Introduction

Introduction RIC KNOWLES The editors did not plan to publish this special issue on Canadian drama. There was no call for papers and no editorial decision to solicit contributions. The need for it was determined by the pressures of an unusual concentration of good-submissions on Canadian topics, submissions that perhaps indicate an unusually high level of activity in a field that is only now completing its first quarter-century as a discrete area of academic and scholarly activity. The contemporary field of Canadian theatre studies came into being in the middle of the 1970S with the publication of the first issues of the journals Canadian Theatre Review (edited by Don Rubin in 1974), Canadian Drama I L'Art dramatique canadien (edited by Rota Lister in 1975), and Theatre History in Canada / Histoire du theatre au Canada (edited by Richard Plant and Ann Saddlemyer in 1980), and with the founding in 1976 of the latter's sponsoring organization, the Association for Canadian Theatre History I Associa- . tion de l'histoire du tMatre au Canada. All three journals continue' to be published, although Canadian Drama has been subsumed by Essays in Theatre / Etudes tMatra/es and Theatre History in Canada has changed its name to Theatre Research ill Canada / Recherches theatra/es au Canada (as the association is now Association for Canadian Theatre Research / LI Association de la recherche tMatrale au Canada). Scholarly activity responded immediately to the new publishing opportunities provided by the journals, and to the stimulation provided by the scholarly association, and such activity has increased exponentially over the years. At the same time, doctoral dissertations began to be written in the field at a number of Canadian universities, and courses on Canadian drama and theatre began to be taught across the country. (Mavor Moore had offered the first such course at Toronto's York University in 1970.) By 1989 three national anthologies of Canadian Drama had been published in rapid succession by Penguin, Irwin Publishing, and Talonbooks (the last of which, edited by Jerry Wasserman, is now in its fourth revised and Modern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 185 186 RIC KNOWLES expanded edition); Leonard Conolly and Eugene Benson had edited and published The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre; and the University of Guelph had inaugurated the first graduate program anywhere specializing in the drama and theatre of Canada, grounded by a major Canadian theatre archive (complementing the one built by Heather McCallum at the Metro Toronto Reference Library). During the same period, journals devoted to Canadian Literature, as well as international journals devoted to theatre, have published special issues on the drama and theatre of Canada, marking the sort of "coming of age" that is signalled by external recognition and validation. Like the impulses behind the so-called renaissance of Canadian theatre in the late 1960s and early [970S, those behind its first phase of scholarly activity were predominantly nationalistic, responding, perhaps, to an upsurge in cultural nationalism that swept the country in the wake of its centenaty celebrations in 1967. That nationalism took a variety of fonns. In the first issue of Canadian Theatre Review, it articulated itself as a resistant postcolonial reaction to the appointment of yet another British Artistic Director, Robin Phillips, to run the Stratford Festival, which at the time still occasionally billed itself as the Stratford National Theatre of Canada: "no other country in the world has a foreigner running its 'national' theatre," lamented the editors (Rubin, Mezei, and Stuart 5). In the first issue of Theatre History in Canada, it took the fonn of establishing lineage in a lead-off tribute to the then recently deceased "mother of theatre in Canada," Dora Mavor Moore, comparing her to "Lilian Baylis, Sybil Thorndike, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, and the Oracle" (Gardner 5). At The Playwrights Co-op, the first national organization of Canadian Playwrights, founded in [976, it took the fonn of establishing the existence of a history and an archive, as the Co-op published in its first year of existence A Bibilography ofCanadian Theatre History: 1583-1975, edited by Richard Plant and John Ball, and followed it up three years later with a supplement for 1975- 76 already half the...