JOYCE DOOLITTLE
Alberta's rich heritage in drama is almost as old as the province itself. Many early activities were generated in Edmonton and nurtured at the University of Alberta, the first Canadian university to establish a Drama Department and home to CKUA, one of Canada's first radio stations. In The Hungry Spirit Moira Day gives the reader a sympathetic glimpse into that history through the life and work of an influential theatre pioneer, Elsie Park Gowan. Lively contemporary interviews with the playwright precede each of the six selected plays. The book also includes two prose pieces, a brief biography, a bibliography, and a substantial and incisive introduction.
By far the largest number of Gowan's 200 dramatic works were written for radio. However, Moira Day has chosen to feature Gowan's stage plays in her anthology. She explains why in her Introduction:
Since the aesthetic of the individual episode--some of them as short as 15 minutes each-values extreme compactness while the aesthetic of the series of the whole stresses size and complexity, publishing individual episodes would be in many ways counter-productive to giving the reader a real sense of Gowan's accomplishment in the form. (p 32)
These plays, three serious dramas and three comedies, were written between 1933 and 1949. The plot of Homestead (1933), Gowan's first play, is melodramatic and the symbolism heavy-handed. Just as Freida Neilson is presented with an opportunity to escape from her crude husband, her loverto-be is killed by a failing tree. But Homestead also reveals a talent for dialogue and characterization and introduces a frequent theme in Gowan's work: the tragedy of an intelligent, sensitive woman trapped in an inappropriate marriage or a cultural backwater. It is appropriate that The Hungry Spirit(1935) gives the entire anthology its name because its heroine, Marion Gale, is modeled, in part, on the author's own life:
Well, there's quite a bit of autobiography in The Hungry Spirit because I wrote it as a kind of protest against life in a small Alberta town. What I'm trying to say in The Hungry Spirit is that the mind has its hunger. The mind has its needs as well as the body. And in a small town everything is materialistic. Is purely ... whatever you've got. Freida (in Homestead) is a girl who is at the mercy of her bodily urges. Marian isn't. (p 66)
The High Green Gate, written in 1952 for the CBC radio series 'Down Our Street Today,' is about working mothers. Three applications for a single place in a day-care centre are dramatized. At the end the audience must make up its own mind about which candidate should be awarded the place.
Gowan's comedies remind me of late 1930s and early 40s Hollywood films featuring feisty women, played by actresses like Barbara Stanwick, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis and Kathryn Hepburn. Some aspects of those stage and screen dramas seem corny and naive today, but such fictional women acted as role models for subsequent generations of real-life feminists. Back to the Kitchen, Woman! (1942) pits J. Leon Hunter, author of a book urging women to leave the job market and return to their homes, against several irate working women who are outraged by his insensitivity to their situations and needs. The Last Caveman (1938) was commissioned (for $35) for the Edmonton Little Theatre season of 1938. In it a hard-working farm family with a mentally handicapped son are about to be forced off their land by a grasping, manipulative land speculator. A young love triangle weaves its way through the play's more serious message. It also toured B.C. and the prairie provinces from November 1946 to May 1947 with Sydney Risk's Everyman Theatre, the first professional company in Western Canada. Inaugural performances in the University of Alberta's Studio Theatre in 1949 included her popular Breeches from Bond Street. Written originally as a radio play and later adapted for CBC television, it is a romantic comedy about a mail order bride who is ditched by the flashy gambler who paid her passage to Canada, but she is befriended by and betrothed to a good-hearted remittance man.
Two short prose pieces complete the anthology. 'Woman in the Twentieth Century' is a lecture Gowan gave to various groups in the 1930s:
It has been said that when Nora Helmer slammed the door of her doll's house, the bang re-echoed around the world. It announced a new age for women---an age in which she ceased to be a chattel or a plaything; an age in which she escaped from bondage, achieved a position of freedom and equality. That was many years ago, but if any girl of today thinks the battle is over, let her think again and think hard. The doors are still banging, it is true. But they bang in our expectant faces quite as often as behind our triumphant backs. (p 293)
Unfortunately, Gowan's examples and arguments are as relevant today as they were sixty years ago. This is a remarkably up-to-date piece. So is 'The Freedom of Mrs. Radway,' a cautionary tale about a writer/housewife written for CBC radio around 1957.
In both life and work Elsie Park Gowan exemplifies the modem woman who demands the right to continue to think and act independently after marriage. Along with contemporary colleagues Elizabeth Sterling Haynes and Gwen Pharis Ringwood she used her formidable energies to advance the cause of drama and of feminism in Alberta long before such activities and ideas were established across Canada.