Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada by Cynthia Zimmerman (review)

Book Reviews theatre to Nora M. Alter's exploration of Vietnamese contemporary resistance theatre, Helen Gilbert's reading of costume in Australian drama, and Donald H. Frischmann's essay on contemporary Mayan theatre. Almost all the material is absorbing - in part because of its extensive variety - and some of the essays are exemplary, including Alan Filewod's assessment of the ways that British and American interests have circumscribed Canadian theatre, Michael Hays's helpful treatment of imperiailhealre in the context of imperial moments in the novel, Loren Kruger's necessarily tentative investigation of post-apartheid South Africa, and Robert Eric Livingston's consideration ofCesaire's and Scrrcau's decolonizing theatre. Curiously, one of the least useful papers for this volume is Edward Said's on Jean Genet: the elegaic memories of the first half do little to assist in his discussion of Genet, and the merit of the piece for the volume is doubtful. The postcolonial theatre field is now well enough established not to require the "critical weight" of names like Said's. This volume 's shortcoming is its frame. ~he editor notes in her introduction that "'Imperialism' is both a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon; it occurs neither in limited areas nor at one specific moment" (xiii) and while to a degree this is true (and useful as a comparative base), imperialism cannot be considered just in such global terms. It is neither a-historical nor a-cultural: the study of imperialism requires some specifying of the particular local manifestation of this lranshistorical phenomenon . Many of the essays in this collection usefully address specific historical moments, performative tropes, and theoretical arguments regarding imperialism, but the subtitle risks disconnecting the arguments from this crucial specificity and diluting the meaning of "imperialism" altogether. The absence of an in-depth introduction and/or a specific organizing principle for the essays means that this volume moves in too many disparate directions to facilitate debate except on the level of the very particular theatrical moment, national event, or play. The arrangement of the fifteen essays in alphabetical order inhibits any debate that might arise between papers: the text might have benefited from having the essays grouped into sections (based on theoretical approach, history, or geography, for instance). The essays in this collection may well generate the demand for information of which Savory speaks, but the way in which they are framed makes this difficult. JOANNE TOMPKINS, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND CYNTHIA ZIMMERMAN. Playwriting Women: Female Voices ill English Canada. The Canadian Dramatist vol. 3. Toronto: Simon & Pierre 1994· pp. 235· $25.99 (PB). Toward the end of her examination of "the .tremendous range of theatre created by women" (172) as represented by the work of six English-Canadian playwrights - Carol Bolt. Sharon Pollock, Margaret Hollingsworth, Erika Ritter, Anne ChisletL, and Judith Thompson - Cynthia Zimmennan cites a comment made by Thompson in 1982: "That's why I'm a playwright ... to explore the huge chasm between the social perso":a Book Reviews and the inner life, to find out who people really are" (19 1). In Playwriting Women, Zimmerman also wants to find QUI who her six subjects "really are," at least in terms of their work. and why they write as they do for the theatre in Canada. She states that the parameters of her book are 1970-199°, and explains her choice of the dramatists discussed in her study by pointing out that they "represent the first generati~n, the first group of Canadian women who succeeded in establishing careers as playwrights" ( 21 4). Zimmerman declares in her Preface that her book "is essentially a series of essays. It is not structured around a single idea or theoretical position. Neither 'feminism in the theatre' nor 'nationalism in drama' serves as necessary linchpin." Further, she says, the book "privileges the evolving shape of a career over intensive treatment of particular plays." Using personal interviews with her subjects whenever possible (several of which appear in her 1982 collaboration with Robert Wallace, The Work: Conversations with English·Conadian Playwrighrs), as well as numerous articles about the plays and their authors, production reviews, and her own readings of the published - and occasionally unpublished - works themselves, Zimmerman attempts to...