DWAYNE BRENNA Our Kind of Work: The Glory Days and Difficult Times of 25th Street Theatre. Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2011. 237 pp. In 1979, national arts reviewer Jamie Portman lauded 25th Street Theatre, and irrepressible artistic director, Andy Tahn, for rising above a perpetual lack of money and facilities to realize a rich, sustaining vision of a populist theatre that reaches out to ordinary people, tugging at their hearts and stirring their minds and relates uniquely to psychology of particular which it serves. (3) Flush from its success with Paper Wheat, notes Dwayne Brenna, 25th Street Theatre often seemed equally willing to merge its image with that of Tahn little guy with his heart in right place who could achieve great things against odds (120). It was a form of self-mythologization, Brenna suggests, that could be as dangerously reckless as exhilaratingly productive in its results, leaving 25th Street juggernaut to sputter and veer as often as it roared ahead to lead pack. Identifying the days of theatre with decade between founding of theatre in 1972, and Tahn's final departure in 1983, Brenna delivers a short, generally engaging book dealing with tension between of theatre's passionate idealism, especially as expressed in its early collective creation work, and increasingly difficult times imposed on it by harsh realities of diminishing funding, chronically inadequate theatre space, understaffing, and hit-and-miss programming, as frequently exacerbated by burnout, naivety, poor judgment and inadequate planning. Reminding reader of great things that theatre actually did achieve against odds, Brenna makes it clear that he is not using term glory days ironically. Nonetheless, he also methodically documents increasing financial, administrative and physical difficulties that eventually exhausted even Tahn's irrepressible resourcefulness; theatre survived, and eventually even thrived again, but it entered a new era with Tahn's departure. Brenna's book marks a significant addition to growing canon of work on alternative theatres that sprang up over 1970s and that revolutionized indigenous acting, writing, directing, and design both in their own regions and in Canadian professional theatre in general. While study is valuable in clarifying symbiotic relationship between Saskatchewan company and such peers as Theatre Network, Theatre Passe Muraille, and Mummers' Troupe, it is invaluable, especially in a field dominated by books on Central and Eastern Canadian companies, in grounding work of this prairie company within its own distinctive regional place and time. The book is often at its best in exploring complex ways in which theatre engaged (and sometimes utterly failed to engage) with the psychology of particular community (Portman) it was serving. Even in dealing with such nationally well-known plays as Paper Wheat, Jessica (Campbell, Griffiths), and Cold Comfort (Gerrard), Brenna explains how local responses to work differed from national responses, and where early versions of same piece sometimes significantly differed from what travelled out of province. Brenna also highlights remarkable eclecticism with which theatre interpreted its populist mandate. …