Drama

84 LEITERS IN CANADA 1993 Drama RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES There are fewer and fewer Canadian plays, particularly plays with large casts, receiving full-scale productions on the main stages of Canadian theatres these days. This does not yet seem to have had an impact on the number of scripts being published, or on the surprising number of play publishers, but it is noticeable that an increasing number of new plays are written for one to three actors and receive their first productions at Fringe Festivals or in play development workshops of one sort or another. In fact, apart from plays by established writers such as Timothy Findley and David French, all of the new plays under review here were produced for relatively small houses on relatively low budgets. And more than one of the playwrights acknowledges, as Raymond Storey does in his Introduction to The Saints and Apostles, that 'the new works festivals that dot this country are one of the most valuable (and least valued) venues for the development of innovative works,' and that the generosity of actors, directors, and dramaturges, often living below the poverty line and working for almost nothing, is the major source of subsidy for new play development in Canada. Not all the plays published in the past year, however, were new, or even newly published. The most valuable of the collections published in 1993, at least to scholars, is a mixture of newly and previously published plays by a pioneer of Canadian experimental writing at a time when professional production was virtually outside the realm of possibility for any new Canadian work. Anton Wagner's A Vision of Canada: Herman Vdaden,s Dramatic Works 1928-1945 (Simon and Pierre, 424, $34.99 paper) is a worthy, well-selected scholarly edition of Voaden's most significant plays, written as he struggled to invent a new Canadian genre which he called 'symphonic expressionism.' The plays, written as multi-media experiments 'for a new theatre,' are difficult to appreciate on the page, and are therefore usefully accOlnpanied by a generous selection of production photographs as well as by musical notations, and they are introduced in a lengthy essay by the editor which quotes extensively from reviews, helping to flesh out a sense of what the plays in production must have been like. I keep wanting to like Voaden. His experimentation, his use of multimedia and interdisciplinary techniques, and his commitment to moving beyond the literary biases of the drama of his time are all things I want to admire. And critics I admire - such as Sherrill Grace and Wagner himself - have accorded Voaden a major place in the history of Canadian drama. But a voice always nags at me that the Symphonic Expressionist has no clothes. It all seems - at least on the page - so pretentious, so DRAMA 85 overblown, and so ultimately empty, as Voaden's cultural nationalism combines with his ecstatic transcendentalism and his tin ear for dialogue to unintentionally comic effect. Voaden apparently aspired to become for Canada a theatrical Walt Whitman, but to my ear he is closer to a (melo)dramatic Sarah Binks. I do, however, admire the work of the editor here, who has provided readers with the wherewithal- the scripts, the photographs , the critical apparatus, the playwright's introductions, a complete cllfonology, a performance calendar, and selected primary and secondary bibliographies - to make up their own minds. Also from Simon and Pierre, and also of primarily historical interest, is Robertson Davies: Two Plays, Fortune, My Foe and Eros at Breakfast (126, $14.99 paper). Fortune, My Foe treats the familiar Davies theme of the supposed insensitivity of middle-class Canada to European art and culture , while Eros at Breakfast, 'a psychosomatic interlude,' treats allegorically the inner workings of love. But it is difficult to understand why this volume was published. Davies is not notably successful as a playwright; both plays, though widely available at libraries, are difficult to take seriously now as producible scripts; and the book is an unlikely candidate for course reading lists. Unfortunately, too, it is one of the last plays released by the now defunct Simon and Pierre, who used to be one of the cornerstones...