwrights? Or how does a contemporary Afro-Canadian playwright re-write a familiar Shakespeare text to make her own quite different points?

By arranging our volume in three separate sections, we want to indicate certain affinities among chapters, but we are fully aware that these divisions are somewhat arbitrary. Productions are of course discussed in Parts 1 and 3, just as the work of specific playwrights is analysed in Parts 2 and 3. Our sections are meant only as a guide. Each section includes a mix of contributors because we have avoided any temptation to group authors together by country of origin. Binaries are often critiqued by our contributors, so no binary is allowed in our organization. Variety and dialogue are our guiding principles.

The chapters in Part 1, Playwrights and Their Works, tend to focus on a single playwright or on certain key plays by that writer. Thus, in Performing Lives, Susan Bennett examines three biographical performance plays written and performed by Linda Griffiths as examples not only of stunning theatrical success but also as provocative sites for theorizing how theatre can perform a life. Implicit here is the idea that theatre does what traditional narrative biography or autobiography does—but differently. And Griffiths’ plays provide an excellent opportunity for the critic to investigate this timely question, while grounding her study in three compelling plays. Martin Bowman, one of the original translators of Tremblay, provides a fascinating overview of the Scots Tremblay, of the risks and rewards of translation, which, as he demonstrates, involves so much more than mere words in two languages, and of the reasons for the profound impact Tremblay has had in Scotland. He also speculates about why certain of Tremblay’s plays have enjoyed much more success in Scotland than they did in Quebec. In her chapter, Sherrill Grace focuses directly on questions of national identity as these have been addressed by Sharon Pollock in four plays that span her career to date. Through close readings of two plays in particular, Walsh and Fair Liberty’s Call, she argues that history and identity, in Pollock’s hands, are a matter of performance and that Pollock always sees a chance to change the story by not blindly performing the accepted roles or repeating the dominant scripts.

With Marc Maufort, the register shifts considerably. In his study of the aesthetics of hybridity in George F. Walker’s Heaven, Maufort explores some of the ways in which one of Canada’s most innovative playwrights exploits a hybrid dramatic language and form to probe his troubled vision of the state of liberal humanism at the turn of the century. In A Different ‘Othello Music’, John Thieme places his close reading of Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet within the context of certain contemporary re-workings of Shakespeare, and he argues that Sears goes beyond parody or adaptation by adding to the story; in Harlem Duet Sears has created a character not found in Othello—his black wife, whom he abandoned for a white one. Thieme suggests a few interesting comparisons with the Sears play, to which one might add Ann-Marie MacDonald’s highly successful 1990 play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), where additions and transgressions completely undo the great bard’s plots. The final chapter in Part 1 is Jerry Wasserman’s discussion of the oeuvre of Joan MacLeod, a very powerful and too little known playwright based in British Columbia. MacLeod is appreciated at home for her beautifully crafted but ethically demanding plays, but Wasserman suggests that, despite the seriousness, even bleakness, of her material, MacLeod’s vision is one of hope. By always privileging the human capacity to imagine a better world, the world of MacLeod’s plays transcends despair, and in this quality (as in her deep moral seriousness) MacLeod has much in common with Pollock. For readers unfamiliar with MacLeod’s plays, Wasserman’s detailed study provides insights and an important framework for discovery of a major contemporary Canadian voice.

With one exception (Cynthia Zimmerman), Part 2 is devoted to the production and reception of plays on non-Canadian stages, and we have placed here those contributions that include interviews with practitioners. In Canadian Plays on a German Stage, Albert-Reiner Glaap considers the contemporary German interest in these works by focussing on the recent production of Michel Marc Bouchard’s Le Chemin des Passes-Dangereuses at the Rheinisches Landestheater. Through an interview process that gives us a multi-voiced conversation, Glaap discusses the play with the dramaturge, director, actors, and playwright. The result is a fascinating glimpse into how a Canadian play translates, in the fullest sense of that word, to a German stage, a German theatre company, and ultimately a German audience. Yoshinari Minami, in Canadian Plays on the Japanese Stage, examines several productions and speculates about the growing appreciation of such plays by Japanese audiences and theatre practitioners over the past twenty years or so. Like Glaap, and Péter Szaffkó, Minami considers the translatability and universality of the plays (most notably Sharon Pollock’s Blood Relations), but he also provides a valuable list of plays produced in Japan, with the theatre companies and dates of productions between 1981 and 2001, as well as some fine production photographs. In his study, "The Story of Morris Panych’s 7 Stories in Hungary," Szaffkó combines production history, translation, and a description of the rehearsal process with a unique interview. Michael Devine was brought to Debrecen, Hungary specially to direct the Hungarian premiere of the play, and in the course of the interview Szaffkó and Devine explore many of the challenges faced by the actors as they struggled to work, not only with new material but also with a very different directing and interpretive style from the one they knew in Hungary.

The three chapters by Jen Harvie, Colin Hicks, and Erin Hurley adopt a somewhat different approach. Each scrutinizes Canadian plays as seen through the eyes of non-Canadian reviewers and audiences, so while the emphasis is on the productions of certain plays, the object of study is less the productions themselves than the reactions of the countries and individuals viewing them. Harvie offers a detailed critique of British responses to Canadian plays mounted in London, with particular attention to plays by Brad Fraser and Judith Thompson. Her title, The Alarming/Boring Binary Logic of Reviewing English-Canadian Drama in Britain, signals what she sees as a major failing amongst British reviewers. In a hard-hitting review of the reviewers, Harvie exposes their narrow assumptions about Canada and Canadian culture—either it is boring or it is alarmingly weird—and offers some well-informed advice on how British critics need to expand their horizons to better understand the variety and complexity of Canadian theatre. Hicks shifts our attention to the Francophone scene and the reception in the United Kingdom of work by Tremblay, Lepage, and Danis. Imagination Import provides an exhaustive summary of theatre critics’ comments and evaluations of a number of plays by Quebec playwrights, but it goes further than that by discussing the role of CEAD, the Centre d’essai des auteurs dramatiques, and the cultural wing of the Quebec government in promoting international exchange and understanding of Quebec plays. Hicks concludes that Quebec plays are alive and well in the UK, but his conclusions invite some thought-provoking comparisons with Harvie’s.

In Theatre as National Export: On Being and Passing in the United States, Erin Hurley steps back from the details of productions and reviews to examine some of the assumptions underlying the representation of Canadian identity on American stages and television. Hurley is perhaps the most provocative and theoretical in her analysis of the production/reception of Canadian plays outside Canada. She is highly critical of the realist assumption that Canadian theatre reflects Canadian life and culture and she labels this assumption the national branding strategy. To replace this strategy she offers something completely different—what she calls passing, by which she means that Canadians pass for Americans in the USA, not by miming something identifiably Canadian but by performing North-American-ness. Hurley challenges Canadians to jettison the old national branding strategy and adopt a new, global, postmodern, performative one. And this is a challenge that resonates interestingly with observations made by Bowman, Hicks, Harvie, and Minami. Indeed, even Jerry Wasserman, in his discussion of Joan MacLeod’s Toronto, Mississippi, seems to be identifying some of the same issues.

The final chapter in Part 2 is Cynthia Zimmerman’s thoughtful interview with Canadian Artistic Director Urjo Kareda, to whom this volume is dedicated. Prior to his untimely death late in 2001, Kareda was at the centre of one of the country’s most influential and vital theatre companies devoted exclusively to Canadian plays and playwrights— Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. He served as Artistic Director there for twenty years, and during that time he nurtured, directed, and showcased some of the major talent to emerge in Canada. Among Kareda’s most interesting comments, as far as this volume is concerned, are his views about Canadian plays on the international stage. Although he did not consider it part of his mandate to promote these plays outside the country, he did not worry about their reception abroad: Canadian plays travel well, he tells us, because they start in emotion rather than in abstraction or intellect.

The third and final part of this collection, Movements and Issues, is in some ways the broadest. All five chapters gathered together here represent scholarly investigations of issues as wide and contested as class, race, gender, and ethnicity and, at times, the intersections among all these categories. Alan Filewod, an expert on popular and alternative theatre, places his thorough discussion of popular theatre movements in Canada within the context of international exchanges, ideologies of production and performance, and influential visits to Canada by theatre groups from countries like Nicaragua, India, and Jamaica. He gives attention to the history of popular theatre dramaturgy in Canada by focussing on specific groups such as Ground Zero Productions or individual plays like Side Effects, and he relates new directions in popular theatre (so often brought on by funding cuts) to similar developments in the UK. In The Hearts of its Women, Ric Knowles offers a deeply moving (and unflinching) examination of painful contemporary issues that have certainly caught the attention of playwrights, audiences, and scholars in Canada: the portrayal of rape on stage, the impact of residential schools on Native peoples, and the gendered healing process that can emerge from a direct confrontation with sexual abuse, colonialism, and violence. Knowles explores the trope and staging of rape in plays by First Nations women playwrights Marie Clements and Monique Mojica, but the power of his analysis stems from his privileging of their voices and the care he takes to situate the subject in a larger context of history and, of what he calls, the hope of remembering.

In Performing History and Can Weesageechak Keep Dancing? Richard Lane and Mark Shackleton also deal with work by First Nations playwrights. Lane approaches his subject from an historical perspective and situates his consideration of Native theatre within the very troubled context of Canada’s early twentieth-century ban on the potlatch, while Shackleton concentrates on the achievements of Toronto-based Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA). In his theoretically astute analysis, Lane argues that, despite the repression of First Nations performance and ritual by the white authorities of church and state, such performance is very strong in British Columbia, where, unlike in many other parts of the country, treaty negotiations are current issues and Native/non-Native relations remain fraught. Shackleton surveys the plays produced by Native Earth and examines the role of the trickster figure in these works.

Finally, Joanne Tompkins rounds out the volume and the range of topics considered by our contributors through her assessment of work by two Asian-Canadian playwrights, R.A. Shiomi and Marty Chan. The plays of these two writers may not be well known beyond Vancouver’s or Toronto’s theatre scene, let alone in an international one, but Tompkins demonstrates why they deserve to be. Through a deft application of film noir conventions and theories of performativity, Tompkins argues that both Chan and Shiomi problematize racialized stereotypes; she suggests that the performative reconstructions and deconstructions of these stereotypes in their plays stage the possibility of stepping out of pre-ordained roles. This is a bold argument for the critic and an ambitious undertaking for the playwrights, and whether or not one is convinced may well depend upon the calibre of a given performance. Nevertheless, the parody and humour of these plays is refreshing, and Tompkins returns the discussion of contemporary Canadian drama to the vexed issue of realism. Key to the success of her argument is our willingness to accept the fact that much contemporary theatre is non-realist, and this is a concept that many, if not all, of our contributors have interrogated or celebrated.

For ease of reference and reading, we have kept each chapter’s Notes and the Works Cited lists with the chapter. Readers will find some variance in methodology across chapters, but the information is clear; to allow contributors flexibility, we have not insisted that they cite the same edition of a particular play. Illustrations, usually production photographs, are provided with the chapter they illustrate, the only exception being the portrait photograph of Urjo Kareda, which we have placed as the frontispiece.

This volume has been three years in rehearsal, but we feel that the time has been well spent. Collaboration by e-mail, snail mail and, occasionally, by telephone may be less fun, perhaps, than shoulder-to-shoulder work, but with the number of countries, voices, electronic systems, and stylistic variations represented here, it seems like a miracle to have brought the project to fruition. This happy completion is proof of the international good will and interest generated by the theatre, which can reach across distances, which can, as Urjo Kareda put it, travel to bring us all together. The moment has come to send this little book out into the world where it can travel further, lead to more collaboration, and hopefully contribute to bringing Canadian drama to greater attention and to more stages.

NOTES

1. For further information on Canadian plays and criticism, we suggest the following: John Ball and Richard Plant’s Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada: The Beginnings Through 1984: www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/Theatre/Bib/Search; Diane Bessai, Playwrights of Collective Creation. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1992; Per Brask, ed. Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1995; L.W. Connolly, ed. Canadian Drama and the Critics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1995; Albert-Reiner Glaap, with Rolf Althof, eds. On-Stage and Off-Stage: English Canadian Drama in Discourse. St. John’s: Breakwater, 1996; Sherrill Grace, Eve D’Aeth, and Lisa Chalykoff, eds. Staging the North: Twelve Canadian Plays. Toronto: Playwrights Canada P, 1999; Denis Johnston, Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Canadian Alternative Theatres. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 1991; Richard Paul Knowles, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies. Toronto: ECW, 1999; Rita Much, ed. Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotsvit. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1992; Elaine Nardocchio, Theatre and Politics in Modern Quebec. Edmonton: University of Alberta P, 1986; Ginny Ratsoy and James Hoffman, eds. Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000. Toronto: Playwrights Canada P. 2001; Don Rubin, ed. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996; Judith Rudakoff and Rita Much, eds. Fair Play: 12 Women Speak: Conversations with Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1990; Djanet Sears, ed. Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama. Vol 1. Toronto: Playwrights Canada P, 2000; Renate Usmiani, Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983; Anton Wagner, ed. Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999; Robert Wallace, Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990; Robert Wallace, ed. Making Out: Plays by Gay Men. Toronto: Coach House, 1992; Jerry Wasserman, ed. Modern Canadian Plays, 2 vols, 4th edition. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001; and Cynthia Zimmerman, Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1994.

PART 1

PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEIR WORKS

PERFORMING LIVES:

LINDA GRIFFITHS AND OTHER FAMOUS WOMEN

Susan Bennett

History is a spider’s web.

        —Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women, translated by Gwendolyn MacEwen

The ability of history to flatten out the contradictions, complexities, and messiness of human lives and to organize everyone and everything into seamless, coherent narratives is both powerful and pervasive. Yet one of the signal achievements of feminist scholarship in the twentieth century has been to challenge the exclusivity of traditional history-making and to bring into the legitimate frame of study much more about the inconsistencies of people’s experiences, especially, of course, in an increased and focussed attention to women. No wonder, then, that Virginia Woolf insisted, in A Room of One’s Own, that [h]istory is too much about wars; biography too much about great men (103). To counterpoint the sweeping narratives of mainstream history, women writers have, both before and since Woolf, shown a particular interest in the creation of biographies—accounts that concern themselves with the quotidian detail of women’s lives, often in the domestic rather than (or at least as well as) the public domain. At the same time as expanding the archive of artifacts, experiences, and events that constitute the domain of biography so as to better reflect their subjects, women writers have also challenged the very nomenclature of the genre. If the practice of biography is synonymous with a vision of great men in their public world, then the revision of the genre as life-writing allows for that expanded archive, for as much attention to women as men, to private lives as much as public ones. As a result, then, feminist life-writing has emerged as a genre that acts out what history has tried to ignore and, as Sara Alpern and others have described it, [w]hen the subject is female, gender moves to the center of the analysis (Alpern et al., 7).

It is in this context that the ongoing fascination of Linda Griffiths, one of Canada’s most accomplished women playwrights, with the dramatization of the lives of well-known women is particularly interesting. This essay looks to Griffiths’ dramatic representation of three public personae: Margaret Trudeau in Maggie & Pierre, Wallis Simpson in The Duchess and, most recently, Gwendolyn MacEwen in Alien Creature. What interests me is not just the biographizing impulse of Griffiths’ writing but, more specifically, her desire to bring these women (back) to life in her own embodied performance of her subjects since not only is Griffiths author of these three plays, she has been, in each case, the actor who realized these historical figures on stage in what have been generally and deservedly received as dramatic tours de force. Hers is not just life-writing, then, but life-performing.

Griffiths’ career in Canadian theatre is, of course, a distinguished one. She was in the late 1970s a vital contributor to the 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon where she garnered extensive experience in collective creation. It was her work with Paul Thompson’s project Les maudits anglais that brought Griffiths first (and only briefly) to representing Pierre Trudeau on stage. As Diane Bessai notes, it was this performance that led to Thompson’s suggestion for a play about the Trudeaus, one where Griffiths would play both Pierre and his wife (220). Griffiths insists this was pragmatism on Thompson’s part, his attempt to get her away from putting so many Trudeau scenes into Les maudits anglais and that her initial response was that she didn’t want to do a one-person show; as Griffiths herself explains, "six months later we were rehearsing [Maggie & Pierre]. I did the research alone. The idea was that Paul would react to what I brought in—perhaps a way of getting out of doing homework (Process?" 97).

In the end, Maggie & Pierre involved a third character, Henry, a journalist—his function a kind of intermediary between the action of Maggie & Pierre and the audience. He is both the teller and enactor of the play in which he is also a participant (Bessai, 221). Yet, while Henry and Pierre are both vitally important to the texture and timbre of the play, it is the role of Maggie—one that Mary Jane Miller describes as a strange mix of instinctive, non-reflective flower child and chorus to her own life (191)—who forms the emotional heart of the play. After previewing in the Backspace in November 1979, Maggie & Pierre opened in Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace on Valentine’s Day 1980 with Linda Griffiths playing all three roles. Bessai remarks that Griffiths is interested not only in the public perceptions projected vicariously on the Trudeaus but also in the way the protagonists contribute actively to the myth-making (and to their personal difficulties) (223). And that is certainly true. But Maggie & Pierre also strives to imagine the other side of this condition: how hard it is to find and maintain the private person in the face of all the claims of public life. Griffiths takes us, often painfully, through a story that is defined by the parameters of Maggie’s life with Pierre.

In the third scene of the play’s second act (one titled Walk Alone), Griffiths shows Maggie walking through the rain-soaked streets of Ottawa, trying to shake off her security guards: There’s a place I like, down by the river, where the sewage dumps in. It looks like a waterfall. There’s 24 Sussex Drive, way up on the cliff. They’re watching me from the windows (Sheer Nerve, 24).¹At odds with the public gaze, Griffiths’ character finds peace not in the traditional domestic roles of wife and mother, but at the intersection of nature and excess. Where the river is joined by the detritus of human life, purity is lost to pollution but, in Maggie’s words here, it makes for something of beauty and freedom. This rather unusual response goes a long way to suggest Maggie’s understanding that the hybridity of an uncomplicated natural life and an unpleasant but necessary public one is her reality—and that her challenge is to see the waterfall and not the contamination. Bessai describes this as Maggie coming to a tentative recognition of the split self (240). While I would argue that, for a brief moment at least, Maggie’s experience is not so much a split as an intermingling of selves, by the end of the scene Bessai’s analysis is absolutely right; Maggie concludes: It’s me, all dressed up in my Yves St. Laurent gown, a monument of good taste. It’s me watching me, down by the river, a monument of bad taste (25). Finally, all Maggie can see is a binary of taste, that emphatic marker of public decorum, and judgement.

In the last of the Maggie-and-Pierre scenes (act two, scene six: The Fight), the couple argue against a backdrop of, as the stage direction has it, an invisible quilt with the phrase, ‘Reason over Passion (29). The citation of this quilt, which was given by its creator Joyce Wieland to Trudeau, is picked up explicitly by Maggie later in the scene.² Pierre reminds his wife of their contract, that he had told her what their life together would be like, and he pleads for her to be reasonable (30). Maggie responds,

Reasonable! Don’t say that word, reasonable. I’m not feeling very reasonable tonight. All I can see is that quilt with your motto, Reason over Passion, written right on to it. (She mimes pulling the letters off the quilt and throwing them on him.) Here’s an R and an E and an A. Look at it! That woman made it for you as a joke. It’s all purple and pink. It’s got butterflies all over it. It’s a joke about a silly man who lives by a silly motto.     (30)

Here, then, Griffiths picks up on a legendary incident in the Trudeau marriage, that Margaret did indeed tear the letters from the quilt (see Lind, 176), but the analysis Griffiths gives to Maggie is, I think, insightful. She describes the quilt as a joke. Wieland, we know, was very serious in her commitment to Trudeau’s political agenda, but Griffiths is surely right to see the quilt as a somewhat ironic commentary on the Trudeau ideological tag: the very form of the art work, the quilt, makes for an ironic commentary on the rational masculinity of government. Women’s contributions are domestic and emotional, a point elaborated by the colours of the quilt and its embellishments (hearts—what Maggie describes as butterflies).

For Maggie, to be reasonable is to deny passion—Look at you. You’re the epitome of a cold land. Let’s go someplace warm, where people laugh and cry and hug and shout and dance in the streets. Come on, let’s go (30). And so the scene ends with Maggie choosing passion over