Moira Day
Most theatre history studies concentrate on theatre as it was experienced in the larger urban centres of eastern and western Canada assuming that theatre in the rural districts either followed a similar pattern or simply did not exist. By exploring the dynamics of entertainment in the prosperous but unusually isolated Peace River country in northwestern Alberta between 1914 and 1945, this paper hopes to suggest that rural theatre, particularly in the more isolated districts, often had a distinct character of its own arising from the particular geography, social needs, economic conditions and human resources of the area.
La plupart des études de l'histoire du théâtre traitent de l'expérience théâtrale dans les plus grands centres urbains de l'ouest et de l'est canadiens, en supposant que le théâtre dans les districts ruraux suivait un modèle similaire ou tout simplement n'existait pas. Au moyen d'un examen des dynamiques du spectacle dans le district de Peace River dans l'Alberta du nord-ouest - un groupe de communautés prospères mais extraordinairement isolés - entre 1914 et 1945, cet article suggère que l'expérience rurale du théâtre, particulièrement dans les districts isolés, avait souvent un caractère distinct provenant de la géographie, des besoins sociaux, des conditions économiques, et des ressources humaines de la région.
The editor of the Grande Prairie Herald was apoplectic. The object of his wrath, a certain Reverend Wright, had decided to regale his new parishioners in Galt, Ontario, with a talk on his adventures as a missionary in the Peace country circa 1929. Unfortunately for Mr. Wright, the resulting article in the Galt Reporter reached the eye of Mr. Fredericks who promptly stormed into print himself. By what sleight of hand, he marvelled, had Mr. Wright managed to reduce the prosperous town of Grande Prairie to 'four houses, five elevators, a blacksmith shop and a hotel?' By what trick had he blinked away all the well-aged Presbyterian churches in the area, forcing him to hold his first services in the hotel dining room while waiting the building of the first church? Perhaps the time had come, Mr. Fredericks concluded sweetly, for that 'Reverend and humble gentleman' to embark on 'a study of the Great Teacher to comprehend what is meant by that noble word Truth?' 1
The obvious moral of the story is to beware of missionaries - cultural or otherwise - inclined to aggrandize their own achievements by wildly exaggerating the barbarity of the natives. But it may also have been a cautionary tale to theatre historians to be careful that their own absorption in the urban and centralized does not lead them to similarly distort or oversimplify the experience of theatre beyond the great cities. By examining the experience of theatre and related entertainments in the Peace country between 1914 and 1945 this paper hopes to establish first, that the myth of the culturally dead rural backwater needs serious re-examination, and secondly, that our understanding of the theatrical mainstream will remain incomplete and flawed without that reconsideration.
If there is one myth that the Peace River experience strongly challenges it is that all small towns automatically followed in miniature the same theatrical patterns as the large cities, or at least copied them with enough closeness that the differences were negligible. In terms of the Alberta experience, this assumption may have held more true in the case of older towns settled with dominant British/American stock and located within easy access of the big cities either through proximity or good road or railway connections. However, it overlooks the differences that such factors as a distinctive local ethnicity or religion could bring to bear on the cultural life of some communities such as Vegreville (Ukrainian) or Cardston (Mormonism); or that geography and late immigration could bring to bear on others.
The realities of late settlement, poor transportation, and extreme isolation - it took a minimum of twenty-one hours to make the 500 mile trip to Edmonton in 1927 - made Peace River's experience of the touring era unique to say the least. 2 The 'Golden Age' of touring enjoyed by the older southern communities was over before most of Peace River was even born. The first theatres, circa 1913, were movie not opera houses, and even A Doll's House, the first Ibsen play seen in Peace River, arrived in a film can in 1920. 3 Conversely, it was not until the late twenties, a time when the Road - in many of its various forms - was on its last legs elsewhere, that performing artists in the form of circuses, magicians, stock companies, vaudeville artists and chautauquas began to stream into the district with any regularity.
From the viewpoint of the visitors, there appears to have been a real fascination with the idea of bringing the performing arts into the isolated northern wilderness. Almost certainly, some of these troupes were motivated by monetary desperation and the hope that these isolated yokels would be uncultured or at least desperate enough to grasp at any entertainment that arrived, a vain and sometimes even dangerous assumption to make with any Albertan small town audience of that time. 4 Other groups, like the Chautauqua and such dramatic readers as Theresa Siegal were motivated by a purer sense of cultural missionaryism. Leona Paterson, a former student of Ms. Siegal, recollects:
Every year, Miss Siegal would go out ... and this was during the Depression, as I remember it.... She would have very special dresses made and she would go all over the smallest parts of Alberta ... in the northern parts ... and I was privileged enough to hear her rehearse. She would do full evenings of Shakespearian plays, acting out some portions and telling the story and keeping it continuing through the other. I remember that Shakespeare was one of the most popular recitals given in little tiny towns way above Edmonton and out from Red Deer....
She told stories about children coming through the bushes and it would be September, perhaps, when it was getting colder - running through the bushes with bare feet, running to get hold on to the old beaten up car of the minister to be taken to this concert, be it in a schoolhouse or a church and the poor clothing of the mothers and the desolate look about the farm people at that time. That would perhaps answer you [why] everybody went.... People craved culture. 5
Sheilagh Jameson's book, Chautauqua
in Canada, which draws strongly on the recollections of many former
Chautauqua workers, including Nola Erickson, the co-organizer of the Canadian
Chautauqua, contains many similar accounts of cultural missionary zeal.
Of equal importance is the fact, that, like Theresa Siegal, the Chautauqua
appears to have viewed its ventures into the isolated North country as
a particularly good example of the stubborn missionary spirit triumphing
over material hardships to reach the culturally impoverished. Jameson notes:
Perhaps it was his pioneering spirit, the same urge that had driven him to bring Chautauqua to the Canadian prairies initially which prompted J.M. [Erickson] to push still further north. Besides satisfying his sense of adventure, the move to send the tentacles of Chautauqua into remote areas undoubtedly was influenced by the realization of the need for the cultural advantages his organization could bring to these frontier regions.... The Peace River experiment which began with four towns and a two day program in 1919 was successful.... A circuit in the Peace country continued to operate until 1931. 6
But again, beware of the example of
the Reverend White. The locals, while having the utmost respect for cultural
mandates, appear to have had a far more ambiguous view of the people practicing
them. While Ms. Siegal's 1932 tour received respectful if not significant
notice in the district newspapers, the Peace River Record had this
to say about the 'successful' 1919 Chautauqua tour:
While the lectures on Malay Peninsula by Carveth Wells were very interesting, the remainder of the programme was mediocre, the first night in particular being a very poor class of entertaining.... they will probably have better success and meet with a great deal more favor if they can get away from the idea that anything can be palmed off on the north, and remember the fact that possibly a majority of their audiences will have been accustomed to as good or better than themselves for a lifetime. 7
The paper's review of the 1931 tour
was even more scathing:
Seldom, if ever, has it stooped so low as in the selection of plays included in last week's series. There is no question as to the ability of both actors and actresses; they were worthy of producing better shows.... Chautauqua has built its reputation on good speakers and choice music. This reputation can readily be destroyed by the substitution of plays of mediocre character. 8
If the 1919 reviewer was likely making
reference to the fact that many of the district's residents were comparatively
recent arrivals from more cosmopolitan centres where they had been well
acquainted with the arts, the source of the second reviewer's discontent
can probably be traced to something more basic: however much these touring
professionals might choose to romanticize their northern odysseys as the
final triumph of art over wilderness, the natives themselves were inclined
to feel by that time that their wilderness was already flowering with a
variety of more hardy and useful blooms of their own devising.
It was not that the more exotic offerings were unwelcome. But it has to be recognized that the local efforts were created out of human needs far more compelling than a simple desire for some makeshift entertainment until the 'real thing' arrived from the outside world.
And in terms of the rural district, the most compelling need of all was community survival. Small towns, especially if they were the recent creations of an immigration boom, seldom took their existence for granted in the way cities did, and this was particularly true of small towns on the frontier. Behind the northern editors' constant exhortations to buy and advertise locally, boost the town and shun catalogue shopping lies a very real terror that the human grip so lately placed on the land could yet be shaken off and the indifferent wilderness stream back to claim its own.
Within this context, there was certainly a sound economic motivation for doing local entertainments. Where touring professionals took money out of the fragile rural economy, amateurs were lauded for ploughing it back into the town and usually into a variety of worthy local projects designed to build the community.
Far more important, though, was the role ascribed to local entertainment in promoting the psychological and social dynamics of community survival. If the arts were a still, soft voice of human warmth, grace and laughter for those buffeted by a demanding, inhuman environment, then the towns had a crucial role to play as cultural leaders in preserving the mental and social health, not just of the village itself, but of the entire farming community. As one rural writer expressed it in 1921:
The small towns and villages which are the real centres of all country districts, and whose very existence depends upon their surrounding farming communities, have a duty and opportunity in this respect.... There is little community life in the open country except what centres in the small towns and villages.... Its lack constitutes what one man has called 'the intolerable condition of rural fife.' Railways, telephones and automobiles have greatly relieved loneliness ... [but] ... there is no play for children; no recreation for the young folks. Yet [life] must be jollier or we shall see more and more farms abandoned, and more and more farm people moving to the city. 9
Nor were abandoned farms the worst
tragedy which could result when the mind could no longer tolerate the monotonous
grind of farm work. In 1937 residents, sensing something amiss at a local
farmhouse, walked into a grisly scene. Not only had the farmer, babbling
on about two of his wife's former lovers, ransacked the house and slit
the throats of his wife and two children, but he had battered them with
such savagery that blood had spattered as far as the kitchen, staining
the fresh bread rising on the stove. 10
The depressingly frequent accounts of violent death through suicide, murder and mishap were a constant reminder that the land was a source of death and madness as well as life, and communities had to create their own psychological and social defenses against it.
This obsession with survival had several far-reaching implications as regards the development of local theatricals. One such implication is that the emphasis on producing 'jollity' via a constant stream of Hawaiian trios, masquerade balls, minstrel shows and upper class British and American farces may have been less a simple reflection of bucolic bad taste than a recognition that controlled escape into a simple, legitimized world of exotic color, fantasy and humor could prevent more lethal boltings of mind from the bleak reality of the landscape. Granted, 'good' outside entertainment could fulfill this function as readily as 'bad' local entertainment - but only the local entertainment could simultaneously force people to exercise their own physical and creative resources - and to do it within the context of the kind of group action and co-operation needed to jointly achieve common goals and build a sense of community.
To this extent, many productions were less an aesthetic experience than a community celebration. The local newspaper critic, if he valued his local credit, 11 always lauded the good work, not just of the actors, but the stage carpenter and scene painter. He also graciously acknowledged the efforts of the local singers, dancers and comedians who performed 'so skilfully' between the acts, and praised the generosity of the local orchestra who played selections before, during and after the play at the big dance that usually followed.
Nor did the community building end at the boundaries of the village. However isolated they may have been from the outside world, local artists proved to be surprisingly mobile within the district despite the notoriously dreadful road conditions. The first recorded touring production to reach Grande Prairie circa 1918 came not from the south but the neighboring village of Lake Saskatoon, 12 and by the mid-twenties it was not uncommon for village amateur societies to tour their productions to several points in the district before retiring the show for good. It is true that the gumbo-like conditions of the roads after a good rain squelched more than one promising career. As one correspondent wrote in 1929:
The Dimsdale players journeyed to Valhalla on Tuesday last to once more present Deacon Dubbs to the public - or at least some of them did. The rest spent a pleasant evening pushing cars out of mudholes until the wee sma' hours of the morning. 13
But if mudholes - and blizzards - sometimes
postponed productions and diminished audiences they seem to have had little
effect on the locals' determination to travel, sleighs and wagons readily
taking the place of cars if the latter were unavailable or unusable because
of impossible driving conditions. In short, the myth of the isolated backwoodsman
waiting in breathless anticipation for his one dose of culture a year via
the Chautauqua may need a second look.
A third consequence of this emphasis on community building was that towns and villages sometimes had a surprisingly ambivalent attitude towards the mass entertainment which was theoretically supposed to spare them the trouble of producing their own clumsy efforts. Local editors were quick to hail both radio and film as valuable windows on the larger world and to acknowledge their superior ability to dazzle, intrigue and entertain an audience. But this sentiment came mixed with concerns about their impact on the community's social and moral fabric, since these media were seen as encouraging passivity and loss of self-reliance. As one commentator noted in 1931:
The automobile, the radio and the talking pictures have made it possible for people to travel to places they would never have seen, to learn to appreciate music and to see the biggest entertaining stars in the smallest towns ... but it is a question if these things have not taken more real things out of the people than they have put into [them].... 14
The Athabasca Herald similarly
cautioned:
Professional entertainment is all very well, but it can never take the place of personal culture. The sale of radios should not decrease the use of piano and violins. It is to be feared that sometimes it does so .... 15
This concern about the potential danger
of the media to the local community is perhaps reflected in the fact that
the two most successful movie managers in the district, Mr. Boyd and Mr.
Donald, were careful to promote themselves as active boosters of all community
activities, their theatres, as far as possible, being open to a variety
of dances, local entertainments and civic celebrations. For instance, the
same issue of the Peace River Record which mentioned that Mr. Boyd
was bringing Peace River its first Sonja Heinie movie also lauded his efforts
in helping to organize a fancy-skating club in the town. 16
Similarly, when Grande Prairie opened its first radio station CFGP in 1937 it stressed the opportunities this opened for promoting and developing local talent. In 1941 the staff started their own weekly serial, Smile Please, which featured the six writer-producers huddled over a single script and single microphone while one of them endeavored to get 'a sound effect working three or four lines before it should come into the script.' 17 The Northern Night Hawks, a local comedy team, also gave several special hour and a half programs featuring music, singing, readings, comedy, and such artists as Joe Pender and his Wapiti Wood Ticks or Norman Devlin 'the yodelling cowboy from McClennan.' 18
Even more importantly the Herald, in conjunction with CFGP, decided to sponsor an hour long parade of talent every Sunday afternoon, the artists to consist solely of Peace River district talent. Adjudication was available to those who wanted to develop as well as expose their talent, and listeners were invited to write in and vote on their favorite amateur act. Between 7 November 1937 and 4 December 1938 a constant stream of district singers, musicians, choirs and actors travelled into Grande Prairie on Sundays to share a potpourri of music and drama in English, Norwegian, French and Ukrainian. So popular was the series with performers that over 200 people - including a fifty-eight member party from Rycroft crammed into seven cars - appeared in the first eight programs alone, with some artists travelling from as far away as Shearerdale and Doe River - 120 miles away in British Columbia. The program was also a hit with listeners. One correspondent from Richmond Hill, commenting that each program seemed better than the one before, further added:
We have just now finished listening to the seventeenth broadcast of the Herald's Parade of Talent, and to those of us who are shut in and denied the privelege [sic] of attending church, the broadcast given by the Sexsmith Parade of Talent (from the Peace River Bible Institute) was certainly appreciated. 19
Having indicated that there were compelling
social, psychological and economic reasons for isolated people to create
their own 'bad' theatrical entertainments regardless of the advent of 'good'
radio, film and touring performers, the question may well be raised whether
the whole issue of aesthetic quality is irrelevant to a discussion of rural
drama. Significantly, the rural people themselves did not feel it was.
In fact, at least one editor strongly promoting agrarian idealism chose
to argue that in that respect it was the cities who were beholden to the
countryside for their culture, rather than the other way around:
In country districts of Western Canada there is a tendency to regard the cities as the seats of culture and wisdom.
But facts demonstrate the contrary to be the truth. On the farm and in the small towns and villages the search for wisdom and beauty is more keen than in the cities and it is there that birth is given to the discriminating a'preciation of the beautiful and the fine arts....
It is true that in the cities one will find intellectual leaders and competant [sic] exponents of art, music and the drama. But where did they originate? In a substantial percentage of instances, the farm or the small town home will be found to have given them birth and is the source of at least their early education. Later, because of the neccesity [sic] of finding an outlet for their activities, they move to the cities and there is a steady infiltration of talent from the country to the urban centres. If it were not so, culture in the cities would eventually wilt and die for lack of revivifying material.
For even as the land is the original source of wealth so is it the fountain of thought and culture. 20
Preposterous? Not when one considers
that as late as 1951 some 70% of the Alberta population still lived on
farms, villages and towns under 1000 population. 21
Under the circumstances it could well be argued that the countryside was
not only an important feeder of talent to the cities but to its own arts
scene as well - especially since the flow of talent was less one-sided
than often supposed. A number of the music and dance instructors who graced
the district for a time had had professional training in New York or London,
while Dr. William Greene, an important local director, was the nephew of
Clay M. Greene, the American playwright, critic and author.
There is little doubt that the local productions were handicapped by a shortage of physical resources. The halls in Bluesky, for instance, were still lit by gas as late as 1923, 22 and some towns did not acquire universal electricity until the late twenties. It is also true that this, in conjunction with the small, scattered population, made it difficult for Peace River towns to sustain Little Theatre societies of the complex art theatre model.
This did not, however, prevent communities from attempting more ambitious work on a less regular basis. The town of Peace River became particularly noted for a string of large-cast operatic productions during the 1920s. Bradbury's Esther, featuring a cast of 45 adults, 22 children, a small local orchestra, with scenery and exotic costuming made entirely by local talent, first set the trend in 1923, with the Record whimsically urging both audiences ('Have you booked your seats for the drama? Don't emulate the foolish virgins.' ) 23 and cast members ('The Oppressors and the Oppressed are reminded to be punctual in their arrival at the Baptist Church') 24 to greater efforts. Equally impressive was Ben-Hur, produced in 1928, with a cast of similar magnitude and with a particularly distinguished guest in attendance in the person of Lieutenant-Governor Egbert.
The critical response to both dramas is interesting insofar as their worth as aesthetic pieces is seen as inextricably tied to their value as community-building activities. In publicly thanking the townspeople for their help in mounting Esther, a production which some had judged 'too big a work to be undertaken' 25 by such a small community, the musical director, Mr. Grimwood, noted that not only had the impossible been achieved through a rehearsal attendence of 95% from the amateur cast, and the free, public-spirited contributions of the local church, press, school inspectors and private citizens to the project, but the local economy had been stimulated by buying most of the scenery and costuming materials locally and making things on-site instead of renting them readymade from elsewhere. In the case of Ben-Hur, the aesthetic quality of the opera was acknowledged by the railway's civic-minded willingness to adjust the train schedules to accommodate guests from other local towns and communities, a move which would again tend to benefit local businesses and merchants:
Through the courtesy of the manager of the E.D. and B.C. Railway, the regular passenger train on its return trip will be detained at Peace River until Friday after the performance, thus enabling the public at McLennan, High Prairie and Grouard and other places to spend ten hours at Peace River to attend the Ben-Hur performance and return home the same day. 26
However, by far the most noteworthy
of the Peace River efforts was its production of the anti-war play Journey's
End in 1930. The director, Dr. Greene, dictated that only veterans
would be chosen for the cast, and further called upon the help of soldiers
to produce:
the highly realistic gunfire, flares and general atmosphere of the front line in the production at which some 3,000 shots were fired behind the scenes including several hundred rounds of shotgun ammunition. 27
The local newspaper went on to note
that the gunfire had, in fact, been so impressive that at least one local
resident had bolted his doors in terror and 'prepared for the worst,' believing
the town to be under bombardment. 28
That spring, the Peace River Record wrote:
It was more than a co-incidence that the play, which has its scene in the front line trench at St. Quentin, should be presented by a company of amateurs of whom each and every one had taken his part at that point (St. Quentin) during the hottest days of the Great War, for every player on the stage was but going through as a play, the scenes in which he had once been an actor in real life. And if an object lesson were needed of how the hatred bred of the war has been wiped away, it is in the fact that the part of the German prisoner in the play was taken by August Thompson, who in the play wore the same uniform that between 1914 and 1918 he wore as a soldier of the German army in the opposing front line trench before St. Quentin 29 .... Twelve years ago these men were battering each other in deadly earnest in the manner the play depicts 30 ... now they meet twelve years after to depict in friendship and play the grim reality of a few years ago.... Mr. Thompson is now 'another one of us' in the vast melting pot of this great north country. 31
Again, it is interesting to note that
the reviewer finds it impossible to speak of the aesthetic superiority
of the play without linking it to the superior community-building value
and symbolism of the production.
It is just as interesting to note that the most important unit of fine arts production in the north country was not the Little Theatre Society, with its emphasis on sustained artistic production, but the annual community-generated music and drama festival with its double mandate of 1) furthering community socialization and survival by drawing together people of all ages across the district in a community affair requiring a high degree of group involvement and co-operation and 2) encouraging the aesthetic development and training of young people in particular through healthy competition and exposure to trained outside adjudicators. The Grande Prairie Herald wrote in 1927:
The encouragement of the study of music particularly by our young people in the schools, must tend to exert an elevating influence in all parts of the district, which will do much to offset those disadvantages which are so much a part of life in a new country.... It is a remarkable fact that a large proportion of our great singers and musicians have come from remote and obscure places, their talent often discovered by the accidental visit of some judge of musical ability. That there is plenty of opportunity for children of our own district to win high honors in future years is an assured fact if they are given that encouragement and training that will tend to bring out and develop the natural talent that many of them possess. To this end, the encouragement of the musical festival becomes a public duty. 32
The first festival, organized in Peace
River in 1925, was generally credited by the provincial Department of Education
as one of the prototypes for the kind of locally organized arts festival
which was to rapidly gain root in many other small towns across the province.
Within the district alone the festival, by 1940, had spread from one to
six towns and grown from a simple choral and voice competition to a broader
performing arts forum including elocution, public speaking, choral speaking,
folk dancing - and drama.
In a sense, theatre had been a part of the festival from the start. Britannia and Her Children and Journey's End had appeared as special features at the 1925 and 1930 festivals respectively, and The China Shop was invited but unable to attend the 1927 event. Nonetheless, a one-act play competition was formally added in 1931. 33
By 1940 the festival's twin mandate had again pushed this competition in new and interesting directions. In the interests of economic parity the already spartan staging requirements, at least in Grande Prairie, became even more spartan. In 1934 the committee dictated that no scenery would be allowed but a basic indoor and outdoor set supplied by the committee itself; 34 by the late 1930s this was further reduced to just curtains. 35
At the same time a surprising number of different classes and divisions rapidly developed to accommodate all elements of the town and farming community. Besides the original open division for adult drama societies, there were soon separate classes for rural and urban high schools, and a large public school division further broken down into grades I-III, IV-VI and Junior High.
There is no doubt that the festivals succeeded very well in their mandate for widespread, popular involvement. By 1939 the Peace River and Battle River festivals together boasted almost 600 entries evenly divided between rural and urban participants. It was also clear that the dance, elocution and play entries had come to substantially outnumber the original music entries, the two festivals alone featuring a minimum of twenty-three one-act plays. 36
Nor were aesthetic standards of the more conventional kind ignored. Although adjudicators treated the children's divisions as more of an educational than performance situation, many nonetheless praised the increasing aesthetic quality of all the entries, and judged some of the productions in the open category on a par with anything they had seen at the official provincial festival.
Still, to at least one adjudicator, R.W.G. of Vancouver, the real power and uniqueness of the festivals again lay in their extraordinary blending of the popular and the aesthetic. Commenting on the 1930 Peace River festival he noted:
Many came in for the festival from a radius of 200 miles. The hotels were packed, private homes took up to five people each and the Immigration Hall was rapidly converted into sleeping quarters for over 100 boys, all contestants in one or more of the various events.
And away up there on a farm is a young girl of fifteen years of age who during the harvest helped by driving a tractor. She was at the festival with her violin playing the Elman transcription of Shubert's 'Serenade' and Ten Have's 'Allegro Brilliante' in the open contest. Let me say here and now that I have never heard anyone up to twice her age play the violin with such innate understanding and musicianship; her playing alone was worth the trip....
It was a revelation to me, one which will form a memory for many years to come, for connected with Festivals and Festival matters for the past fifteen years, I have never seen anything to equal it, no, not in all Vancouver or in Southern Alberta for that matter. 37
To sum up, this paper tries to make
the point that the dynamics of rural entertainment, particularly in the
more isolated northern communities of pre-World War II Alberta, were more
complex than often acknowledged. It was a deeply-rooted desire for community
survival rather than a simple desire to 'make do' until the 'good stuff'
arrived which was the real driving force behind the creation of most local
entertainment, and which continued to protect it against the live and media
entertainments that entered the district in the 1920s. Local radio and
movie managers, recognizing the power of that motivation, worked the integration
of local talent as far as possible into their operations to avoid the charge
of being community destroyers. And while rural residents were certainly
concerned about aesthetic excellence and development, their most vital
fine arts form, the arts festival, combined the aesthetic mandate with
a broader community-building concern.
A recognition that rural arts dynamics were more complex than they appear may help us realize that so were the relationships such groups had with larger arts organizations, such as the Chautauqua. It has often been claimed, for instance, that the latter failed because better roads and cars reduced isolation, and the competitive media of radio, magazine and film changed people's tastes. Is this true? Not entirely. It may be true that locals judging the Chautauqua as professional entertainment may have eventually found it wanting in comparison to the 'cheaper, better quality' material in radio and film. But it has to be considered that Chautauqua probably endured as long as it did even more on its strength as a community developer and educator than on its professional one - and that by the late 1920s the local entertainments which may have originally helped whet an appetite for Chautauqua had in fact developed to such a degree that they had rendered it obsolete. In short, the Chautauqua may have ended less because the locals had simply become more sophisticated consumers than that they felt they had outgrown it as artists and community builders in their own right. 38
Another question may be why the Saskatchewan Drama League festivals which also ran multi-division competitions that continued throughout the war are hailed as unique and important, while the Peace River festivals and others of their kind in Alberta remain largely unmentioned. Could it be that the first were organized by a centralized provincial drama league affiliated with the national and hence 'important' Dominion Drama Festival, while the latter were organized in a more decentralized fashion at a local, rural and hence 'unimportant' level?
This question - and others of its kind - may remain open-ended. But certainly, if we are not careful, we could also be inadvertently guilty of Reverend White's sin of reducing much of complexity and importance to 'four houses, five elevators, a blacksmith shop and a hotel. 39
Notes
'THE COUNTRY MOUSE AT PLAY': THEATRE IN THE PEACE RIVER DISTRICT 1914-1945
Moira Day
This paper was researched and written with the help of a SSHRCC post-doctoral fellowship. Special thanks are due to my research assistants, Deb Tihanyi and Steve Olson, and to Professor George Mann of the University of Lethbridge who kindly sent me a copy of the Sterndale-Bennett letter cited.
1 Grande Prairie Herald,
5 Nov 1937
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2 G.P. Herald, 25
Sept 1937
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3 Peace River Record,
26 Mar 1920
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4 Mob violence was not unheard of if the performance struck an audience the wrong way, though acerbic editors accounted for most of the damage done to presumptuous troupers. One infuriated tour manager who accused the local Banff reviewer of being as foreign to good aesthetic taste as 'Bethoven's [sic] finest Sonatto [sic] is to [a] Fiji Islander' received the following crushing reply:
To get down to brass tacks, not a single member of the so-called opera company could sing or act. The chorus on the first night consisted of three girls, clothed in abbreviated chorus costume, and their singing, dancing and ballet dancing was certainly the limit - and then some. As to the opera itself, 'there was no wit in the fashion, there was no plot in the plan' and an average bunch of school kids, gathered from any school in the country, would have acquitted themselves more credibly. . . . It is about time that such 'cheap skates' as the manager of the Beggar Prince Opera Co., who secured a tent in which to house and feed his so-called artists while here, thus saving hotel expenses, was given to understand that the people of Banff will not be imposed upon by barn stormers. (Banff Craig and Canyon, 21 June 1912)
5 LEONA PATERSON. Interview
with MARILYN POTTS, 10 Feb 1982, Univ of Alberta Archives
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6 SHEILAGH JAMESON. Chautauqua
in Canada. Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute 1979 p 90, 93
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7 P.R. Record, 12
Sept 1919
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8 P.R. Record, 4
Dec 1931
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9 'The Country Life Problem',
Saint Paul Star, 19 May 1921
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10 G.P. Herald,
22 Jan 1937
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11 Townspeople were usually
prepared to accept criticism from a trained, outside adjudicator in a competitive
festival situation but they clearly felt that when it came to locals reviewing
productions by the community at large, the home newspaper had a higher
duty to bolstering community spirit than serving the lofty dictates of
aesthetic truth. As one man discovered after giving a negative review of
the Grande Prairie community choir in 1920, any reviewer foolish enough
to break that unspoken rule was apt to quickly find himself a social pariah,
and publicly blasted for callously throwing 'a gift involving much love
and sacrifice' back in the face of the givers (G.P. Herald, 11 May
1920)
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12 G.P. Herald, 19
Feb 1918
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13 G.P. Herald, 3
May 1929
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14 Edson-Jasper Signal,
10 Dec 1931
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15 Athabasca Echo,
13 Feb 1931. This sympathy towards live musicians also extended beyond
the local level. One editor compared the firing of thousands of trained
musicians upon the advent of the talkies with the cruelty of a farmer 'turning
his stock out to forage for themselves in the middle of winter.' (G.P.
Herald, 7 Feb 1930)
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16 P.R. Record, 17
Dec 1931. In their book-length study of leisure and recreation in Alberta
up to 1945, historians IRENE KMET and DONALD WETHERALL examine this hostility
and suspicion towards film at greater depth
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17 G.P. Herald, 5
Dec 1941
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18 G.P. Herald, 8
Dec 1938
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19 G.P. Herald, 3
Mar 1938. Because the Herald was sponsoring the radio hour its coverage
of the event between 15 Oct 1937 and 15 Dec 1938 is fairly extensive
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20 'Culture in the Country,'
E-J Signal, 20 May 1937
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21 Canada Yearbook
1952-53 (Ottawa: King's Printer and Controller 1953) 144
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22 Waterhole Northern
Review, 25 Dec 1923
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23 P.R. Record, 15
Mar 1923
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24 P.R. Record, 15
Mar 1923
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25 P.R. Record, 29
Mar 1923
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26 P.R. Record, 9
Mar 1928
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27 P.R. Record, 4
April 1930
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28 P.R. Record,
11 April 1930
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29 P.R. Record,
4 April 1930
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30 P.R. Record, 28
Mar 1930
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31 P.R. Record, 4
April 1930
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32 G.P. Herald, 2
May 1927
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33 P.R. Record, 9
October 1931. In a letter written by JAMES ADAM to W. STERNDALE-BENNETT
(28 June 1929), ADAM mentions that on his last visit to the Peace Country
to adjudicate he had tried to talk the Grande Prairie Festival into including
a one-act play competition in its festival program. He suggests that STERNDALE-BENNETT's
idea of starting a provincial drama festival is intriguing, but perhaps
it could best be realized by integrating it into the existing musical festival
system. It is interesting to note how near the musical festival network
came to being the cradle of the Alberta Drama League. It is also interesting
to note that the one-act competition was established at Peace River only
a year after the official provincial drama festival was established
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34 G.P. Herald, 12
Jan 1934
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35 G.P. Herald, 22
Jan 1937
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36 P.R. Record, 5
May 1939. According to the Record, there were 227 musical entries
as opposed to 342 elocution-drama-dance entries
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37 G.P. Herald, 4
July 1930
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38 There is, in fact,
every indication that rural Albertans continued to appreciate the Chautauqua
format as a community-building mechanism, but that they increasingly saw
little need to pay professionals to do what they were capable of doing
themselves. As recorded in the Department of Extension reports between
1934 and 1939, a flourishing community - talent or 'local chautauqua' movement
quickly succeeded the collapse of the professional Chautauqua movement
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39 G.P. Herald, 5
Nov 1937
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Sources
Newspapers 1914-1945:
Athabasca Echo
Edson-Jasper Signal
Fairview Northern Review
Fairview Post
Grande Prairie Herald
Lake Saskatoon Journal
Peace River Record
St. Paul Star
Waterhole Northern Review
Reports:
Canada Yearbooks 1915-1953. Ottawa: King's Printer and Controller of Stationery
Department of Extension Annual Reports, University of Alberta 1934-1939. University of Alberta Archives, Edmonton
Letters:
Letter from James Adam to W. Sterndale-Bennett. 28 June 1929
Interviews:
Leona Paterson. Interviewed by Marilyn Potts, 10 Feb 1982. University of Alberta Archives
Books:
Jameson, Sheilagh. Chautauqua in Canada. Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute 1979
Wetherall, Donald G. with Irene Kmet. Useful Pleasures: The Shaping of Leisure in Alberta 1896-1945. Regina: Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism - Canadian Plains Research Center 1990