Drama

90 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Drama CYNTHIA ZIMMERMAN For thirty years Canadian-owned companies have published the bulk of Canadian titles for the small Canadian market. They have also taken all of the risks on new and untried authors. That same stalwart group took a particular beating during 2000, held hostage to >monopsony.= This is the term used when one company controls the market because of its dominant position as a buyer, rather than as a seller. In Canada, Chapters Inc, created in 1995 by the merger and restructuring of two small book chains, owned 60 to 70 per cent of the retail trade. Consequently, when financial woes hit the superstore chain and it began reducing inventory by returning truckloads of unsold books, it generated a crisis in the publishing industry. In March 2001 the Association of Canadian Publishers announced that the publishing of fewer Canadian titles would be the inevitable result. However, the year 2000 books were already out so, once again, there is a bumper crop. You might have thought nobody reads plays any more B or maybe only a few amateur theatre groups and students. If you thought that you must be wrong, since the plays are getting published and our publishers are not simply being sentimental. Angela Rebeiro of Playwrights Canada Press has consistently maintained that there is a readership for plays and she has committed the press to publishing at least one anthology a year of complete scripts, not excerpts. However, market forces are clearly not the sole factor. Protectionist policies and arts council subsidies, which some argue are at risk in the current globalization climate, have permitted other considerations. So, this review package includes three fat anthologies produced by two small presses. One simply reprints selected plays by seven designated female >stars,= but the other two include both established and new writers. They are massive tomes not easily slipped into a briefcase. The main purchasers will be libraries. The central aim of these anthologies is to demonstrate the existence of a body of work. Another aim is to provide visibility to a group previously marginalized. That was the purpose and the success of last year=s Playwrights Canada anthology, Staging the North: Twelve Canadian Plays. It should also prove true for Testifyin=: Contemporary African Canadian Drama and A Map of the Senses: Twenty Years of Manitoba Plays. A Map of the Senses has been edited by Rory Runnells, the co-ordinator of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights (MAP), since 1983. The volume marks the anniversary of the organization. The plays included have in common their connection to MAP, which has served as >central resource, production gadfly, playwrights= home, theatres= inevitable assistance and annoyance.= This does not limit the diversity of plays which have emerged, DRAMA 91 as the editor=s introduction points out. Covering the twenty-year period are mainstream works, like Maureen Hunter=s Footprints on the Moon (a Governor-General=s Award nominee); plays from the fringe and from small theatres; writing by mature writers and younger ones; contributions by aboriginals and by gays. Only three of the twelve have been previously published. The five fringe plays, necessarily shorter works, tend to the experimental and surreal. Worm Moon (produced 1989), by Deborah O=Neil, is set in a forbidding futuristic landscape where hope (or denial) sustains the three women survivors. Harry Rintoul=s Between Then and Now (produced 1993) is a play within a play where the characters insist on challenging their author. Ric Chafe=s Zac and Speth (produced 1992) is an energetic two-hander for our time: racing through a ten-year period, two activists repeatedly meet and separate while struggling >to do something beautiful for the world.= At seventeen they do the protests, live with the squatters, rail against the establishment. In their twenties, they move on to political activism and the mission to >reinvent the left.= Ultimately they discover that, while the causes change (the play cleverly careens through a decade of leftist alarms), their love remains. Politics with a love story as the throughline. Better Looking Boys (produced 1997), by Dennis Trochim, is also a love story, but this time with a gay twist. In Ian Ross...