"No, the Centre Should Be Invisible": Radical Revisioning of Chekhov in Floyd Favel Starr's House of Sonya

"No, the Centre Should Be Invisible": Radical Revisioning of Chekhov in Floyd Favel Starr's House ofSonya ROB APPLEFORD In his survey entry on "American Indian theater," C.W.E. Bigsby offers an insightful comment on the advantages of live performance over cinematic representation for Native peoples: Not merely does the public stage appear to operate as the political platform which, iconographically, it resembles, but it offers a model of group strength, of imaginative purpose and of a confident identity [...1The vertiginous excitements of theatre [..,J the sense of genuine risk, is liable to be closer to the experience of a threatened group than is the aesthetic closure of the film [...] (36S} While I readily take issue with his rejection of film as a potent medium for Aboriginal representation, I just as readily agree with Bigsby that the stage offers a unique opportunity for Aboriginal peoples to model both political affirmation and "genuine risk" for immediate public consumption. What I find intriguing when examining Aboriginal theatre is the complex relationship between the traditional and the contemporary in this modelling of Aboriginal identity on stage. At one end of the spectrum, "traditional" Aboriginal performance , involving ritual, orality, local histories, and cultural/spiritual information , has been understood by scholars and critics as either replicating or renewing traditions of perfonnance specific to indigenous regions and cultures .' At the other end, "contemporary" Aboriginal performance, utilizing Western theatrical techniques and exploring more overtly political themes, has been viewed in relation to global examples of performance-as-resistance by other "threatened groups" (see Wasserman). Both local/traditional and international /contemporary definitions of perfonnance can serve to illuminate how Aboriginal theatre resists the dominant by pointing to local or international contexts for interpretative frames. Yet, these two frames - the local/traditional and the international/contemporary - are difficult to disentangle, and bifurcate Modern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 246 Floyd Favel Starr's HOllse ofSonya: Revisioning Chekhov 247 clearly hybrid modes of Aboriginal performance. For myself, as a nonAboriginal spectator, it remains a difficult task to frame such hybrid theatre so that both the local and international contexts are taken into account. This difficulty is made plain when one examines the 1997 play HOllse of Sonya, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by Saskatchewan Cree playwright Floyd Favel Starr. His play forcefully demonstrates the need to view Aboriginal theatre not as being somehow divorced from Western tradition, but rather as being engaged in exploring what Favel Starr calls "the sources of the rivers of our cultures"("Artificial Tree" 83). Aboriginal theatre in this country is frequently informed by traditional, and therefore localized, knowledges and aesthetics. And yet, to suggest that this theatre is not just as frequently shaped by cultural and material forces that can be loosely termed Canadian and/or Western caricatures its uniqueness and denies its connection to other traditions. Aboriginal performance, rather than experimenting with new ways of representing culture, risks being judged against largely normative and internalized ideas of what Aboriginal stories should be like, in terms of both form and content. When faced with the work of Aboriginal playwrights, many non-Aboriginal critics (including myselO seek to understand how this work fits into an evolving but nevertheless recognizable Canadian or Western theatrical tradition. One strategy that is frequently employed is to discuss how Western theatre is cited by Aboriginal playwrights. If these playwrights are understood to cite Western theatrical traditions , either covertly or overtly, it then becomes possible to analyse Aboriginal theatre in relation to the traditions cited and their aesthetic or political histories. The most obvious example of covert Western citation is the work of Cree playwright Tomson Highway. Many critics have recognized the clear debt Highway owes to Western theatre, most notably to Greek theatre and to the more direct antecedents, Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soellrs and John Murrell's Waiting for the Parade (Knowles, Theatre of Form 62). Highway also cites the influence of Western musical forms, especiallythe .sonata, on his writing. By identifying these antecedents, covertly signalled, .in Highway's work, critics can place him, at least provisionally, within a recognizable Canadian or Western theatrical tradition. When seen as part of a tradition, in this case...