JERRY WASSERMAN
In his often impressive but uneven new study of James Reaney's theatrical development, Gerald D. Parker cites two disparate responses to the 1960 premiere of The Kildeer. Mavor Moore enthused that it was 'likely to become an historic event-and perhaps even the most important one in contemporary Canadian arts and letters,' whereas Nathan Cohen characteristically grumbled, 'The Kildeer is a desperately bad play.' One of the paradoxes of Reaney's career is that, while writing some desperately bad plays, he also created some of the central events in the modem Canadian theatre, his Donnelly trilogy paramount among them. Another paradox is that for all Reaney's acclaim as one of our most important playwrights, his plays themselves are almost never remounted professionally: not one of the major plays examined by Parker from the works of the early 1960s to Reaney's last full-length non-musical, Gyroscope (1980), appears among the thousands of productions documented in Canada on Stage since 1984. Though addressing this paradox is one of the many things Parker's book does not do, what it does do well provides ample reason for welcoming to the all too short list of books on Canadian playwriting.
How to Play is the first book on Reaney the dramatist since J. Stewart Reaney's fine 1977 monograph, which basically took us up through Sticks and Stones. So it is welcome for its discussion of the subsequent plays alone, including the final two-thirds of The Donnellys, Baldoon, The Dismissal, Wacousta!, The Canadian Brothers, King Whistle!, and Gyroscope. But Parker is not primarily interested in providing textual or theatrical analyses of individual plays except insofar as they illustrate his overriding thesis that all of Reaney's dramatic writing (including his fascinating essays, cited in abundance) enunciates a very particular 'idea of the theatre' incorporating playwright, performers, and audience in an 'ontologically' creative and playful process; combining local documentary material, modernist experiments in art and theatre, and Reaney's own mythopoeic imagination; and employing the physical, visual, and verbal languages of performance in unique dramatic collage. Parker shows how these ideas evolved from the early plays, came to maturity in the plays and Listeners' Workshops circa 1965-75, and somehow went awry in much of the later work.
The first of the book's three lengthy chapters is typical of both its strengths and weaknesses. It provides detailed and lucid examinations of the mid-century development of Canadian theatre, Reaney's own nationalism-articulated brilliantly in his Alphabet and Halloween essays-and his archival impulse to record the life of Southwestern Ontario. But in attempting to contextualize all this within the larger movements of modem art, Parker omits no possible influence or echo. He cites at least twenty playwrights-from Artaud, Barrie, and Büchner to Von Horvath, Wilder, and Yeats-along with visual artists Chagall, Klee, Miro, Cornell, and Curnoe, as well as Frye, McLuhan, Auden, Blake, Apollinaire, Stein, Wagner, Satie, Cage, and Eisenstein. Long lists of names like this punctuate the study. As a student of Frye (whose Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism he imagined turning into plays), Reaney himself sees analogues everywhere. In one passage he manages to compare Wacousta to Ahab, Byron, Satan, Heathcliff, Thoreau, Achilles, and Hamlet. But Parker's analogic overkill is merely exhausting and ultimately counter-productive. If Reaney's work is like that of so many others, the argument for his uniqueness becomes very hard to make.
The second chapter, focusing on Reaney's visual patterning and use of the physical stage, suffers from similar problems. At his worst Parker reduces the fascinating theatricality of Colours in the Dark to an arid display of art- and theatre-historical intertextuality on the one hand and ponderous catalogues of effects and devices on the other. At his best, here and in the third chapter on the verbal and auditory dimensions of Reaney's dramaturgy, Parker carefully accumulates analytical observation, textual quotation, and Reaney's own metacommentary to reveal the inner workings of an extraordinarily complex theatrical system. What Parker claims for Reaney's work is true of his own as well: it functions most effectively as collage.
By what it excludes as much as by what it contains, How to Play marks some tantalizing trails for Canadian theatre historians to explore. Parker cites, for example, Herman Voaden's stage experiments of the 1930s and, in a different context, Tornson Highway's participation in workshops on Wacousta!, without in either case developing the connections. He has no comment on the current status of Reaney's career, the absence of any major new play for over a decade. And he is silent about the reception of Reaney's plays by his audiences and the reasons why those audiences, in recent times, have been largely limited to college and university campuses. Parker's book would have benefitted from closer attention to its own first sentence, a comment by Reaney himself: 'Well, if you are going to ask questions of a playwright, I think the best place to close is to get him talking about actual theatres he's been in.'