Nigel Hunt
To begin this look at play publishing trends in Canada I shall put my cards - at least some of them - on the table.
First, I was asked to look mainly at the more recent entries into the play publishing market, rather than presses like Talonbooks (of Vancouver) and Simon & Pierre (of Toronto) which have been around for over a decade and have published many plays.
Second, I have a vested interest in play publishing since as editor of Theatrum theatre magazine, I play a part in choosing the five plays we publish each year as part of our magazine. Of course I read many of the plays that are published in English in Canada each year (and have done so since about 1985), but my thoughts on play publishing can't help but be influenced by my own participation in the field.
Third, I have made no attempt to survey the entire field of play publishing and come up with statistics and conclusions on play publishing activities. My ideas and observations are based on my own knowledge and examination of the lists of play publishers, and my conversations with several people involved in play publishing, particularly Robert Wallace, former editor of Canadian Theatre Review and since 1982 drama editor of the Coach House Press; Gordon Shillingford and Peter Atwood of Blizzard Publishing; and Alan Filewod and Natalie Rewa, editor and associate editor respectively of Canadian Theatre Review.
From the point of view of a play publisher, the first thing that became clear to me when Theatrum decided in 1989 to reformat and include play texts as part of our publication was how many plays never get published, and how long it often takes the ones that do to appear in print. This enables anyone, either book or periodical publisher, entering the market to pretty well have his/her choice from the many wonderful plays that get written and produced across the country each year. I continue to be grateful - and somewhat amazed - that Theatrum can obtain permission to publish some very fine plays for an honorarium too embarrassingly low to reveal in print. Of course what is more important for the playwright is the exposure that our subscription and retail sales (totalling about 2,500 copies per issue) manage to generate. We've found, too, that such exposure can lead to further productions, something always of great interest to playwrights. Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love was first published by Theatrum in our September/October 1989 issue, following its Calgary premiere. (It was later published in book form by Blizzard.) The well-known Quebec director André Brassard revealed in the programme notes for his production of the play in Montreal in the spring of 1991 that he'd discovered the text by reading Theatrum. Going the other way, our publication of the English translation of Jeanne-Mance Delisle's A Live Bird in Its Jaws led to its discovery by a small Toronto theatre company and its subsequent production in November 1991.
The other thing to remember is that (unlike publishing poetry and fiction) publishing a play text, since it usually follows production, is not as risky in the sense that the text has already had some sort of reaction from critics and audiences.
Then again, the sales market for plays is not huge. It is primarily educational (if you can get Canadian plays put on university and high school course lists), followed by theatre professionals and amateurs, followed a very distant third by the general public who, at least in Canada, have rarely shown themselves to be interested in reading plays by Canadian playwrights. 1 This, we hear time and again, explains why plays (except the rare anthology) are not published by major presses like McClelland and Stewart, leaving that responsibility to literary presses and other small publishers. Yet a play can hold its own in terms of sales figures against a fiction title because plays often sell consistently over a number of years as part of a publisher's backlist, especially if the play continues to be produced, while sales for a fiction title more typically peter out after one year. Anne Chislett's Quiet in the Land sold 2,000-3,000 copies in its first year, won the Governor General's Award, and has sold steadily each year since then; it remains one of Coach House Press's biggest selling titles. Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), which also won a Governor General's Award, by September 1991 was already into its third printing (representing more than 5,000 copies), with no signs of letting up as subsequent productions of the play continue to spur sales. Robert Wallace insists that the real reason most publishers ignore plays in fact has nothing to do with sales but is the result of a prejudice against play texts as 'a second-class art form,' a stand-in for the real thing.
Perhaps such a realization of the sales possibilities of plays has led more publishers to enter the market. Joining the old faithfuls mentioned above we now have plays being published on a regular basis by Blizzard Publishing (of Winnipeg), NeWest Press (in Edmonton), Nu-Age Editions (of Montreal), Guernica (also of Montreal), Fifth House (of Saskatoon), Women's Press and Sister Vision (of Toronto), Wild East Publishing Co-operative (of Fredericton), and perhaps others of which I am unaware. There is also Playwrights Canada Press, the publishing imprint of the Playwrights Union of Canada (PUC), which publishes five or six titles each year in trade paperback format. These plays are chosen by a hired, independent editor from a shortlist put together by a committee from submissions by PUC members. PUC also makes members' scripts available in a 'Copyscript' format (computer printed and cerlox bound) in order to meet requests from potential producers. This format serves the market for producers since the play scripts are made available more quickly and less expensively than when published in book form.
One interesting fact to note from this list of play publishers is that there is respectable regional representation. Considering how few plays are published - compared to fiction, poetry or even the number of new plays produced - the diversity of Canadian playwriting is not poorly served. Wild East has to date published two anthologies of writing by the Fredericton Women's Theatre Collective. NeWest, as the name indicates, publishes work from the Western provinces, including play collections by such authors as Sharon Pollock, Rex Deverell, Wilfred Watson and Ken Mitchell. Blizzard started out doing only Western Canadian plays since, as Gordon Shillingford told me, 'we believe our playwrights in the west are being ignored in eastern Canada,' but now has only about half of its list made up of Western Canadian plays. Blizzard also picked up several recently published play titles from Summerhill, which ceased business in 1990 and was later sold. 2 Nu-Age started out publishing plays by English-speaking Montrealers Kent Stetson (a bilingual edition featuring Warm Wind in China and its French translation), Colleen Curran, and three volumes by Vittorio Rossi. In the fall of 1991, however, they broke the pattern by publishing a collection of two plays by Allan Stratton, who is not based in Montreal. Guernica, which publishes books in English and in French, specializes in the work of Italian-Canadian authors. Guernica has published a two-play volume by Marco Miccone (translated from French into English), as well as English-Montrealer Michael Springate, Québécoise Maryse Pelletier (her Governor General's Award-winning play translated into English as Duo for Obstinate Voices) and a play by Albertan Caterina Edwards. PUC publishes works from across the country, in keeping with its national mandate. Moving from geographical regions to cultural regions, Fifth House concentrates on publishing works by Native writers (their play list includes two books each by Tomson Highway and Drew Hayden Taylor), while in keeping with their publishing mandate, Women's Press and Sister Vision publish plays by women of colour (Djanet Sears, ahdri zhina mandiela), Native women (Monique Mojica) and lesbian writers (Audrey Butler).
The two theatre publications that regularly publish plays in English, Theatrum (five plays a year since 1989) and Canadian Theatre Review (at least four plays per year since 1974), in keeping with their nation-wide perspectives, publish plays from across Canada as well as plays by writers from cultural backgrounds or working in forms that are underserved by book publishers. (A third periodical, Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien has also published plays on occasion.) CTR's current editor, Alan Filewod, for instance, told me that he chooses plays 'because of the theatrical techniques they represent.' Associate editor Natalie Rewa explains that the plays she chooses fall into three categories: (1) plays that are important 'for the record' so that people can read them; (2) plays which are 'important for what they're trying to do'; or (3) plays that no one else will ever produce again or publish.
Despite the fact that many plays are published in neither book nor periodical form, I've found that many of the plays which Theatrum has published have later appeared from book publishers. I was surprised, for instance, when our first published play, The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine, a clown-based show produced by Theatre Columbus which relies on copious stage directions to try to convey the humour and verve of the production, was republished by Playwrights Canada Press. This has made me try to choose plays to publish which are even more eclectic and experimental so as to avoid too much duplication.
Perhaps the most exciting development in play publishing is the one which is yet to come. More and more, as Canadian theatre continues to mature, gain confidence and try out new forms, leaving naturalism further and further behind, play publishers will have the challenge of how to convey these works to readers on the page. Clearly the theatrical experience is never represented solely by what's on the page. (The endless variations in interpreting and staging the plays of Shakespeare show this.) Some plays already in Canadian theatres are forcing publishers to come up with new ideas on how to present them on the page. La Trilogie des dragons, created by Robert Lepage and Théâtre Repère, is a powerful theatrical experience and an extremely successful show still touring internationally some six years after its initial creation, but the fact is that simply printing the dialogue and a few stage directions would not do any sort of justice to what the piece is actually about since so much is conveyed through lighting, movement, etc. Instead of publishing the play as such, the Quebec theatre journal, Cahiers de théâtre Jeu (which does not publish plays) devoted most (173 of 240 pages) of an entire issue (No 45, 1987) to descriptive and interpretive essays as well as interviews with the entire creative team and lots of photographs and diagrams, to convey the experience of La Trilogie. Only a few excerpts of dialogue were actually included but the production was both documented and conveyed to a reader much more effectively than if just script and photos had appeared.
Natalie Rewa had the same challenge when she wanted to somehow present another production (Rivage à l'abandon) by another visually oriented Quebec company, Carbone 14, in an issue of Canadian Theatre Review (Fall 1990). Instead of presenting the text by German playwright Heiner Müller, she decided that the best way to 'publish the performance' would be to have a photo essay (seven pages total with nine photos and an essay by Diane Pavlovic, translated by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott). The same issue also featured publication of another Robert Lepage show (co-written with Marie Brassard), Polygraph, along with an interpretive essay and seven production photos, which points out a problem Rewa freely acknowledges: often there just aren't enough good photos available to fully document such a play. Rewa bemoans the state of our 'still very traditionally based publishing industry' before concluding, 'the plays just aren't written for the typesetters.'
Some innovative attempts have been tried elsewhere. Bonnie Marranca's 1977 anthology, The Theatre of Images (New York: Drama Book Specialists), published the texts of three unusual productions, Robert Wilson's A Letter for Queen Victoria, Richard Foreman's Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, and Lee Breuer's The Red Horse Animation, three shows in which text - when used at all - is merely pre-text, and visual tableau a more significant means of communication. The last of these three was printed as a 32-page colour comic strip complete with bubble captions, a move that Marranca. dubs 'a textual alternative' but justified since the 'cinematic "cuts" of Red Horse frequently focus the actors in close-up; the "frames" are duplicated in the actual comic book documentation of the performance.'
In a different way, Robert Wallace's insistence on contextualization in his play publishing at CHP is also a way to better present plays which resist the printed page. Plays published by CHP, even single volume ones, don't go to press without at least an introduction - in order, as Wallace says, 'to situate it in a time and place so we can see a play doesn't issue out of a vacuum' - and sometimes much more. When CHP published Linda Griffiths' play Jessica, Wallace had to work very closely with the playwright to devise a script notation which could indicate some of the metaphysical transformations in the show. Several different type styles were employed to suggest different levels of dramatic activity. Moreover, Wallace insisted on having sufficient introductory material, causing the book to take a further two years as the journey which Griffiths and her collaborator, the Métis writer Maria Campbell, took (both to create the play and to get it into print) produced dialogue-form essay material far in excess of the play itself. Wallace admits that in the book - which was eventually titled The Book of Jessica to reflect that its concerns went far beyond the play text - the play is 'so heavily contextualized that the context may outweigh the play.... You could say that the introduction got out of hand.'
When I spoke to him in September 1991 Wallace was working on several other projects for CHP which require innovative approaches. One was a collection of gay plays including Daniel MacIvor's 2-2-Tango, which relies as much upon its blasts of fast-paced repetition and stuttered, staccato recitation for its dramatic effect as the actual words which are spoken. The challenge here, Wallace comments, is 'to somehow graphically suggest the excitement of the piece' by laying out the literary text more as a poem than a traditional play with dialogue. But Wallace's work at CHP in contextualizing the plays which he publishes is rare. He comments, 'I don't think it's a trend but I wish it was.'
Of course, any honest look at the future of play publishing must be tempered with extreme caution since it is far from clear how much of a future there will be. Due to the combination of an economic recession and fiscal conservatism, the arts in Canada are facing tough times. Theatre companies known for developing and producing new work have already had to cut back on their seasons. Some will undoubtedly face death by bankruptcy in the very near future. Already in Toronto this season (1991-92) I've noticed numerous remounts, perhaps due to a lack of resources to develop new plays. Obviously this has an impact upon play publishers - dependent as they are upon producers for finished plays to publish, and which themselves must struggle to make ends meet. Not only will play publishers have to search for solutions in publishing innovative play texts, but they must also find innovative strategies to market the plays they do publish if they are to survive.
Notes
Forum - THE PRE-TEXT OF THE POST-TEXT: THOUGHTS ON PLAY PUBLISHING BY SMALLER CANADIAN PRESSES
Nigel Hunt
1 I don't know how sales
of plays today compare with sales at other times or in other places; however,
it may be instructive to remember that the reason George Bernard Shaw included
oodles of descriptive stage directions in his published plays was to help
make them accessible to a readership that was more accustomed to expository
prose than drama
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2 Blizzard has often published
a play timed to coincide with its premiere production or a remount production,
hoping to increase sales by having the play available in the theatre where
the play is running and out in the stores to take advantage of the publicity
and awareness that the production has created. While this is common practice
in such theatre cities as London, England, and has been tried at various
times in Canada, it is still not done by many publishers since it can be
hard getting a finished text from a playwright before opening night, making
it difficult for the edition to reflect changes made during rehearsals
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