Drama

Few plays staged in full productions are published as print texts. To provide a sense of the discrepancy between the number of producing theatre companies and the number of plays published, consider this: the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT), on its website, lists 507 theatres which produce plays in Canada; Playwrights Canada, the largest publisher of Canadian plays in English, publishes between twenty-five and thirty titles annually. Allowing that not all the companies affiliated with PACT are producing new Canadian work, there is an enormous gap between the number of theatres producing new work and the number of plays which are published as print texts.

The explanation for why relatively few plays are published as bound print copies is simple. The audience of readers for plays is small; publishers want to ensure that there is some prospect of sales and so they tend to publish plays which have had successful productions and, by extension, audiences. Annie Gibson, the publisher of Playwrights Canada, indicates that the press which she oversees is interested in ‘publishing the best drama that the country has to offer, and … that the play has had a professional production.’ The first criterion is expected; no publisher would announce the intention of publishing literary dregs. The second criterion and its implications are more interesting. For Playwrights Canada Press, the designation of ‘professional’ means either the actors and director of the production are members working under the terms of the Canadian Actor Equity Agreement or the play has been produced by a theatre which is a member of PACT.

The criterion of a professional production may seem restrictive and exclusionary, but the reality is that the criterion is narrower than a ‘professional’ production; in the main, there is an implicit criterion of a successful professional production. As a glance at the work considered in this review indicates, established playwrights and those emerging as talented new playwrights have a better chance of seeing their work in print than do first-time playwrights, even when the work has received a professional production. In the main, the work of new playwrights, which is often produced in venues such as fringe festivals, is not considered for publication as print text until it is remounted within a professional venue. Unlike prose fiction or poetry, where first-time authors have a chance of having work published, playwrights – particularly new playwrights – face seemingly insurmountable barriers to getting their works in print. It is difficult for any playwrights to get work published and nearly impossible for a first-time playwright.

If a playwright is fortunate enough to have her or his work produced professionally, the production can create an audience for the print version of the script. For some readers, reading the script in print is a mnemonic which allows the reader to recall the production and to reflect on the script and the production through the private act of reading. For other readers, who may not have seen the production, the publication of the script allows it to reach a larger audience. Published scripts might be read by practitioners with an eye to mounting a production or by individuals who enjoy reading plays; or they may be read as part of the curricula of courses in high school or universities.

As works of literature, theatrical scripts bring a particular pleasure and challenge to the reader because playwrights do not write with the intention of their works being read by the solitary reader; rather, they write with the intention of their works being staged within the materiality of theatre where meaning is constructed through the languages of theatre including, for example, the gesture of the actor and the scenographic elements of set, lighting, sound, and costume. Theatrical scripts require a particular kind of engagement by the reader, who must imagine the words in the page embodied by the actor moving through space.

Theatrical production, by its very nature, is ephemeral, which creates thorny methodological problems for those who study theatre. Each moment of a performance occurs and then is gone; it can only be recovered through trace evidence which transposes the performance into other modes of representation and memory...