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  • Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work Is Always Done by Shelley Scott
  • Kym Bird (bio)
Shelley Scott. Nightwood Theatre: A Woman’s Work Is Always Done. Athabasca University Press. 2010. 346. $39.95

Shelley Scott ends her narrative history of Nightwood Theatre with the ‘hope’ that her book has ‘taken the weight and measure of an enduring Canadian phenomenon, and … [has] done something to preserve its contribution.’ She can take confidence in having achieved her goal. As the first to undertake a history of the company, her work, including her comprehensive catalogue of all of Nightwood’s theatrical performances, will become a significant part of the past she has recovered.

Scott is well positioned to write this history, having been the first to organize Nightwood’s archive in the early 1990s. She also interviewed all of its founding members and its most influential proponents and practitioners, many of whom she came to know personally. She, nevertheless, is clear that her history does not include the internal ‘conflicts and controversies’ engendered over the years, but deals exclusively with the profile of the company between its inception in 1979 and 2009, based on publicly [End Page 576] accessible material. Just below the surface of this public narrative, however, in the fragments of stories of Mary Ann Lambooy, Mary Vingoe, and ‘FemCab’ one senses the incipient unease of at least some of Nightwood’s directors, coordinators, and writers, particularly with the collective structure of the company as it evolved over the 1980s. Insofar as the personal is political, these machinations are a repository of the forces that drive the politics of a theatre as well as being part and parcel of the aims and goals of feminist historical recovery. Their recapitulation, in some form, would have no doubt made this history more comprehensive as well as added to an understanding of the social and cultural context in which the company developed.

Nightwood Theatre’s compelling discussion draws upon a wide-ranging array of articles, play-texts, company mandates, and interviews over its thirty-year existence. Its predominantly chronological narrative opens by situating the theatre in a variety of contexts including national and international feminist theatre, the second-class professional milieu of women in theatre, and the company’s commitment to multicultural and anti-racist values. Scott’s text gives you a strong sense of Nightwood as avant-garde, tracing the roots of the company from its New York–inspired, image-based work under the leadership of Cynthia Grant to the politically driven feminist theatre upon which it made its name.

Nightwood provides a rich theoretical and historical elaboration of collective creation, a theatrical process to which this artist-run company was committed for the first decade of its existence. It places the company in the Canadian theatrical tradition of the alternative theatres, particularly the Theatre Centre collective (and its five member companies, Buddies in Bad Times, AKA Performance Interfaces, Autumn Leaf, and Necessary Angel) to which it originally belonged. While Scott’s history traces the roots of collective creation in Canada to the Workers Theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, one could argue that this theatrical practice was engaged by women as early as the 1890s: the Mock Parliament suffrage plays, despite being a product of a political rather than an aesthetic enterprise, employed feminist aims and strategies.

Scott’s text does a wonderful job of defining feminist theory and charting Nightwood’s course in terms of its continually transforming relationship to it, from the early, experimental years that she associates with the liberal feminist aspiration to equality, through the cultural and materialist feminism of the more politicized 1980s in which the company embraced its anti-racist, pro-sexuality mandate, to the backlash of the 1990s, to a third-wave feminism that characterizes its work today.

Having attended Nightwood productions almost since it was founded, Scott’s informative history engenders many memories. Its exegesis of main-stage collective works and single-author productions beginning with The Story of Ida Johnson and This Is for You Anna to The Danish Play, a nanking [End Page 577] winter, and Finding Regina, and its discussion of festivals and play development strategies like ‘Write From...

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