After Baba’s Funeral / Sweet and Sour Pickles, Jacob Kepp, Lokklnen, Righteousness, Gramscl X 3

Abstract

By weight of numbers, this recent batch of plays from Western Canada supports the critical commonplace that the strength of Canadian drama derives from regional sensibility. But at the same time they challenge conventional assumptions about the nature of regional culture. It is not simply because the two most interesting of these plays bear no overt relation to their place of origin that I find myself questioning the nature of “Prairie drama.” The remaining three plays reviewed here deal with the historic nature of the Prairie experience, but their shared qualities suggest that what we identify as regionalism is often the existence of a localized genre common to any evolving culture. We tend to perceive regional drama in terms of its most obvious thematic attributes: when we speak of “Prairie drama” we speak of plays about farms and immigration. The label of regionalism can in fact obscure the actual workings of regional drama by relegating it to a literary ghetto that cannot describe those plays that do not fit the obvious patterns.