Drama 1999

246 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 Welch, Liliane. The Rock's Stillness. Borealis. 106. $14.95 Wendt, Karl. Railway Statioll. Broken Jaw. 64· $11.95 Wilson, Paul. The Lang Landscape. Coteau. 118. $12.95 Wiseman, Christopher. Crossing the Salt Flats. Porcupine's Quill.96· $12.95 Woodcock, Patrick. Scarring Endymioll. Mosaic. 82. $12.95 Wren, Jacob. Unrehearsed Beallty. Coach House. 96.$17.95 Young, Terence. The Island in Winter. Signal/ Vehicule. 108. $12.00 Zitner, S.P. 77/f Asparaglls Feast. Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series. McGill-Queen's University Press. 1)0. $16.95 Drama 1999 CYNTIllA ZIMMERMAN When I first perused the review package for '999, I felt considerable pleasure. There was a record number of anthologies or collections and the plays in these, plus the others, totalled 105 plays published. All the Canadian-owned presses are small, but these are the ones which willingly cater to a limited market and take the risk on little-known and local talent. Admittedly, in the collection for 1999 quite a few are reprints (19 by George Walker, for example), but still, 105 is a lot of plays. Dave Carley, drama editor for Scirocco, assured me that indeed more plays are being published. He gives Playwrights Union of Canada the lion's share of the credit for the increased visibility and availability of Canadian scripts. Angela Rebeiro of Playwrights Canada Press (the publishing imprint of Playwrights Union) is convinced there is a reading public for plays; most of her sales are to amateur theatre and not to the college market (the major purchaser for Talon Books and Scirocco). Finally, after a generation of effort, we have in place a flourishing Canadian literature in all genres. Of course there has been strong public sector support since the 1970s, a support which is working. However, the president of Talon Books, Karl Siegler, a man deeply committed to Canadian culture, says that the good times for the publishing of Canadian drama may well be coming to an end (his date is 2003). Siegler fears that we are about to lose the protectionist policies which have made it possible. But for the moment, the millennial moment, it is looking good: each year new writers and established writers publish new work, and important earlier works are reprinted. Something to celebrate, for the moment. To begin with the weightiest, it is surely Staging the North: Twelve Canadian Plays, a book of 528 pages. Given the inauguration of Nunavut, this volume appears at an auspicious time. The editors, Sherrill Grace, Eve D'Aeth, and Lisa Chalykoff, have co-operated on a worthwhile endeavour. DRAMA 247 Staging the North includes a lengthy and reflective Introduction to the book by Sherrill Grace, useful introductions to each play, and photographs from ten of the productions. The plays span three decades, the earliest being Herscllel Hardin's EskerMikeand His Wife, Agiluk, which premiered in 1971. Half of the scripts are by southerners and half by northern dwellers (including two collectives by Tunoonig Theatre which were previously published in CTR 73). Four scripts are being published for the first time. Of the six plays whose first production was in the 1990s, three were staged by the Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse. Sherrill Grace's Introduction outlines the southern tradition of plays about the North, starting with Herman Voaden's Northern Song in the early 1930s. The traditional southern view of the North as a daunting challenge of mythic proportion, an unforgiving white wilderness, is at the heart of a number of the plays: Henry Beissel's Inukand the Sun (1974) (a classic quest story based on Inuit culture); Gwendolyn MacEwen's verse play for radio, Terrorand Erebus (1974) and GeoffKavanagh's Ditch (1995 Chalmers Award winner) both based on the blighted Franklin Arctic expedition of 1845; and Lawrence jeffery's Who Look in Stove (1993) (dramatizing the final months of three trappers from the historical Hornby disaster who starved to death in a cabin in the Northwest Territories). Philip Adams's Free's Point is also historically based. The one-person show recreates the final moments of mad Mick, a man 'bushed' by the terrible isolation and his own bad conscience. For Herschel Hardin, in EskerMike...