SHEILA RABILLARD
The subtitle of this collection of twelve previously unpublished essays on women in contemporary Canadian theatre gives a playful clue to the common ground they share. Claiming a legacy from Hrotsvit, a tenth-century Saxon nun, the editor Rita Much implies that Canadian women playwrights and directors must reach far to discover a guiding ancestress-an assumption that none of the essayists challenges, focusing as they do almost exclusively on the current scene. If there is no secure birthright, there is the exhilarating process of self-invention. Much uses Hrotsvit, however, not as an emblem of some impossibly pure parthenogenesis but as a means of asserting the crucial role of women as performers, directors, audiences, critics, biographers and theorists, as well as playwrights, in the creation of a new theatre. Hrotsvit's cloistered drama was in all likelihood "written, produced and performed by women for women" (xi). The editor's strongest claim, then, is that the essays she has commissioned from women with a broad range of expertise and approach are themselves contributions to the theatrical phenomenon that they document. In this respect, Women on the Canadian Stage serves as a valuable companion-piece to the collection of interviews with Canadian women dramatists she edited with Judith Rudakoff, Fair Play: 12 Women Speak (1990).
The essays in this collection, according to Much, attempt to offer "an alternative critical paradigm for assessing theatre created by women" (x); collectively, they "endeavour to construct new ways of perceiving and understanding the reality of women's experience foregrounded in the plays and to explain how the playwrights have succeeded in uncovering and celebrating positive images of women on the Canadian stage, thereby shattering stereotypes created by patriarchal prescriptions for female behaviour" (x). Here, I think Much sells the collection short in an attempt to impose order on an unruly diversity that is more representative of the variety of drama and commentary produced by women in the contemporary Canadian scene. As she herself notes, there are many feminisms and no single alternative paradigm--critical or dramatic--emerges from these essays. Indeed, while the majority of the essayists consider plays by recognizedly feminist playwrights more than one acknowledge that, as Lucie Robert nicely puts it, "There are women playwrights who have 'changed the subject' (writing as a woman is in itself enough to 'change the subject' of drama) without changing the language as well and without questioning the institutional basis of theatre" (44). Those playwrights who do not question the language and institutions of theatre, on the other hand, cannot adequately be described as "uncovering and celebrating positive images of women" (x).
Happily, Much assembles a richly eclectic set of voices unhindered by any preconceived paradigm. "The subjects, the playwrights and aspects of theatre discussed in these essays were not dictated by editorial concerns but arose out of the specific interests, areas of expertise and passions of the contributors" (xxi). The essayists seem to be chosen to include views from across Canada, including Québec (though the West is under-represented), and from theatre practitioners as well as academics. The contributions vary in focus and method: from Sharon Pollock's wry reflections on her goals as a female artistic director, to Mary Vingoe's biographical sketch of Newfoundland playwright Janis Spence, to Ann Wilson's analysis of Good Night Desdemona (Good Moming Juliet) as a "post-colonial drama of empowerment" (11), to Lucie Robert's theoretically canny overview of contemporary Québec feminist drama, to Hélène Beauchamp's lyrical hommage to Pol Pelletier. The essays just mentioned were those I found most rewarding, along with Susan Bennett's consideration of Wendy Lill and Natalie Rewa's exploration of Jovette Marchessault's "longstanding interest in the materiality of representation and the spiritual quest" as it finds new expression in the mise en scène of Le voyage magnifique d'Emily Carr (31). The contributions by Rewa and Wilson, in particular, stand out; each binds nuanced analysis of dramatic and theatrical strategies to a meditation on the play under study as a complex act of self-definition by a woman playwright.
If there is an appeal to variety, it has its dangers as well. The disparities among these essays mean that only a few stimulate the kind of intellectual cross-currents generated between Wilson's and Rewa's pieces. And, inevitably, important playwrights and vital constituencies are omitted; Much makes no pretense to comprehensiveness and although she includes Djanet Sears on Black women playwrights in Canada, there is no discussion of Native women's work, Asian-Canadian theatre, or the burgeoning field of performance art. The reader can browse this miscellany selectively; she will encounter work ranging from the theoretically sophisticated to the straightforwardly biographical and much that contributes to the constitution of feminist theatre in Canada.