Drama

DRAMA Native Canadiana: the Urban Rez. Polestar. 128. 430 . Souster, Close to Home. Oberon. 126. Heather. The Panum Poems. Ekstasis. 61. Northern Summer. New Star Books. 121. $16.00 Circle 16. 90. $12.00 .::JUlCHt!HCUllU; Fraser. McClelland and Stewart. 168. Diane L God on His Haunches. 53. RM. A Selection of Z-/u£...t.""x 95: Poets National 93. Fred. Diamond Grill. NeWest. Waits, Death. 62 Rock Videos In the Old Wilson, Sheri-D. Girl's Guide to WCIOQiCOCK, Patrick. Athelia. Mosaic. 79 That Will Never Exist. Exile. Heart. Killiek RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES Nineteen was not a Not was it the first full done excellent service in PICKlI1lg pr4ominE:nt Coach House 68 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 in the wake of funding cuts to arts service organizations) also serving the academic world by making interim copies and arrangements with playwrights available immediately following the collapse of Coach House. But the resources of such publishers are limited, and the more effort and expense are devoted to picking up major Coach House titles - the reissues have been of classroom standards such as Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, ]uliet), Fronteras Americanas, House Humans, and Lion in the Streets - the less room there is for the publication of new and innovative work. There were other noticeable absences as wellin 1996,including the usual shortage of lesbian plays, the absence ofnew full-length work by canonical writers such as Tomson Highway, John Murrell, Sharon Pollock, Judith Thompson, and George F. Walker, and, with the welcome exceptions of Michael Melski's Blood on Steel and Wendy Lill's The Glace Bay Miners' Museum, reviewed below, the usual dearth of new work from Atlantic Canada (though Helen Peters's anthology of Newfoundland collective creations, Stars in the Sky Morning, also reviewed below/ continues her welcomeeffort to resurrect important Newfollildland scripts from the past). Perhaps most notable among the absences in 1996, however, was new fulllength work by Native playwrights, who were represented by only one radio play and excerpts from longer work in the Airplay and Beyond the Pale collections discussed below, and by playwright Drew Hayden ,Taylor's volume, not of plays, but of short essays, Funny, You Don't Look Like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (Theytus, 130 , $12.95). It may be that new and experimental playwriting that has in the past been published out of small presses and magazines will in future be left to self-publication by writers anxious to find productions for their scripts:On the basis of what has appeared in thls way in 1996 and in past years (with a few notable exceptions), this would be unfortunate, since the selection of materials tends tobe made by ego or ambition, and since such scripts rarely benefit from the services of an experienced (or any) editor. Only two selfpublished scripts have come to my attention for this review package: From Here to Insanity, by Calgary's Caroline Russell-King (56, $9.95, published in 1995 but not reviewed last year), and Pagan Love Songsfor the Uninitiated: A One-Act Play and Thirteen Musings by an Aspiring and Somewhat Desperate Writer (48, $5.00), by Sue Balint. The former is a light comedy (problematically , I think) about schizophrenia (or perhaps multiple personality disorder ) and other forms of mental illness. Although it is not without skill in execution, From Here to Insanity seems to me to be potentially offensive in its mining of mental illness for laughs, and it is completely without what used tobe called redeemingsocialimportance- with the possibleexception of an interesting observation about the links between acting and schizophrenia : Iyou're Blanche Dubois, from J/ A Streetcar Named Desire"? ... I thought you had another personality.' Pagan Love Songs for the Uninitiated, on the other hand, by a graduate of the Queen's University Drama Depart- ment, is a genuinely experimental exercise by a beginning playwright with a very good ear and a capacity for the deft organization of interlocking speeches, in this case about miscommunication. The play doesn't quite work, but it shows considerable promise that might well be realized when the playwright has more to talk about. The demise of the theatre magazine Theatrum accounts for the...