Major Plays of the Canadian Drama, 1934-1984 ed. by Richard Perkyns, and: The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama, Volume I ed. by Richard Plant, and: Modern Canadian Plays ed. by Jerry Wasserman (review)

Book Reviews 15 1 Shepard is so acutely aware of language. I agree with Weales, who suggests thal "reviewers have found it congenial to handle plays by talking about what they are about and that is the least valuable way of approaching Shepard's work" (p. 39). Shepard's plays do not "mean" anything, but rather they explore the construction of meaning (and by extension, identity). I think, for example. of Miss SeDans's speech in Angel City which begins: "I look at the screen and] am the screen"; or of the impulse common to all of the characters in the family trilogy. the desire to tell the "true" story. Indeed, in most of Shepard's plays, characters tell slories, and in the telling they construct their identities. But in the theatre, the scene of representation, is the "true" story ever told? The interplay of fiction and reality is not limited to Shepard's theatrical scripts. In Motel Chronicles, a collection of ostensibly autobiographic prose and poetry (which Mottram relies on for biographic information), Shepard inscribes this interplay by shifting the voice between first person and third. This shift (between narrative which Shepard claims as his own and that which he ascribes to someone else) effectively disallows a biographic critique of Shepard's work. His theatre is one in which actors perfonn characters who are themselves performers, thus constructing a scheme in which identity is constantly displaced. Nothing is fixed; distinctions between "reality" and "fiction" collapse; and meaning, in any conventional sense, cannot be established. For Mottram, Shepard's plays constitute a body of work in which themes are developed with a progressively greater degree of complexity. He argues that Shepard is haunted by his relationship with his father and that this becomes a major thematic preoccupation. Although these themes are evident in Shepard's work, Mottram's emphasis is misplaced. His argument attempts to secure meaning in the plays and thus ignores other aspects of Shepard's theatre. For me, these other aspects make Shepard's works among the most interesting in the contemporary American theatre. ANN WILSON, YORK UNIVERSITY RICHARD PERKYNS, ed. Major Plays of the Canadian Drama, 1934-1984. Toronto: Irwin Publishing Ltd. 1984· Pp. 742, $24.95 (PB). RICHARD PLANT, ed. The Penguill Book of Modern Canadian Drama, Volume I. Toronlo: Penguin Books of Canada 1984· Pp. 904· $14.95 (PB). JERRY WASSERMAN, ed. Modem Canadian Plays. Vancouver: Talon Books 1985. Pp. 412. $14.95 (PB). Modem Drama does not usually review anthologies, but it was thought worthwhile to make an exception in the case of these three collections because they signal an important phase in the development of Canadian drama in English. Although plays have been wriuen and performed in Canada since at least 1606, the sparse population, marked regional differences, and sheer size of the country were discouraging for a medium that is essentially an art ofdeveloped cities; so it was not until after World War II that Canada saw first, the development of professional theatre of international repute and then, the production of Canadian drama of sufficient quantity and quality to establish itself as a distinctive cultural force. 152 Book Reviews Under the stimulus of the centennial celebrations of 1967 (Canada is still only I I 8 years old), the Canada Council established a chain of regional theatres across the country, while at the same time another layer of federal grants designed to combat the drug and drop-out problems of the late 19605 was launching a vigorous alternative theatre movement on the lines afOff-Off-Broadway. It was this "alternate" movement which fostered indigenous drama; so that with a look down the Toronto "Live Theatre" list, it has been common in recent years to find a dozen or more of its forty-odd theatres (there were only two in 1962) staging original Canadian work; and over the country as a whole, there have sometimes been as many as two hundred productions of new indigenous scripts within a single year. It is not without justification, therefore, that Canadian theatre has been hailed as "the cultural success story of the 70'S." The weakness behind all this activity, however, was that only a handful...