Drama

100 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 de ses chapitres a«Poesie et Fiction», ce qui permet de lire, par exemple, Elise Turcotte, Jean-Paul Daoust ou Gabriel Landry. Liaison consacre aussi beaucoup de son arne ala promotion des poetes de meme que Le Sabord. Bref, les equipes de redaction de la plupart de nos revues semblent convaincues de l'importance de la poesie, alors que les pages litteraires de nos journaux la boudent avec une constance soutenue. En guise de conclusion, on peut dire que la poesie publiee en 1993 et 1994 est multiple et peu innovatrice, qu'il n'y a plus vraiment d'ecoles, de nreuds gravitant autour d'une revue, par exemple, que chaque poete fait asa tete, ason cceur, que des phenomenes comme l'ecologie et l'electro-· nique n'ont pas encore trouve leurs voix et qu'on est peut-etre en attente d'un nouveau millenaire. Drama RICHARD .PAUL KNOWLES The most striking feature of play publication in 1994 was the proliferation of solo shows and plays for young - particularly secondary-school audiences . This proliferation, one suspects, is directly related to the economics of play production in the 1990s. These suspicions are reinforced by the fact that, of some sixty newly published plays for adult audiences - not including the twenty-six short plays published together as Instant Applause, which, oddly, includes no solo' shows, no less than twenty-one are for one actor. Only the David MacIntyre/Tom Cone opera, The Architect (four actors, plus chorus), Death Waits's short play, You'll Get Over It (seven), Sally Clark's Life Without Instruction (eight), and Michael Hollingsworth's History ofthe Village ofthe Small Huts (from seven to eleven), call for casts larger than six. Fortunately, the solo shows are among the year's most inventive. Both Playwrights Canada and Coach House published collections, Singular Voices (210, $19.95) and Solo (304, $17.95) respectively, that together represent the power and range of the solo work currently being produced . in Canada. Not all of these plays are new - Solo includes Michel Tremblay's La Duchesse de Langeais (first produced in French in 1969, and in John Van Burek's translation in 1980), Joan MacLeod's Jewel (first produced in 1985), and Alan Williams's manic Cockroach Trilogy (produced in various versions and venues since 1978); and Singular Voices includes Janet Fiendel's A Particular Class ofWomen (first produced in 1986). But all of them in their various ways make for good reading and effective pretexts for performance. Solo, edited by Jason Sherman, is the riskier and more hip of the two, including as it does Ken Garnhum's extraordinarily DRAMA 101 complex and evocative performance piece, Surrounded by Water, about islands and boats; Linda Griffith's romance/fantasy about baseball, A Game ofInches; Caroline Gillis's accomplished first play, Caveman Rainbow, into which the subject of cancer is introduced and intrudes as quietly as it is and does into the life of the speaker; and Judith Thompson's magnificently painful and paradoxical letter to a (dead?) friend, Perfect Pie. The selections are not all or equally effective - Robin Fulford's Love Song, a monologue by a rapist, is more sensationalist than illuminating, and Edward Riche's Possible Maps, a kind of cartographic Pilgrim's Progress, is a wonderful idea that never quite realizes its possibilities - but the rewards of the volume far outweigh its shortcomings, and it should serve as an effective teaching tool and audition resource for actors for years to come. Singular Voices, including six plays, is a more conservative collection than Solo, but its selections, for the most part, are strong, direct, and honest, taking advantage of the immediacy and intimacy of the actoraudience relationship that is available to the solo performer. A partial exception to the conservative general rule is Blood Everywhere, by James O'Reilly, the only playwright whose work appears in both volumes. In fact, his Work, in Solo - a series of inventive, associative riffs about that most unusual subject, what one does for a living, which makes effective use of vocal inflection, carefully selected detail, and a touch of the surreal - is in some ways more straightforward than is...