DON PERKINS
Number 20 in NeWest Press's Prairie Play series, The NeXtFest Anthology, extends a useful tradition of anthologizing smaller works by established and new playwrights to introduce and draw attention to voices that might otherwise go unrecognized. This tradition began with the third entry in the series, Prairie Performance (1980). In the Foreword, General Editor and series founder Diane Bessai wrote of the need to show the "variety of plays shaped by Western regional experience," and her valuable concluding essay, "Prairie Playwrights and the Theatre," provides a pocket history of Western theatre activity over the previous fifty years. Prairie Performance gathers eight plays that span some 42 years and pays homage to careers seemingly past and to voices emerging into a new, more receptive theatre climate: Elsie Park Gowan, Frank Moher, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Joanna M. Glass, Ken Mitchell, W. O. Mitchell, Gordon Pengilly, and Wilfred Watson. That Western regional play writing was anything but homogeneous at the time (or even "flat," as critics of Western or prairie writing in general are so fond of suggesting) is made clear in dramatic styles ranging from romantic folk-play and naturalism to McLuhanesque poetic abstractions that bridge medieval morality with contemporary shopping centre culture.
The sixth entry in the series, Five from the Fringe (1986), is a selection of five plays first performed at the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Event. Edited by Nancy Bell, the collection includes an equally diverse selection of works. One Beautiful Evening, a mask play by Small Change Theatre, was performed at the Fringe in 1982. The other four plays included all date from the 1985 event (the year the Fringe proved itself, with Ken Brown's Life After Hockey, as a forum to establish a show that could turn a reasonable profit and have an ‘afterlife' on tour). Also included were John Selkirk's The Land Called Morning (which was republished by Fifth House in a collection of the same title); Laurier Gareau's historical drama The Betrayal; and Lyle Victor Albert's Cut, a comedy set in the limbo of lost lines and characters. Small Change Theatre enjoyed a decade of popularity before ceasing to operate; Brown and Albert are still very much part of the local and regional theatre scene. In fact, Cut was recently republished in a collection of Albert's plays (Scraping the Surface: Three Plays, NeWest Pub., 2000) that includes his award-winning title play—a two act monologue that began as a one-act Fringe piece. And although some may have found the pieces "slight" when judged against "real" (i.e. mainstage, full production) scripts, the Fringe, like several of these writers, has gone on to prove itself, alone and as part of a larger circuit, as a place to begin or even to carry on a play-making career.
The NeXtFest Anthology highlights the work of one of the most recent in a long line of Edmonton theatre projects devoted to uncovering and fostering new talent: the NeXt Generation Arts Festival, founded in 1996 by Bradley Moss at Theatre Network. The multi-disciplinary Festival was created in part to help fill the void caused by the cancellation of the Citadel TeenFest and the suspension of the MFA Play writing program at the University of Alberta. The collection is edited by Glenda Stirling, who began as a participant in NeXtFest and went on to become its Director. A lively introduction, co-authored by Moss and by Stirling, traces the growth and the evolving philosophy of the event. The anthology also includes four plays from the original festival: Chris Craddock's SuperEd, Paul Matwychuk's The Key to Violet's Apartment, Sean Callaghan's No. Please, and Rosemary Rowe's Benedetta Carlini. Also included is one title from the 2000 event: Tuesdays and Thursdays, by Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn. This collection demonstrates something of the range of voices just finding its way into the Edmonton theatre scene and beyond. It also suggests that having one's voice heard, regardless of the risks, is itself a strong preoccupation of the writers.
Two pieces are one-handers. With SuperEd, Craddock (who has since gone on to play writing success with a full-length backstage comedy, On Being a Peon) traces the coming of age of an adolescent trying to answer the eternal question, "What does it mean to be a man?" Skilfully developing that hardy perennial, the monologue play, in which the actor portrays a character and all those who influence him, Craddock has Ed sort from among a plethora of would-be role models. He eventually learns from a well-intended, homeless drifter to "give ‘em hell," and (while under the influence of his first joint) from his brother's cat that it is "good enough to do okay things," rather than trying to be a superhero all the time. In comparison, Matwychuk's The Key to Violet's Apartment is not such a bravura piece for an actor. Rather, it is more in the "conversation with the audience" narrative tradition: one voice seeking to make sense of its world. This particular world is one in which two male friends speculate on what it would be like to be a woman for a day, and what kind of women they would be; and in which a woman wonders who could have sneaked into her apartment at night to fill all her footwear with water.
Callaghan sets his dark No. Please in an old-fashioned world of the near future, where saying too much can get one branded a "siren": one who makes too much noise and is therefore demonstrably unsound or insane, both of which are capital offences. A character known only as "the woman" runs afoul of her husband's rules of proper behaviour by having some fun (dancing and having sex with a male co-worker). Apparently just as seriously, she has also felt some sympathy, in the last moments, for a low-lifer the husband has helped bring to the gallows for the public's entertainment. When she calls out, rather harmlessly from her apartment window, her husband shoots her to restore normal peace and order. Chillingly, he then phones a fellow officer to arrange for the proper forms to be brought around to log the death of yet another siren.
Silencing voices recurs as theme and action in the other two plays as well, and both are pieces with historical bases. In Benedetta Carlini, Rowe opposes two relationships between women. One involves present-day friends, Gwen and Clare, who are perhaps moving towards a lesbian affair while working on women's history projects. The other involves two seventeenth-century nuns whose lesbian relationship is the focus of Clare's project and her imaginary reconstruction from a sketchy historical record. Given the recent Reformation, an Investigator appointed by the Roman Catholic church to test Sister Benedetta's qualifications for sainthood is most punctilious. When she begins to intercede directly between God and the congregation, he silences her and removes her from her office as abbess, apparently as much by trumping up charges of fraud against her claimed miracles, as by exposing her relationship with her nurse. There is some strong writing in the historical settings, and in Clare's response to the strength the nuns find in their belief and faith. However, in Gwen (a rather glibly wisecracking bit of comic relief) and at times in the professor, Rowe tends to a level of one-liner frivolousness that smacks of a "fringe" aesthetic.
Arnold and Hahn work with a much more recent event, a late nineteenth-century murder in Prince Edward Island in which William Millman killed his pregnant girlfriend, Mary Tuplin. The play is an imaginative interpretation that at first evokes the charm of a youthful first meeting and instant infatuation, traces a courtship interrupted by family ambitions for William's education and future, and concludes with the final crime of passion, as William tries desperately to salvage that future by destroying Mary and her version of the truth of their love. Superficially, this summary suggests the story itself is not necessarily unusual; what is unexpected from two such novice writers is their treatment, which is a highly poetic voicing of the emotions of the two young lovers. They deftly manage their characters' constant shifting from dramatic showing to narrative telling, and back. The play of language—as in the overlapping of echoing voices when the two come to the same phrase or exclamation by different routes but overlapping or contrasting emotions—gives reason to hope for more from this talented pair. It also speaks volumes for the quality and value of NeXtFest's dramaturgical program. All the writers included get their first publications in this anthology, a detail that speaks highly of the continuing value of NeWest's ongoing commitment to emerging playwrights and their need for recognition, wider exposure, and encouragement.