Recent Canadian Drama: Passion in the Garrison

Abstract

RECENT CANADIAN DRAMA: PASSION IN THE GARRISON' ROTA LISTER University of Waterloo W r it in g is a contest between a human being and a blank piece of paper. Playwriting is a contest between a human being and an empty space."1 These are the words of Chris Johnson, Canadian dramatist. Hundreds of new plays have been produced by the regional and alternative theatres of Canada in the last few years; Toronto's Playwrights Co-op has published around 140 of these, as listed in its catalogue for the spring of 1974. How do some of these plays grapple with the vastness of the land and diversity of people from Bonavista to Van­ couver Island? Once upon a time, there was the True North, without people. Then came the Indians and Eskimos: next the French; after them, the English, Scots, Irish, and u .e. Loyalists; finally - not so finally, actually, because the first Germans arrived at the end of the seventeenth century, Aaron Hart, the first Jew, in 1759, Dominique Barcz, the first Pole, around 17502 - enter the other Cana­ dians. During the last twenty-five years more and more Canadian dramatists, it would seem from a study of twenty-eight relatively well-known plays,3 have seen the very diversity of our cultural mosaic as the most significant dramatic potential contained within our great spaces. For example, a single play, Robert­ son Davies' Hunting Stuart, suggests in its dramatis personae a mixture of Scottish, Hungarian or Polish, and Yankee individuals. Moreover, Henry Benedict Stuart, the protagonist, is actually a German immigrant whose origi­ nal name was Stolberg but, as he says, Stolberg had a foreign sound, and there was a story in the family that there had once been an English, or Scottish, branch called Stuart. (33) His aunt, Mrs. Izzard, speaks sub-standard English: Say listen - 1speak English just as good as anybody. I was brought up to speak English; we came out from the Old Country before I was fifteen. So don't you throw that up to me about not speakin' the same language because it's a lie. (13) What are the main concerns presented by some of our dramatists who have English Stud ies in Ca n ad a, i , 3 (fall 1975) 354 English Studies in Canada peopled their stages with members of Canada's ethnic minorities? It seems appropriate to begin this brief exploration with plays about our original citizens. As Chief Dan George of the b .c . Burrard tribe points out in his introduction to The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. the play ... carries a message all Canada should hear. It is a message Canada needs to hear. I was amazed at the reaction the play received in Ottawa. People came to us to say that now, for the first time, they understood a little of what the Native Peoples have suffered and are suffering. (35) According to this report of the play's impact by a member of its cast and a representative of the minority dramatized, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe performs one of the oldest functions of drama: it teaches by means of enactment. It teaches the audience that Rita Joe, a young West Coast Indian woman, is a victim of white society. Rita tries to earn her living in the big city after she has left the reserve but slides into worse and worse conflicts with the law, from a job to unemployment to vagrancy and prostitution and an ever-lengthening record of convictions. Finally Jaimie Paul, her lover, is killed by white hoodlums and Rita Joe herself is raped and murdered by them. As Indian, the central character of Ryga's earlier play Indian, an apparently "shiftless, drunkard" stereotype, notes: All Indians same - nobody ... I got nothing ... nothing ... no wallet, no money, no name. I got no past... no future ... nothing, sementos! I nobody. I not even live in this world ... I dead! ...I not just dead ... I never live at all. What is matter? ... What anything matter, sementos? AGENT has the look of a medieval peasant meeting a leper - fear, pity, hatred. (32) It is easy, Ryga suggests, to provide the Gestalt completion for the...