JAMES HOFFMAN
Vancouver's New Play Centre, now twenty-five years old, has been continually represented in terms of theoretical uncertainty; admittedly "invisible," it has been deeply resistant to analysis. A genre criticism, as recently constituted to cope with the dynamics of genre (re)formations, is capable of responding to this uncertainty and, indeed, suppression. This article examines two major genres, playwriting and directing, their unstable relationship, and the resulting effect on theatrical practice at the Centre, a practice that had potential as metatheatrical activity but also serious limitations in its challenge to traditional theatrical modes. Certain dramaturgical assumptions, often unstated and deriving from places such as the Dominion Drama Festival, led to a reduced concept of the playwright and the production of plays that often failed to capture Vancouver's postcolonial milieu.
Le New Play Centre de Vancouver, qui existe déjà depuis vingt-cinq ans, a continuellement été représenté à partir d'une incertitude théorique; "invisible," cette incertitude a résisté à l'analyse. Une critique des genres, telle que récemment constituée pour interroger la dynamique de leur (re)formation, est en mesure de répondre à cette incertitude, voire à cette suppression. Cet article s'intéresse à deux genres majeurs, la dramaturgie et la mise en scène, dans leur relation instable, ainsi qu'aux effets de la pratique théâtrale du Centre, une pratique qui pouvait potentiellement être une activité métathéâtrale mais qui comportait aussi de sérieuses limites dans ses défis aux modes traditionels du théâtre. Certains supposés dramaturgiques, souvent non-avoués et dérivés d'instances telles que le Dominion Drama Festival, ont conduit à une conception limitée de l'auteur dramatique et de la production de pièces qui n'ont pas réussi à révéler le milieu postcolonial de Vancouver.
In his introduction to Twenty Years at Play, an anthology of plays from the New Play Centre in Vancouver, editor Jerry Wasserman begins with the statement that the Centre is "relatively invisible," that it "has been one of the best-kept theatrical secrets in Canada." This seems a surprising remark in a book intended to celebrate the success of a play development organization now well into its third decade, many of whose plays, according to this same introduction, have had notable productions and have won numerous awards, and many of whose playwrights, such as Margaret Hollingsworth and Sharon Pollock, have achieved critical recognition. Indeed, its stable of playwrights, which also includes Tom Cone, Sheldon Rosen, Leonard Angel, John Lazarus, and Betty Lambert, is well known and there have been impressive box office hits-notably Sherman Snukal's early 1980s comedy, Talking Dirty, which ran for over 1,000 performances at the Arts Club Theatre. Approximately one hundred and fifty plays have been developed and then fully staged by the Centre: these include one-acts, an early success being Cone's Herringbone (1975), lately developed into a full-blown musical which played at Playwrights Horizons in New York; full-lengths such as Lazarus's Dreaming and Duelling (1980), which has enjoyed numerous stagings across Canada; musicals, notably Ted Galay's Tsymbaly (1985), a hit of the 1986 Manitoba Theatre Centre season; and occasional experimental pieces such as Angel's Six of One: A Playscript in Progress (1985), a play about a multi-cultural group of dancers in which the actors frequently exchange roles.
Yet it is invisible; it has, as Wasserman puts it, "managed to get through its first two decades without having been the subject of even a single article in a national publication" (7). How can we critically discuss the New Play Centre? It seems to be a special problem, existing in a privileged theatrical space beyond criticism or representation other than progress-narratives and other developmental constructs. 1 In my research for this article I examined founding documents, 2 reports and promotional materials, and I interviewed most of the managing directors as well as several prominent playwright "graduates" of the Centre. Generally I found a predominant "we were just doing theatre" type of self-construction. According to these sources, there were twenty-four years of fairly neutral activity at the Centre, not unlike that of amateur theatre. Nowhere does there appear a strong set of beliefs or manifesto; Douglas Bankson, one of the co-founders, stated that the Centre's role was to be a humble one, simply to encourage the writing of local plays in order to, as he expressed it, "serve those theatres that were active in Vancouver at that time." Beyond this, somewhat surprising in the charged theatrical world of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period of Hair, Che!, and Paradise Now, as well as Vancouver's own controversial Captives of the Faceless Drummer, 3 there has been a distinct refusal to commit to notions of self-image or vision. Rather than overt theory, ideology or even a continuity with history, there was emphasis on practicality and practice-Pamela Hawthorn, its major director, telling me: "We had no theoretical base ... we were a bunch of practical theatre people." Repeatedly, in my interviews with Centre directors, I found that while Hawthorn emphasized the Centre's intense commitment to what she called "the art form," that is to the promotion of Canadian plays on Canadian stages, the strongest self-expressed tendency at the Centre was towards a lack of fixity, to a kind of shapeless multiplicity, to being many things to many people.
I wish to consider the New Play Centre as a site where largely unspoken genre dynamics seriously compromised understandings of purpose and operation and at the same time created significant potential for metatheatrical activity-that is, activity with the potential for functioning as a different order of theatre itself. Why a genre study? Given the uncertain, suppressed character of this institution, we need a criticism committed to bringing some sense of typological clarity-the traditional task of genre study. It seems appropriate, given the Centre's uncertainty, to make some attempt at description and classification, especially at locating its position vis-a-vis theatrical types. Has it functioned, for example, as a traditional genre of theatre- perhaps in disguise? How many genres have been in operation at the Centre? Was one dominant?
At the same time we need a criticism capable of responding to the transparency and the blurring of boundaries at the Centre where, clearly, there has been an unsettling dynamic of re- and de-categorizing. This too is the domain of genre, especially as understood by postmodern theorists who, alert to the destabilizing effects of marginalized voices on established generic norms (for example, feminists have questioned generic tradition as male-dominated), see genre as essentially an historical and political construct. As a result there is particular interest in genre formation and change, as well as in the altered and altering relationships between genres. Thus genre is valued not for its normalizing, essentializing typologies, but as a kind of model for process and change.
Ralph Cohen, among others (Chambers, Bauman), sees genre as "perfectly compatible with multiple discourses, with narratives of discontinuity, with transgressed boundaries" (241)-all of which seem in operation at the Centre. And the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, although designed for the study of the novel, seems useful. I am thinking specifically of his description of complete versus incomplete genres, the identification of generic canons, the behaviour of genres vis-à-vis other genres, and consideration of structural characteristics, as outlined in The Dialogic Imagination. His methodology, since it deals with emerging genre, and with genre in process and in relation to other genres, seems applicable to the situation at the Centre.
What are the major genres at the Centre? The most obvious one is playwriting. This theatrical genre, certainly one with ancient roots, has attracted the most attention in the Centre's various descriptions and activities, indeed has mostly determined its raison d'être. In fact most of the Centre's activities in the formative early period, under Bankson's direction, 4 were devoted to script development-almost to the exclusion of other theatrical practices. The development process, however, was borrowed at least in part from another institution.
The tone and much of the Centre's style was set in the early years: playwrights, mainly from amateur theatre groups, were encouraged to submit scripts. These were read and returned with critical commentary, and here the development ended for the great majority of writers. A small number of plays were selected for workshopping, and then several were modestly performed, the first in rehearsed public readings at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the summer of 1971. The whole process was a replication of the amateur drama festival, such as the Dominion Drama Festival, with its system of competition, selection, adjudication, and awards. Indeed, the Centre's origins are found in a group who called themselves the "lunch bunch," who met regularly to discuss theatre. Two of them, Sheila Neville, a University of British Columbia librarian, and Douglas Bankson, professor of creative writing at UBC, became co-founders of the Centre, while another, Anne Cameron, became an invaluable secretary in the young organization. All were involved with the DDF, Bankson and Neville being governors who had recently participated in the ongoing project of encouraging Canadian scripts in the festival. Thus the Centre achieved what the DDF could not: the institutionalizing of playwriting.
This particular focus on playwriting led to the establishment of another genre: the play development centre itself, a new, largely post-world war II phenomenon (Anderson) still very much in formation and therefore an undetermined genre of theatre. Is it, for example, primarily a writing or primarily a producing theatrical institution?5 If it is essentially a place of writing, then it may be a metagenre of theatre, that is, it could have potential for transforming the theatre itself, for utilizing theatre to transform writing, or perhaps for influencing the wider regional culture itself. For example there was the possibility that the Centre may have been asserting or reclaiming writing in its post-colonial setting. At times, as in a 1980 New Play Centre report, this seems to be the case, as there is commitment to process, to "the emergence of a strong, meaningful culture . . . [and to] the needs of individuals and the community." Two of the words chosen for its name, "New" and "Centre," suggest the reclamation of identity from an imperial centre, the granting of status to a (formerly) peripheral language; while "new play" seems to announce a challenge to imperial writing, an assertion of a writing that is in formation and potentially at least recuperative. This recalls the postcolonial strategy of questioning generic assumptions, and is perhaps best shown in the harsh street situations of Tom Walmsley's plays, in the portrayal of Ukrainian immigrant life in the plays of Ted Galay, or in the depiction of a contemporary local figure as in Eric Nicol's Ma-all works developed at the Centre.
However, there is also indication that writing was merely sub-generic, a minor genre of theatre. When I asked key figures such as Bankson and Hawthorn whether they might have been operating a centre not so much to develop playwriting as to teach the elements of theatre to writers, there was significant agreement. Even the Centre's singular commitment to local plays was problematically not elaborated. Was it understood as referring to imperial canon-making or canon-breaking-to the standard American or British play in a Canadian setting or to some kind of post-colonial variant? As we'll see, evidence suggests an uncertain middle ground between the two. Meanwhile, how successfully did the Centre achieve its initial aim of "serving" the Vancouver theatre? A retrospective article (1990) admits that "Vancouver playwrights have not by and large been a dominant force in Vancouver's own theatres" (Johnston 25). The reason for this has much to do with a pervasive conflict that limited the Centre's notion of playwright and play.
Indeed, within the Centre there are two major theatrical genres in unstable relationship: playwriting and directing. Playwriting, the creation of the dramatic script, is continually represented as the primary activity of the Centre, the preference for new plays and one-act plays being a significant departure from the norms of other professional theatre groups. The other activity, directing, is largely unspoken, the silent partner; in fact, from the very beginning the Centre has been a haven for directors. Most of the managing directors of the Centre, the most notable and influential being Pamela Hawthorn, have been stage directors and not playwrights. Of the original Board of Advisors, none were established playwrights. In the first two years, in 1970 and 1971, all plays submitted for critiquing were read by Bankson, himself both a director and writer, as well as by a theatre director. Thus the major impetus for play development at the Centre has been from the director.
There has in effect been an ongoing dialectic between these two major genres. The choice of name, New Play Centre, seems to indicate a privileging of playwriting. Even during the first two years, however, when the major activity was a script critiquing service, there were workshops, in effect a form of directing; indeed the first constitution speaks of the Centre's "objects" as being "(a) to promote a play-reading program which leads to (b) workshop productions. . . ." Bankson, in a letter to the Canada Council, in 1971, stated: "The aim of the Centre is to aid and encourage the writing and production of plays. This dialectic has existed throughout the Centre's existence and although questioned, it has never been fundamentally altered. We can question some of the assumptions behind it.
It was implicit, for example, that the Canadian playwright existed in a subservient relation to imperial norms. This was due in large part to the Centre's unspoken relationship with the Dominion Drama Festival, which folded in the early 1970s just as the Centre was founded, and where the nonexistence of the Canadian playwright was assumed. A key document, written by Bankson in 1969, when he was a governor of the DDF, entitled, "Some Observations and Proposals addressed to the D.D.F. Committee Studying the Original Play in Canada," stresses the need for Canadian playwrights to be "made equal partners with the Director, Actor, Designer and Technician" (underlined in original). It is important to note that while there were acting and directing workshops and frequent difficulties in finding good adjudicators at the DDF, only playwriting was seriously problematized. Denis Salter has noted the DDF's "failure to realize the Bessborough ideal of a national repertoire of producible plays" (13). Thus the attitude that directing is closed and complete while playwriting is unformed was taken from the DDF into the New Play Centre.
This is interesting, considering that directing as practised at the Centre was only invented in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and to this day remains an imprecise, developing genre, with a wide range of practices. If we use Bakhtin's concept of an incomplete genre, one that is still developing, such as he has discussed in relation to the novel (3-40), then directing is in the state of evolving while playwriting-its object in our case being to construct a form more or less as practised for centuries-could be viewed as a complete, somewhat ossified genre. As Bakhtin notes, a developing genre, will, in its interaction with other genres, dominate, infecting them with that same sense of becoming (7).
This is what I think occurred at the New Play Centre: playwriting, in its interaction with directing, was destabilized and characterized as an incipient art This can be seen as differing from regular theatrical practice where there are normative assumptions regarding the writer, director, designer and actor who are understood to work in collaborative harmony, in what are perceived to be stable and complementary generic practices.
How has the production of playscripts at the Centre been affected by this? For one thing, there has not been a strong concept of the playwright or of the play, both of which are constructed in terms of reduction and concealment. The relationship between director and playwright is expressed as a hierarchical one, that of a master and apprentice. Early publicity talks of the "prospective playwright," never the prospective director, who will be assisted by the Centre. The emphasis on new plays, while it might seem to promise a reexamination or reconstitution of playwriting, in fact conceals a preference for traditional modes, ones amenable mainly to the needs of the director. A letter written by Bankson, July 20, 1971, to David Gardner, Theatre Arts Officer of the Canada Council, notes the "aim of the Centre is to aid and encourage the writing" of plays. The first instruction, in a document, "Guidelines for Readers of Scripts for the New Play Centre," written by Bankson, asks the reader to "approach the script from the point of view of a Director [note upper case!] who is considering it for production." A few sentences later, the guidelines state that "the correction of weaknesses is obviously your most important function." Overt here is the notion of the playwright as dependent, perhaps even resisting, participant in the theatrical process, as well as unstated assumptions about the nature of the play.
Another result has been a dominance of realistic scripts and a particular interest in the one-act play. Hawthorn admitted that a major unresolved artistic issue was that the Centre's work was "too realistic . . . [that] the best work available was realistic." Margaret Hollingsworth said that she disagreed with Hawthorn's insistence that "plays should be realistic, [and] have a through-line . . . I fought her on that." Thus it was axiomatic, despite Hawthorn's statement that there were "no guidelines" in recognizing a "good script," that certain kinds of play creation, such as that of collective or experimental works, were inappropriate at the Centre, and therefore the work of certain writers, such as Atom Egoyan, now a notable Canadian filmmaker, were rejected. Then, according to Hawthorn, writers who used language well were especially favoured; Tom Cone similarly talked about the importance of "original voice." How language became realistic was at least partly due to the Centre's routine model of workshopping, in which a group of actors read and then commented freely on a new script. This practice concerned playwright Ian Weir, who said that it tended both to diffuse the script and to intimidate the playwright. And Tom Cone has cautioned: "Workshops can ruin a playwright ... we can't overrun the writer" (Waddel 44). At the same time, we might add, most actors and directors, now acting as dramaturge, are trained in the methods of psychological realism.
This preference is in line with the Centre's expressed desire to be practical and non-ideological, since realistic plays are often perceived to be a neutral, scientific genre, and since the Centre's purpose was to serve the mainstream theatre. We know of course that some critics have seen the realistic play as ideologically closed and conservative (Knowles). In any case, the Centre believed that other groups, such as Tahmahnous Theatre, founded almost at the same moment as the New Play Centre, would serve the alternate theatre.
Then, particularly in the early years, it was felt that the writing of one-act plays was the best means of developing playwrights. This can be seen as an admission that the traditional form of the full-length play was problematic for the Centre, although what the one-act offered in its place was never articulated. The choice of the one-act is, however, in itself indicative of a submerged ideology. Gail Finney, in discussing modem attempts to elevate the one-act play, has noted the form's deterministic aspects, especially in tragedy, where "characters ... are without free will, incapable of altering their conditions" (453). Of the five plays published by the Centre, in West Coast Plays (1975), many display the "human victimization" observed by Finney. Thus this alternate form, the one-acter, proposed by the Centre as a pedagogical tool, instead set in place a limiting, even repressive structure. One could question, for example, the inability of characters "altering their conditions," indeed engaging with regional issues in this volume. Malcolm Page has observed the lack of nationalist assertion, noting that there is in fact "very little British Columbia content" (95) in West Coast Plays, a comment he similarly makes in reviewing Twenty Years On: A New Play Centre Anthology (82). Thus we have to question just what the New Play Centre was proposing in the construction of its dramatic canon.
How then can we view the operations of genre at the New Play Centre? Perhaps the key question is to what extent the Centre's generic strategies can be seen as the assertion of cultural difference, arguably the greatest artistic need in the post-colonial milieu of Vancouver. What challenges were there, for example, to the characteristics of genre usually associated with colonial structures? In particular, can we see alteration of the canon or evidence of the appropriation of the playtext; that is, was there significant liberation of playwriting from the authority of an imposed colonial system? While some aspects of the Centre do point positively in this direction, there was as noted an alienation of vision, and therefore of generic questioning, that suggests the effects of cultural denigration common in colonial cultures.
This preliminary analysis suggests that the New Play Centre has accomplished two things. First, by refusing to represent itself as a traditional form of theatre, it has fostered notions of generic transformation and appropriation, and therefore opened the way for marginal or subversive forms, perhaps best shown in the dramatic work of Tom Walmsley, Leonard Angel, or Tom Cone. By maintaining a self-determined, somewhat open approach to play development, the Centre has subverted traditional methods of accessibility to the theatre by privileging the work of the playwright and opening the way to revised dramatic creation. Thus were denaturalized some of the features of colonial theatrical practice-such as existed at the DDF. This argues for a constitution of the New Play Centre as a kind of metagenre, somewhat beyond the norms of theatrical practice and available to a wide variety of post-colonial revisioning and reappropriation strategies.
However, in practice there was compromise, as in its insistence on the primacy of the director and on the diffusive workshop model. Thus were qualified many of its own, and therefore its culture's, redefinitions of genre, the result being a kind of self-proclaimed non-genre: "We were just doing theatre." At the same time as it worked to liberate writing from an inherited/imposed colonial system, it quietly imposed its own essentializing notions, as in its privileging of language and realistic structure. Thus what seemed to be a site of metatheatre, a site for revising the place of dramatic discourse in the grip of coloniality, became instead an elusive entity fluctuating uncertainly between metagenre and non-genre.
NOTES
1 See: Martin Knelman, "Hothouse Mama," Saturday Night (April 1981): 99-100; Steve
Waddel, "Canada's Big Apple for Playwrights," Performing Arts in Canada (Spring 1981): 41-44; Denis Johnston and Jerry Wasserman, "The New Play Centre: Twenty Years On,"
Canadian Theatre Review 63 (Summer 1990): 25-28.
Return to article
2 The earliest founding document seems to be a New Play Centre constitution, dated May 5, 197
1. The same year, in a July 20 letter to David Gardner, Theatre Arts Officer of the Canada
Council, Douglas Bankson applied for funds and briefly described the Centre's
accomplishments in its first year. Then, in August, for writers using its services, Bankson wrote
a two-page document providing a general description of the Centre and its operations. These
documents are located in the Vancouver City Archives.
Return to article
3 In late 1970, the Playhouse Board suddenly decided not to stage George Ryga's new play
Captives of the Faceless Drummer, which is based on the FLQ crisis in Quebec that caused the
country so much anguish at the time. The play had been commissioned by the Company and
was scheduled to play early in 1971. Ryga and his supporters made the affair public, and much
controversy ensued.
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4 Bankson was director of the Centre from its founding in 1970 until 1972, when Pamela
Hawthorn became managing director, a position she held until 1989. She was replaced by Paul
Mears, who had worked for five years under Hawthorn. Kim Selody, the current director,
assumed the position in late 1991.
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5 The debate over whether the Centre was a playwriting or a producing agency exploded with
some rancour in the early 1990s, and led to the formation of an alternate group, the Betty
Lambert Society, organized entirely by playwrights, solely to support playwrights. The group's
first Newsletter (September 1992) declared: "[the New Play Centre] is primarily a theatre
company, not a service organization." Recently, in August, 1995, the New Play Centre and the
Betty Lambert Society merged to form a single entity: Playwrights Theatre Centre.
Return to article
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