Alan Filewod
Since its founding in 1974, Canadian Theatre Review has made a major contribution to the canon of Canadian drama, in its critical discourse and publication of new plays. Under three successive editorial regimes its notion of what constitutes the canon has changed radically. In its first phase, CTR was committed to legitimizing the canon; in its second phase, the notion of the canon was broadened to include marginalized voices; today CTR is effectively committed to interrogating the very idea of a canon.
Depuis sa fondation en 1974, la Canadian Theatre Review contribue de façon significative à la formation d'un canon théâtral canadien-anglais, tant par son discours critique comme par la publication de textes dramatiques. Sous trois équipes de rédaction successives, le concept de ce qui constituerait un «canon» s'est transformé radicalement. La revue cherchait, dans un premier temps, à légitimer le canon existant; ensuite, ce concept fut élargi pour inclure des voix jusqu'alors marginalisées; actuellement, la CTR s'engage à interroger l'idée même de l'existence d'un tel canon.
In its sixteen years of operation, CTR has distributed approximately 90,000 scripts of Canadian plays around the world: 63 texts with an average circulation of 1,500. At the same time it has established a critical discourse that has contextualized those scripts in terms of an historical project which has changed radically over the years.
In the course of a personal assessment of how well CTR has fulfilled its various mandates, I want to pose the questions that have been plaguing me about the nature of canons and canonization. But to begin, I must admit my partiality. I cannot be objective about CTR; I have been after all the managing editor for the past three years. But more than that, the evolution of my thinking about Canadian theatre and drama has always been inextricably combined with CTR. As a drama student at York in the early days I studied under Don Rubin when he founded the journal; he was my first, therefore formative, teacher; I served as an editorial assistant in CTR's early years; I was one of the coordinators of the pilot Canada on Stage volume in 1974, and have been a frequent contributor ever since. I mention these points only because I want to stress that I am keenly aware that I am implicated in the criticisms I am offering here.
From the beginning CTR championed the cause of the Canadian playwright and proposed the notion of a dramatic literature as the first condition of an autonomous national theatre. For that reason, CTR has published a playtext in almost every issue. Let me offer some quick figures about those plays. Of a total of 67 texts, up to CTR 64 [Summer 1990] the list breaks down into revealing categories: 48 were written by men; 16 were written by women; three were gender-mixed collaborations. Of these, three were written for radio; all but one (Beverly Simon's Leela Means To Play) were produced professionally; four were by non-Canadian authors (one American, one Argentinean, one Japanese, one German); five were written for Theatre for Young Audiences; three were expressly gay in subject; four were translated from French; one was written by a Black writer.
It is apparent from this that in its attempt to define the theoretical principles of Canadian drama, CTR has effectively erased cultural difference. I suggest that CTR proposes a theory of Canadian drama because throughout its discourse the journal has defined the historical conditions by which Canadian theatre and drama might be legitimized. There is a theory at work here, crude and inarticulate as it has been for most of the journal's life.
The legitimization of Canadian drama has engendered a canonizing process that erases difference, and it is only now, with the transforming challenge to our notions of theatre emanating from cultural and ethnic minorities, that we can see in retrospect why that erasure was historically necessary - but not, I think, unavoidable.
This suggestion places CTR's development in an ironic frame, because for most of its history CTR has analyzed Canadian theatre in terms of colonialism, but a colonialism that was never explicitly theorized. It is vividly clear, given the figures cited above, that CTR itself operates as an agent of colonization and displacement. We are only now arriving at the point where the governing discourse of the journal can address its own theoretical contradictions.
CTR's theoretical development has evolved in three broad stages, corresponding to the editorial regimes. In the first stage, under Don Rubin, CTR advocated a notion of Canadian theatre in terms of the arrival of a professional institution committed to producing Canadian drama. Rubin's theory was one in which the idea of a canon was crucial.
When I recall the CTR of the early 1970s, I remember best the passionate broadsides levelled against the Stratford Festival. In fact, that was the journal's starting point, because CTR's birth coincided with the hiring of Robin Phillips. The attack on Phillips was loud, somewhat naive and in retrospect needlessly alarmist, but then Phillips wasn't the real issue; he was simply the rhetorical site for a debate that had been growing in intensity since the Gaspé and Niagara-on-the-Lake meetings that preceded the founding of the Playwrights Co-op. Phillips was a convenient target, but if it hadn't been him, another would have served.
In his editorial in that first issue, Rubin made the point (inaccurately, I suspect) that 'no other country in the world has a foreigner running its "national" theatre.' 1 The real issue wasn't Phillips, it was Stratford's role in the Gestalt of Canadian theatre.
Stratford continued as the Other against which CTR centred its definition of Canadian theatre throughout Rubin's tenure. In 1981, responding to the controversy precipitated by Phillips' departure, Don Rubin and Alan Richardson ascribed Stratford's crisis to a lack of what they capitalized as 'Love of Place.' According to this model, 'a clear sense of "place," of "this place" never really emerged even when the bilingual nature of this country was introduced.' 2 Essentially, the authors accuse Stratford of failing in the imperative task of reflecting the true nature of the Canadian community.
But what was that Canadian community, as read in the pages of CTR? It was at heart Trudeau's vision of a bilingual and unified state with strong (the preferred word was usually 'rich') regional cultures. Stratford was, to CTR, un-Canadian.
Rereading these articles I find myself in a constant dialogue with my younger self, for whom this notion of a national community seemed inviolable. The statist nationalism of the 1970s was the first condition of the narrative of Canadian theatre that evolved principally in CTR and the Toronto newspapers at the time. That narrative became the orthodoxy which posits the maturation of Canadian theatre in terms of a nationalist identification with experimental theatre to form the alternative theatre movement, which has displaced the colonizing regional theatres, etc. That orthodoxy, inscribed in most books on Canadian theatre (including my own) and the Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, has been questioned often in recent years but it is still the governing discourse in Canadian theatre historiography and drama curricula.
This narrative presupposes the equation of culture, community and state. As long as it was the articulation of a national struggle to define a post-colonial culture, the actual definition of that culture could be deferred as a dehistoricized quality, something not to be known but to be intuited by 'our best' playwrights. Rubin's formula of 'Love of Place' is a metaphor for this undefined metaphysics. Frye's famous 'where is here' was answered by 'Here is where we are.' And who are 'we'? 'We' are the people who are 'here.' In that light it is useful to point out that the first two plays CTR published were Cook's Head Guts and Sound Bone Dance and Reaney's Sticks and Stones, both plays that define culture by historical geography. There is no suggestion in CTR that Stratford might be in fact the necessary and appropriate cultural expression of the business/government alliance that funded it, and that its problems were not of 'place' but of class and cultural formation.
To CTR, Stratford was a cultural anomaly that reflected a Canadian fear of self-hood, of maturity. Although this argument depended on a critique of cultural universality in the arts it equated colonial provincialism with cultural immaturity. These two metaphors - one economic and the other anthropomorphic - recur in variations throughout Rubin's tenure. In his inaugural article in CTR 1, Rubin used the metaphor of 'creeping toward a culture' to suggest that a new sense of Canadian identity in the post-war era signalled the emergence of a mature culture, which would usher in a 'Golden Age of Canadian drama.' 3
Rubin defined CTR's mandate as herald to that golden age. His selection of playscripts was a clear attempt to canonize a national drama: in the first five issues he published Cook, Reaney, John Herbert, George Ryga, Gwen Pharis Ringwood and Herman Voaden. In his tenure he published three plays by Cook, two by George F. Walker, two by Rick Salutin and two by Ryga; he was also the first to publish Blood Relations. Many of the CTR scripts have yet to find book publication - including plays by Walker, Jack Winter, John Herbert and Beverly Simons. By the end of the 1970s Rubin developed and wrote about a proposal to found a national playwright's workshop modelled on the O'Neill Center. For Rubin, a dramatic literature was the proof of a nationhood defined in terms of cultural unity. In his last major article in CTR, in 1982, he wrote:
Am I building a case therefore for the collective beatification of Canadian artists and visionaries? Not at all. Rather, it is to simply recognize their works for what they are and have been at root: celebrations, on the one hand, that we are still together as human beings who share this time and place, and warnings, on the other, that we are in real danger of not realizing ourselves as a people. It is from this very particular perspective that I think we can begin to more fully appreciate the works of playwrights such as Michael Cook, George Ryga, Beverly Simons, Ken Mitchell, Rick Salutin, David French and George F. Walker, to name just a few. 4
It is no coincidence that this could
be the preamble and reading list for a typical course on Canadian drama.
Cook, Ryga, French, Salutin and Walker are still among the most beatified
of the canonized.
We hear much these days about the canon, about theories of canonization and about exclusions; the point I would like to introduce here is that the canon as it has been recognized through its main instruments (the anthologies and CTR) is a product and a validation of the historical attempt to prove the arrival of Canadian theatre. CTR argued vehemently the idea (derived from the German Romantics) that the theatre was the pre-condition of a dramatic literature, which was in its turn the highest expression of a theatre. I prefer the materialist response: the drama was canonized in order to demonstrate the necessity and validity of the theatre in Canada. It is in this sense that canon is indeed the most appropriate word, referring as it does to the authority of a governing standard by which a discipline is measured.
Under Rubin CTR articulated a vision of Canadian theatre that embodied the ideology of a unified national community. The discourse of mainstream and alternative theatre advanced this ideology in its narrative of a colonialist historiography in which the evolution of the theatre was in fact a metaphor for the evolution of the state. By the late seventies, the battles which had launched CTR appeared to be won, and Rubin began paying more attention in the journal to international subjects: Canada, CTR implied, had matured and could open its eyes to the wider world.
In the second phase of CTR's theorizing of Canadian drama, Robert Wallace radically expanded that notion of cultural maturity to embrace a notion of difference as a precondition of national culture. Wallace brought that perspective from his own writings; as a gay critic he brought a marginalized gaze to the theatre. During his five years as editor, Wallace began to question the assumptions that CTR had previously ordained. His main strategies for this were the inclusion of Québécois theatre into the field of discussion in Canadian theatre, a recognition of feminist theatre, and a quick shift in defining emphasis from the playwright to the conditions and methods of performance.
Rubin had early on introduced the practice of building occasional issues around a specific topic in CTR, but Wallace formalized this so that every issue examined a particular theme. In doing so he retreated from Rubin's position that CTR's mandate was to survey the state of the art across the country. Wallace cut the quarterly round-up of news (including a section of recycled press-releases) and focused instead on creating a dialogue in each issue between writers whose submissions were commissioned. Rubin had drawn on playwrights, directors and free-lance drama critics for most of his articles; Wallace broadened that reach to recruit new voices. He looked to the universities for young academics with a fresh theoretical perspective, and when he sought writers from the theatre community, he tended to look towards the new generation of artists. Rubin had begun CTR as a quarterly magazine that revealed an uneasy relationship with academic discourse; although many of the contributors have been academics from the beginning, Rubin favoured a less formal journalistic style. Wallace in his turn re-asserted the importance of academic discourse.
The themes Wallace chose for his issues (17 in all) show clearly his strategy of re-assessing prevailing analyses. In CTR 46 he examined the relationship of dominant and minority theatre cultures under the heading 'Garrison Theatre'; in CTR 43 he invited Kate Lushington to co-edit what was perhaps his finest issue, on feminist theatre. Starting with CTR 50 Wallace introduced a new format that featured livelier graphics and more visual documentation. This reconstitution of CTR's mandate was an attempt to decentre the examination of Canadian theatre, and it successfully reached a new readership.
If Rubin had developed CTR to reflect a community of Canadian theatre, Wallace began questioning the nature of that community. In fact, this was the theme of his first issue, in which he defined community as 'shared experience,' and proposed that 'To understand the complexity of Canadian culture we would do well to look to our theatre in which we both reveal and conceal our nature.' 5 For Wallace, the theatre was a decentred complex of communities and productive relations, a theoretical position that refuted the primacy of the playwright.
In his selection of playtexts, Rubin had tended to advocate relatively well-known writers, and scripts were chosen on the basis of undefined literary merit. That did not mean Rubin was cautious: he didn't hesitate to publish unproduced scripts, he relished controversy, and he expanded the definition of the canon to include collective scripts like Paper Wheat. Wallace continued this tradition but used as his basic criterion the fact of significant production. The Wallace canon in CTR included obscure early efforts like Richard Ouzonian's Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are, the new wave of advocacy theatre for the young (Dennis Foon's adaptation of Volker Ludwig's Trummi Kaput), feminist theatre (This Is for You, Anna, A Woman from the Sea, The Fighting Days) and new regional voices (Raymond Story, Michael Mercer, David Young). Of the 15 plays he published, six were by women - not a great ratio but better than CTR's overall average.
By the time Wallace resigned as editor in 1988 he had redefined CTR's mandate and readership and had negotiated its assumption by the University of Toronto Press. I cannot really offer an analysis of the current direction of CTR, because of course I am part of it. But I can suggest that in the past three years Wallace's policy of decentring the canon has been expanded, mainly because of the decentralized editorial structure that rotates the responsibility for each issue among the members of the editorial board. Each of the three editors has a particular discourse that has evolved through several issues: in mine I have sought to reconsider notions of performance, to include political and popular performance forms, and I have attempted to challenge the conceptual structures which we erect to explain the theatre in Canada. In her issues Natalie Rewa has questioned the cultural priorities of the theatre by addressing the politics of multiculturalism, theatre for the young, and like Wallace before her, paying considerable attention to new developments in Quebec. Ann Wilson for her part has focused on theoretical problems which challenge the patriarchal hegemony that has dominated the discourse of Canadian drama. These three directions have resulted in even more theoretical and academic submissions; like Wallace we continue to seek new writers from outside the traditional domain of dramatic criticism and arts journalism.
The plays we have published in the past three years reflect, I think, our attempt to find texts that establish a dialogue with the theme of the issue. That has meant an even less centred notion of the Canadian canon. Of the 14 plays we have published (up to the forthcoming CTR 64) six have been by women (that statistic looks better when I add that five of those have been in the last eight issues - we're getting there); two have been expressly gay in subject; one was written by a Black playwright, one by a Native writer, four have been overtly political and all have been by playwrights new to CTR.
It is apparent enough that CTR's mandate has evolved over the years, from the proposal of a canon and a discourse to the active critique of the canon. But 15 years ago CTR was one of the instruments that helped make the process of canonization possible in this country; now our task is to destabilize the borders of that canon, to challenge the consensual fallacy which would have us accept that we can recognize the masterpieces of Canadian drama by their adherence to dramaturgical and literary values which are, to my thinking, entirely irrelevant.
When I was leafing through back issues in preparation for this paper, I came across a sentence that showed me exactly how far CTR has travelled in the last decade. In 1976 Rubin asked David Watmough to prepare an issue on homosexuality in the theatre. You may remember it; it contained a few personal statements, an article by Eric Bentley and a round-table discussion, and nothing at all about gay and lesbian performance. What struck me most of all was this comment from Watmough's editorial:
It is my ardent belief that there is no such thing as a gay play; no more than there is such a thing as a straight play. There are good plays and bad plays, and they are written by either homosexuals or heterosexuals. 6
You won't find that kind of statement
in today's CTR. You're more likely to read that there are gay plays,
patriarchal plays, women's plays, Black plays, plays of every community
but there is no such thing as a 'good play.' There are only plays that
are identified as good by particular sectors for their particular reasons.
In the gulf between these two positions we can see the evolution not only
of CTR but of our notion of canons as well.
Notes
UNDERMINING THE CENTRE: THE CANON ACCORDING TO CTR
Alan Filewod
1 DON RUBIN, STEPHEN MEZEI
and ROSS STUART, 'An Editorial Viewpoint,' Canadian Theatre Review 1
(Winter 1974) p 5
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2 ALAN RICHARDSON and DON
RUBIN, 'From the Colonial Twilight,' CTR 30 (Spring 1981) p 37
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3 DON RUBIN, 'Creeping
Towards a Culture: The Theatre in English Canada since 1945,' CTR 1
(Winter 1974) p 20
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4 DON RUBIN, 'Celebrating
the Nation: History and the Canadian Theatre,' CTR 34 (Spring 1982)
p 13
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5 ROBERT WALLACE, editorial,
CTR 37 (Spring 1983) p 7
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6 DAVID WATMOUGH, 'Setting
the Stage,' CTR 12 (Fall 1976) p 7
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