CHRIS JOHNSON
This study attempts to recover in a critical context one important aspect of a seminal era in the development of modem Canadian theatre and drama which, with all its pristine hopes and enthusiasms, is probably over now. (250)
This sentence from near the end of Bessai's book not only identifies the author's objective, but encapsulates the intermingling of the personal and the professional with which she approaches the undertaking. Playwrights of Collective Creation is scholarly in its thoroughness, its detail, its accuracy, but it is also personal in that it goes beyond analysis in its ability to convey a sense of the excitement, the commitment, and yes, the passion, that animated the Canadian collectives of the early seventies. This is so probably because, one senses, Bessai shared/shares the excitement, commitment, and passion- no "playless theory" for her, and for her, the passing of this era is cause for some regret.
The focus of the book is Paul Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille, and chapter two, an examination of that company and several of its productions, is the heart of the work: chapter one, a workmanlike survey of collective creation in European and American theatre, sets the context for the Passe Muraille investigation, which in turn leads to chapters three, four, and five, on Rick Salutin, John Gray, and Linda Griffiths, playwrights who all made use of their collective experiences with Passe Muraille in the writing of their subsequent, more "conventional," scripted plays. The short chapter six, "Seminal Theatre," summarizes and concludes.
Bessai confronts two great difficulties in undertaking this work. The first is the improvisational nature of Thompson's working methods: ". . . never highly structured or schematic. Rather, he tailored his direction . . . to the needs of the subject of the play and to the skills of the particular group of actors involved" (37). The second has to do with the experiential core of Passe Muraille performances, a difficulty to which Bessai alludes when she refers to the "anomaly" of the printed form of a collective creation: ". . . there can be no textual equivalent to the physicality of the language performed on the stage. In essence, the resulting 'text' needs to be read as the notation of a performance piece rather than as a conventionally scripted play" (43). Absence of textual equivalence also challenges anyone who would describe and analyze such theatrical experiences. Bessai addresses both difficulties through the strategy of discussing in chronological order and in great detail the creation and effect of seven Passe Muraille shows: Doukhobors, Buffalo Jump, The Farm Show, 1837.- The Farmers' Revolt, Them Donnellys, The West Show and Far As the Eye Can See.
The strategy is most successful in responding to problem number one, as it provides a model of the growth of what came to be regarded as the Passe Muraille style, showing how elements apparently borrowed from American and European precedents (e.g. The Open Theatre, Joan Littlewood) were augmented and altered by the discovery and addition of specifically Passe Muraille (and Canadian) elements: Thompson's "texture work," the "mythologizing" of history, "making history current language," exploration of theme through expressive gesture, the informal relationship with the audience, Thompson's mission to "take ordinary people and make their lives into some kind of art," all of these acquiring distinctly Canadian shapes through the "particularist" attention to specific Canadian events and communities, and specific Canadian audiences. Further, we are shown the varying relationships which can, and did, exist between the "writers," the other "wrighters" involved in the process, and the shows which resulted.
Difficulty number two is more problematic, and while Bessai's strategy succeeds to a considerable degree, as my opening remarks suggest, it is here that a reader sometimes feels frustrated and removed from the center of what is being discussed: one wants to see the expressive gestures, feel the informal relationship with the performers. One solution would be to provide much more extensive illustration than the seven photographs included, and to use them in a manner that goes beyond the decorative, integrating image and text through discussion of those particular moments and gestures. I would also like to see more attention to "notation" of the events "as performance pieces," readings even more vigorously informed by the "particularist" nature of each theatrical experience: what went on in that barn that day.
Nonetheless, sequential close reading as a model of accumulating technique, developing theatrical thinking, and evolving theatre practice successfully carries the momentum of the Passe Muraille investigation into the similar "models" Bessai constructs for each of the individual playwrights she examines. In each case, she identifies that which each writer found valuable in the Passe Muraille experience and took with him or her into later work, either collective or solo, and in each case, she identifies the ways in which each writer found the collective limiting, the ways in which each attempted to transcend those limitations and in so doing (or in attempting but failing), distinguish himself/herself from the Passe Muraille source. As in the case of the Passe Muraille chapter, each of these chapters employs the strategy of chronologically sequential close reading, and, now, extensive cross reference, with Passe Muraille shows reintroduced for purposes of comparison. At this level, then, analysis of printed texts exceeds the merely literary with its clear sense of this aspect of theatrical context. Finally, Playwrights of Collective Creation does succeed, as analysis, chronicle, and evocation, informed as it is by understanding, experience, and passion.