Expanding the Margins of Our Narrative: A Review

Abstract

The anthologies and plays reviewed here offer some exciting possibilities as to how theatre can deal with tragic historical events, interrogate fixed identities, open up new narratives and challenge audiences to look at Canadian theatre and Canada in a different way. Although the plays vary in subject and style, all, in one way or another, are indicative of how Canadian theatre is being influenced by what Northrop Frye refers to as “a post-national consciousness,” a notion Damiano Pietropaolo uses in his preface to Where Is Here? The Drama of Immigration. In this new collection, Pietropaolo has anthologized twelve original radio dramas commissioned by CBC’s national radio drama program, Sunday Showcase. The plays featured tell a wealth of different stories on the theme of immigration, all of which draw attention to the way place informs the immigrant experience and identity. A Terrible Truth, a two-volume anthology of Holocaust drama compiled by Irene Watts, which includes a significant Canadian representation, raises questions about how, and even if, theatre should respond to a tragedy as incomprehensible as the Holocaust. Contextualized in Kertzer’s thorough introduction, the varying plays featured in these two volumes touch on many different aspects of the Holocaust and challenge the audience with questions that seem unanswerable. In The Plum Tree, Mitch Miyagawa confronts the past in this play about the effects of the forced internment on several generations of a Japanese-Canadian family. Lastly, in China Doll, Marjorie Chan uses the tradition of foot-binding to bring to life the story of a young girl caught in the social and political changes taking place in early-twentieth-century China.