ADRIAN FOWLER
This is the third collection of contemporary Newfoundland playscripts to appear in recent years. The first, The Plays of Codco, edited by Helen Peters, was published by Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, in 1992. Shortly thereafter, in an address to a workshop on Newfoundland Theatre Research in June 1992, former Codco member Andy Jones listed nearly one hundred and twenty original plays created and produced in the province during the previous twenty years that had not been published. A Theatre Anthologies Project developed as a result of this workshop and in 1997 ten collective plays were published, edited by Helen Peters, entitled Stars in the Sky Morning (St. John's: Killick Press). This latest anthology, edited by Denyse Lynde, is a companion volume that presents ten non-collective plays—nine of them by single authors, the tenth a collaboration between two playwrights. Taken together, these collections represent a significant contribution to our ability to comprehend the dimensions and the quality of theatrical activity in Newfoundland and Labrador during the past quarter century. It is very clear, however, that they still represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A very large body of original work by the Mummers Troupe, Rising Tide Theatre, Sheila's Brush, Cory and Wade's Playhouse, as well as numerous other individuals and groups remains uncollected, untranscribed, unedited and unpublished.
The "landwash" in Newfoundland refers to what biologists call the intertidal zone, the site of a rich variety of unusual life forms distinctive to that environment. It is an apt title for a collection of plays from Newfoundland. The ten plays collected here emerge from a theatrical tradition that is rich and distinctive but not well-known or understood. As Denyse Lynde points out in her "Introduction," they also represent a remarkable diversity in theme and technique. Four of the playwrights included here—Michael Cook, Al Pittman, Tom Cahill and Ray Guy—established themselves as writers outside of the collective tradition that became dominant in Newfoundland during the 1970s. Guy's strong affinities with the black comedy and brutal satire of Codco (he was one of the first to herald their achievement) may have eventually led him to write for the theatre, but he remained the single author of record on the three plays associated with his name. Cook, Pittman and Cahill were already connected with the development of original drama in Newfoundland before the collectives appeared on the scene. Cook's style, as Eugene Benson has pointed out, owes something to Brecht's epic theatre. But here Cook is represented by a previously unpublished tragicomedy set in Toronto, The End of the Road (1980). Understated, witty and generous in its development of the theme of social disparity and dislocation, the play advances a moral position that is familiar to readers and audiences of Cook's work, but it does so with a complete lack of the rhetorical posturing and grandiosity that is so characteristic of his normal discourse. More influenced by Dylan Thomas, Pittman's West Moon (1980, 1994) is an eloquent elegy to the way of life of the old Newfoundland outport as it falls before the disintegrating forces of change. While it does not gloss over the physical and spiritual hazards inherent in that life, West Moon is romantic in the way it passionately records the dignity and value of individual lives lived within its ambit. Ray Guy's Young Triffie Been Made Away With (1985), in contrast, presents a dissonant and subversive view of the traditional outport, a savage satire masquerading as a conventional thriller. Cahill's The Only Living Father (1991) is less challenging in comparison with these three: it is a competent but unsurprising account of the life of Joseph R. Smallwood.
Although Des Walsh is a more recent playwright, his adaptation of Harold Horwood's novel, Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, is limited by his source. Walsh, a writer far more generously endowed than Horwood in wit and taste, is able to do little to redeem the ponderous conceptual framework of the original novel. The other five playwrights included in this anthology represent a postmodernist new wave of theatrical writing in Newfoundland. Hanlon House (1989,1991) by Greg Thomey and Brian Hennessey, Flux (1993) by Pete Soucy, and Catlover (1990) by Janis Spence all turn inward with irony and insight to a consideration of personal development and personal relationships in a world of fluctuating values. Berni Stapleton's Woman in a Cage (1993) and Liz Pickard's The ALIENation of Lizzie Dyke (1994) do this as well, though in more surrealistic ways. A gritty, working-class feminism pervades Stapleton's dark play. Pickard's vision is more triumphant. Lizzie Dyke suffers for the fearless assertion and celebration of her homosexuality, but never falters in her attempt to be her own person in a world intolerant of difference.
Denyse Lynde's "Introduction" is disappointing in that it does not set these plays in the theatrical and cultural context out of which they arose as effectively as one might wish, nor is it especially illuminating in its brief analysis of the plays themselves. It suffers by comparison with Helen Peters' informative and insightful "Introduction" to Stars in the Sky Morning. Nevertheless, Lynde's companion anthology performs an important service in providing further access to the remarkably fertile field of theatrical activity in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past twenty-five years.