Drama

60 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 Drama JERRY WASSERMAN This was an excellent year for English-Canadian drama in print. Among its highlights were new (and not so new) plays by John Gray, Sharon Pollock, Betty Lambert, John Krizanc, Joanna M. Glass, Steve Petch, and Johri Lazarus. Less well known writers whose work made a strong impression include Wendy Lill, SuzanneFinlay, Michael D.C. McKinlay, and Lyle Victor Albert. A couple of wonderful collections appeared: four plays by women and eleven radio plays from CBC'S Golden Age. The journals Canadian Drama 'and Canadian Theatre Review continued to publish playtexts of theatrical and historical interest, old and new, that might not otherwise find their way onto the printed page. What is disturbing about the year's output in drama, however, is that only one play was published by itself as a single, independent volume - John Krizanc's Prague. No doubt there are sound economic reasons for this, and it is by no means always a bad thing. But any indication that the English-Canadian play-as-book may be headed for extinction has to be cause for real concern. New Works I (Playwrights Canada, 548, $16.95) illustrates some of the problems with the compilation approach to drama publication. Why have these five plays been published together? Not, according to the anonymous introduction, because they all premiered on the prairies ('the .geography is inddental'), but rather because 'they are strong first plays that merit further production and attention.' In fact only two of the plays really are strong, Michael D.C. McKinlay's Walt and Roy and Lyle Victor Albert's The Prairie Church ofBuster Galloway (with honourable mention to Murray McRae's overwritten but sometimes compelling family drama, Visiting Hours). It is doubtful that their appearance in such an uneven collection with so vague an identity, at this price, will do much to introduce them to a wider audience. (Who will buy this book besides libraries?) Publication here probably also guarantees that these plays will never be published individually, and so may even deprive them of the profile and attention they deserve. Theatrically, both Walt and Roy and The Prairie Church ofBuster Galloway are fairly modest and conventional. Both utilize a single interior setting with little physical action and far too much hauling out of the whisky bottle whenever the playwright can't think of an imaginative piece of stage business or an intrinsic character motivation. But both compensate with interesting concepts and energetic characterization. Walt and Roy takes us on a long day's journeywith the brothers Disney the night before a meeting in 1936 with the bankers on whom they are depending to finance 'Walt's folly': his radical ideal for the feature-length cartoon Snow DRAMA 61 White and the Seven Dwarfs. This is classic left:..brainlrightbrain conflict, the uncomfortable symbiosis of unwilling doubles. Roy is the conservative, unimaginative businessman, Walt the mad artistic genius, foul-mouthed and violent - an almost shocking revisionist portrait ~f a man most of us remember as the kindly, fatherly gent from Sunday-night television. Though we don't learn quite as much as we would like about either brother or the creative clockwork that made the historical Walt Disney tick, Walt and Roy nevertheless sticks in the memory. With only two characters, a single set, and a subject that commands international interest, the play is bound to enjoy continued life beyond Alberta. The same can't necessarily be said for The Prairie Church of Buster Galloway, which has the small-town feel of the tiny Alberta farming community in which it takes place. The setting is a grain elevator, the 'church' of the title, through which percolates what little life is left in the slowly dying village now threatened with the loss of its rail line. The revelation that Mac the elevator manager has long been skimming grain from his customers - his friends - gives rise, through a series of plot twists, to a comic ending that invokes the values of continuity, solidarity, and the family farm (what else?) at the expense of city slickers, big government, and the CPR. The play speaks to familiar issues (d Paper Wheat etc) and in...