JERRY WASSERMAN

The production history of Büchner's Woyzeck in Canada's English-language theatres corresponds closely with the development of an indigenous English Canadian drama during the period of 1960-80. Particular qualities of the style, structure, and political tone of Woyzeck made it an attractive vehicle for the 'alternate' theatre companies that blossomed during this era. Its most profound impact was felt via the productions of George Luscombe, John Herbert, Richard Rose and Gordon McCall, all of whom were subsequently to do important work which would be indebted to their experience with Büchner's play.

L'histoire des diverses créations de Woyzeck, pièce de Georg Büchner, au Canada anglais correspond de près au développement d'une dramaturgie canadienne-anglaise indigène au cours de la période 1960-1980. Certaines parlicularités de son style, de sa structure, de ses résonances politiques en firent un véhicule tout désigné pour les compagnies théâtrales 'alternatives' qui foisonnaient à cette époque. Les plus profonds effets de l'oeuvre se firent sentir à travers les productions de George Luscombe, John Herbert, Richard Rose et Gordon McCall qui, influencés tous par la pièce de Büchner, allaient contribuer de façon significative à l'évolution d'un théâtre canadien.

Bill Reeve has vividly shown how the history of Woyzeck in the Canadian theatre confirms once again the universal appeal of this extraordinary play. But Woyzeck has been more than simply a popular choice for Canadian artistic directors looking for an interesting show to fill a slot in their season. Of the productions and adaptations just documented, no fewer than four have had a marked impact on the development of English-Canadian theatre itself. The director in each of those cases - George Luscombe, John Herbert, Richard Rose and Gordon McCall - confronted Woyzeck early in his career. Each later went on to play a significant role in what is popularly called the 'alternate' theatre in English Canada. And each of them acknowledges the importance of Woyzeck to the direction his theatre work subsequently took. I would like to explore the question of why Woyzeck proved such an attraction and influence for those in the vanguard of this new Canadian art; and more specifically, I would like to consider how Woyzeck in the hands of those four practitioners, helped shape the modern Canadian theatre.

When George Luscombe mounted the first of his three Woyzecks in 1963, Canadian professional theatre barely existed. Theatre in English Canada up to the end of World War II had consisted almost entirely of imported touring troupes or amateur homegrown productions. In 1945 Canada had not a single professional theatre company of its own, and not for two more decades after that were there any professional playwrights outside of CBC radio or TV. A burst of post-war nationalism changed things, giving rise to new attitudes towards indigenous art and culture. With the Canada Council providing funding, a Canadian professional theatre slowly became reality. Buildings were built, companies founded, actors trained, and playwrights began gradually appearing, though by and large English-Canadian plays were still a rarity.

This stage of development climaxed in 1967, Centennial Year, the year of Expo '67, a time of great national self-awareness. By the end of that year a wave of new Canadian plays had been produced, and with them the exciting sense that a genuine Canadian theatrical art had come into being. Among the plays generating the most excitement and marking the emergence of English-Canadian drama were John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes and George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, both of which have important connections with Woyzeck.

In the years following, English-Canadian theatre tended to divide itself into two camps. The large regional theatres presented, on the whole, conservative seasons made up of British and American plays and the European classics. Smaller theatres, which sprang up in abundance after 1967, were generally more adventurous. They were more likely to do new scripts, experiment with style and presentation, perform improvisational work or collective creations, present strong political or nationalistic views. Above all, these theatres - which came to be known as the 'alternates' - were the primary showcase for Canadian plays. With few exceptions the most innovative and original work on the Canadian stage since then has been done through the alternates, from their prototype, Luscombe's Toronto Workshop Productions, founded in 1959 and ahead of its time by a decade, to present-day companies like Richard Rose's Necessary Angel. It is in such venues that Woyzeck has enjoyed the most influence and popularity; and since these were the formative years, the repeated attractions of Woyzeck wielded a formative influence.

The attractions of Woyzeck for an English-Canadian theatre just coming of age in the 1960s were many. One was certainly its adaptability; another its politics. The play's incompleteness, its mobile structure, the absence of a clearly pre-determined scenic order, all invite productions that showcase a director's personal style or vision. As well, the lack of specific cultural referents in Woyzeck, at least in its most popular English translation, give it a universal currency.¹ So Canadian directors, anxious to mount original scripts but lacking in accomplished playwrights to provide them, were able to set the play locally or update it to speak directly to the contemporary concerns of their audience. An adaptation of Woyzeck by a local writer could be billed as a 'Canadian' play and could easily be shaped to emphasize an anti-war message or some other form of social comment.

The makers of the new theatre in Canada were hungry for a certain kind of new play, and Woyzeck provided just the right raw material. Toronto Star critic Nathan Cohen summed up George Luscombe's house style in 1967 this way:

He's at his best when dealing with a skeletal script ... He registers an acute political consciousness. By defining ... a play's economic and social framework, he makes a cogent comment on life today and the values which characterize it. ²

No play could have been more conducive to those tendencies than Woyzeck. Similarly, Herbert Whittaker's review of John Herbert's World of Woyzeck in 1969 observed how compatible the play seemed with its director's dramatic tastes. 'Herbert's production allows for the things he likes in theatre. It has plenty of emotion ... It also has lots of violence and plenty of wide-sweeping social protest - the Garret is by way of being a theatre of protest ...' ³

Not just the Garret but the Canadian alternate stage generally during this period could be described as a 'theatre of protest.' By an accident of history the Canadian Centennial fell in the midst of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. So Canadian drama emerged out of a Zeitgeist that combined the spirit of protest of the age with the national soul-searching of the Centennial. The result was a critical, introspective dramatic consciousness with which Woyzeck seemed in complete harmony. The politics of the play, refracted through the New Leftish lens of the sixties, spoke to the foremost concern of Canadian drama during this period: the oppression of the powerless, and more particularly the self-destructive internalization of that oppression by the powerless themselves. The protagonist in English-Canadian plays was frequently a victim, and in the character of Woyzeck one finds his absolute prototype.

Another attribute of the play that lent itself to the demands of the Canadian theatre was its ensemble nature. Though the title role is one of the great parts for an actor, the play only works as an ensemble piece. This is especially true for the Canadian productions, which have tended to foreground the social and political forces at work on Woyzeck rather than focusing on the psychological or existential dimensions of his struggle. Reading the reviews, one rarely finds the title character receiving special mention. This was just fine for a theatre system lacking in stars and leaning in many cases both politically and artistically towards a collectivist philosophy. The adaptability of Woyzeck also meant that the ensemble need not strain the budgets of chronically underfunded alternate companies. Cast sizes have ranged from full acting-school contingents at UBC and the National Theatre School, to Theatre Compact's no-so-compact cast of 15, all the way down to Richard Rose's four men, two women and a dog.

The final attraction of the play in general terms was the distinctive way it synthesized naturalistic subject matter and non-naturalistic style, the same combination that would prove successful in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and other major Canadian plays of the era including Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Soeurs and David Freeman's Creeps. The Canadian theatre wanted to dramatize life as it was really lived by those who lived it at its most desperate. Woyzeck offered such a vision. It was grounded in documentary truth and so held special appeal for Canadians, whose unofficial national genre is the documentary. At the same time it offered up its truth in an expressionistic way, challenging the more conventional models of realism and naturalism provided by British and American drama.

Ultimately, Woyzeck's appeal for English-Canadian theatres through the 1960s and seventies was based on many of the same qualities which made the play appealing almost everywhere during that era. My first exposure to Woyzeck was a student production I saw at Cornell University in 1970 that used rock music, strobe lighting, and a set consisting mainly of monkey bars. In his 1974 book on Büchner, Ronald Hauser contends that Woyzeck has historically been perceived as an 'alternate' kind of play. It has never had much success on 'the big stages of the world,' he argues, because 'the people who want to confront such problematical texts ... are the ones who go to the little playhouses found all over America on college campuses and out in the neighborhoods... ' ⁴ Since Canadian theatre was being created during this time in just such little playhouses all over Canada, Woyzeck came to be an integral part of its development.

It seems fitting that Woyzeck should have made its first Canadian appearance at George Luscombe's Toronto Workshop Productions. This was the company, as Renate Usmiani describes it, that 'set the pattern for alternative theatre groups in both its political orientation and its experimentation with new performance styles.' ⁵ For its first eight years TWP operated out of a factory basement with a seating capacity of 100 - the site of its Woyzeck productions. Since 1967 it has had its own permanent theatre seating 300, but the company has not diverged much from the political and theatrical directions Luscombe gave it at its inception, soon after he had returned from a five year sojourn with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in England.

There, among other things, he had worked on the plays of Brecht and on the development of unfinished scripts by writers like Brendan Behan. On returning to Canada Luscombe decided to go back to Büchner, whom he recognized as an Ur-Brecht. The play he chose to do was Büchner's unfinished masterpiece, and the fact that he did it three times in three years attests to the power it held over his imagination.

I asked Luscombe what had attracted him specifically to Woyzeck. One thing, he said, was the evocative minimalism of its style - 'the economy of the play, the sharpness of its poetry and detail,' as opposed to 'the long grunts and groans of realistic language.' ⁶ Among the details he remembers most vividly from rehearsals was a concentration exercise he gave his young actors based on the scene where Woyzeck hears the Freemasons underground. His actors, Luscombe chuckles, had to keep listening until they located those voices exactly six inches under the stage.

The other hook for Luscombe was the play's political resonance. His productions were shaped by his memories of Auschwitz, which he had visited in the 1950s. Associating the play's Doctor with Josef Mengele, he saw Bilchner as having 'prophesied the madness we have lived through.' Even more important for his later work, Luscombe saw the play as helping us 'to understand how we could allow fascism to get hold of our system.' Assuming the term 'fascism' is meant here in its rather loose sixties usage as well as in a literal ideological sense, we can see how this has remained Luscombe's theme to the present day. Nearly all his most successful work has been concerned in one form or another with abusive or insensitive social and political systems, and their victims: his theatrically inventive dramas of racism in America (Mr. Bones) and protest against the Vietnam War (Chicago 70), his compelling visions of the depression in Canada (Ten Lost Years) and the Canadian experience of the Spanish Civil War (The MacPaps). The latter, one of his more recent productions, Luscombe sees as linked directly to Woyzeck along the political axis he has been following for a quarter century at TWP.

I do not want to argue that Woyzeck literally determined the direction of his theatre's subsequent work. Luscombe's political vision was already intact as early as Hey Rube!, TWP's collective drama about urban eviction which preceded his first Woyzeck. Theatrically too, Woyzeck took its place along a continuum of TWP productions: Hey Rube! was played circus-style, Woyzeck as carnival, Mr. Bones as minstrel show. But Woyzeck clearly did help Luscombe cement principles and techniques which would recur in his later shows and imprint themselves on Canadian alternate theatre. With Woyzeck, Luscombe says today, 'I was able to prove to myself that the most exciting theatre came from a skeleton script that allowed you room to breathe, to create, but with a tremendously strong throughline, a line of steel.'

Another of the pillars of alternate theatre in Toronto in the 1960s was John Herbert Brundage, known then as Jack Brundage but better known today by his pen name, John Herbert. Trained as an actor, Herbert began writing and directing plays for little theatres of his own in the early sixties, eventually setting up the Garret Theatre in a tiny space over a pizzeria in 1965. Until it closed in 1970 the Garret was one of the chief venues for non-commercial theatre in Toronto, leaving its mark on some of the most important theatrical figures of the next decade. ⁷

But Herbert's primary contribution to Canadian theatre was as the author of Fortune and Men's Eyes, a naturalistic drama about the brutalization of four young men in a Canadian reformatory. First staged in New York in 1967, Fortune quickly gained international status with productions in over 100 countries and translations in more than 40 languages. Its success was 'the ice-breaker in the channel,' in the words of George Ryga.⁸ It gave credibility to Canadian drama and inspired other playwrights to write from their own experience of the darker side of the Canadian dream.

John Herbert's connection with Woyzeck dates back to 1963. After TVT's first production of the play, Luscombe asked Herbert if he might be interested in writing an adaptation of Woyzeck for a second production. Herbert had recently attracted Luscombe's attention with two one-act plays of his own which he had mounted in a local coffee house, one dealing with anti-semitism and the other with the worship of money. ⁹ 'I seemed to be the only writer on the scene who had done socially critical drama - and who knew Büchner,' Herbert says. 'I had read the plays and had always intended to do Danton's Death. I've always thought that's his masterwork.' ¹⁰

So Herbert accepted Luscombe's commission and wrote his adaptation which he titled World of Woyzeck. At the same time he was working on an adaptation of another nineteenth century classic, Dumas' Camille, which Herbert called A Lady of Camelias and produced with his own company in 1964. He notes that, despite some obvious differences, this was a play not entirely unlike Woyzeck 'there's a prostitute at the centre of the work and the aristocrats are exposed as fools.' His other project at this time was the first draft of Fortune and Men's Eyes.

Personal and artistic differences between Luscombe and Herbert led to the withdrawal of Herbert's Woyzeck script just weeks before its scheduled opening. It was at that time that Luscombe brought in Jack Winter to do the version that TWP produced in January 1965 (without even bothering to print new posters, according to Herbert. With a little crossing out and pasting over, 'World of Woyzeck by Jack Brundage' became 'Death of Woyzeck by Jack Winter'). World of Woyzeck was eventually produced and directed by Herbert himself at the Garret in 1969, financed by his royalties from Fortune and Men's Eyes.

Almost without exception, all John Herbert's works from the early one-acts through his full-length plays of the 1970s (Born of Medusa's Blood, Omphale and the Hero) concern the destruction of individual innocence by a corrupt social order characterized by grotesque and obsessive machismo. In his Woyzeck this machismo takes the form of militarism; in Fortune it is the violence inherent in the power structure of the prison. In both plays the victim is an Everyman ('Smitty' in Fortune and Men's Eyes) who begins by questioning the logic of an insane system and ends by perpetuating it. Herbert describes Woyzeck as a play that 'takes one family in that stupid violent life and shows how the violence perpetrated upon Woyzeck can only lead to violence against those he loves.' In Fortune Herbert depicts the young prisoners as striving to create a surrogate family which, sadly, succeeds only in reiterating the brutality of the system of which it is a microcosm. Despite his best intentions, Smitty brings grief to the one other boy whom he cares for and who cares for him, and through a process of dehumanization he as good as destroys himself. Both plays, Herbert says, are about 'the violence done to individuals by the organized violence of the world. Woyzeck as hero is very much like Smitty - a gentle man in whom latent violence is called forth by the violence around him.'

With Richard Rose's adaptation of the play in 1980 we are no longer early in contemporary English-Canadian theatre. But we are still early in the development of Rose's own work with Necessary Angel, the company that, under his direction, has become a dominant force in the second wave, the alternate theatre of the 1980s. Richard Paul Knowles describes Rose as

... an inventive young director with a flair for innovative use of three-dimensional space. Early in his career, in productions of such plays as Euripides' Electra, Rose experimented with unusual audience-stage configurations, and with devices such as simultaneous staging, in order to break down audience complacency about theatre and about the world.¹¹

That was in 1979. Boom, Rose's adaptation of Woyzeck, appeared the next year. Since then he has put together an impressive record of successes.

In Mein, a collective creation that won the 1984 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play, Rose ... explore[d] within a single mind the psychology of corporate ambition. In John Krizanc's Prague, the proscenium stage at the Tarragon Theatre was systematically exposed and exploded ... [winning for the play the Chalmers Award for Best Play in 1985]. Rose is best known for his production of Krizanc's Tamara, a critique of fascism in which ... audience members were invited to put together their own play by following the actors of their choice from room to room in Toronto's historic Strachan House. The production won five Dora Awards in 1982, including Outstanding Director, and it has since been remounted in, among other places, Los Angeles [where it won six Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards in 1985, including best production and direction].¹²

Touring Northern Saskatchewan with a dance company in the late seventies, Rose began to realize that Woyzeck, a play he says 'I had always wanted to do,' conveyed experiences parallel in many ways to those the natives of this northern area were undergoing in the face of an economic boom.¹³ In both cases poor, isolated people found themselves invaded by skilled outsiders, drafted into the workforce (or the army), and barraged by the rhetoric of science, rationality and self-improvement. So Woyzeck seemed a natural vehicle. Rose describes it as 'the powerful, profound story of a small man; a "sixties generation" play that dealt with oppression and the madness created by society.' Then why an adaptation? Why not just play Woyzeck as Bühner wrote it? 'A lot of my theatre deals with myths, revised, revamped and made contemporary,' Rose explains. 'The public feels too safe when a play is set in its historical context and performed in quasi-archaic language.'

Boom toured twice, through rural Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario. Being on the road with the play, having to adapt to various, usually non-theatrical spaces such as gyms and community halls, made Rose 'very concerned with space. It gave me a whole new bent on environmental work,' he says, which he applied directly to his next major project, Tamara. Rose also continued his earlier experiments with ensemble in Boom, using what he calls 'multidimensional acting' and 'simultaneous staging' to try to tell more than one story at a time. These techniques were stretched to their limit in Tamara where 'everyone has a central role and actors are rarely "offstage" ... as so much is happening simultaneously in different locations.' ¹⁴

Another connection, one which Rose feels must have been more intuitive than conscious, was the relation of Woyzeck to his production of Mein, an expressionist play with bows to the German tradition, as its title suggests. Working on Woyzeck gave Rose a sense of how 'you can affect an audience through flatness of character and an elementary acting style,' stripping things down so as to sharpen focus on certain elements you choose to highlight. The effect in Mein, as one critic describes it, was 'a dynamic tension between our expectation ... of a foolish folk tale and the astringent and brutal contemporary reality of the actual story' ¹⁵ - a description that might nicely fit Woyzeck itself.

Rose has been called a director who specializes in 'critiques of fascism.' ¹⁶Tamara is set in Mussolini's Italy, Prague in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, and Mein in the mind of a corporate fascist. Looking back now at his experience of Büchner's play, Rose concedes that 'while its simplicity and poetics were attractive,' his strongest response was indeed to its politics: 'elevating a poor man to the status of a hero without losing the dirty realism of what it was like to live in those conditions.' It is no wonder that Rose should have been responsive to this play that epitomized for both Luscombe and Herbert the dynamics of small-f fascist oppression.

Whenever such topics as oppression, poverty, and the death of innocence arise in the context of Canadian theatre, one thinks naturally of George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. This was another of the key plays from 1967 that, along with Fortune and Men's Eyes, first gave legitimacy to English-Canadian playwriting. Rita Joe presents naturalistic material in a combination of Brechtian and expressionist styles, detailing the persecution and eventual murder of a young native Indian woman by the white urban society she can neither join nor escape.

The play invites comparison with Woyzeck in so many respects that it seems unlikely for Ryga not to have known Büchner's work. Both plays dramatize the nightmare of an Untermensch dislocated, mocked, and driven to destruction by a world to which he does not belong. Both mix naturalism and expressionism in short, fragmentary scenes. Both plays surround the protagonist with flat characters identified only by their rank or profession. But when I asked Ryga to confirm my neat hypothesis, he claimed not to have been influenced by Woyzeck, and indeed never even to have heard of Büchner.

Perhaps Ryga 'absorbed' Woyzeck through some of his other dramatic sources, direct or indirect, like Brecht and Peter Weiss,¹⁷ who were themselves Büchner's descendants. Or perhaps the affinities of Woyzeck with the Canadian dramatic psyche at that historical moment were such that a political playwright like Ryga could hardly help writing a play with echoes of Büchner. In any case, I am not the only one to have sensed the connection of Woyzeck with Rita Joe. Gordon McCall, who has since founded Vancouver's Touchstone Theatre and Nightcap Productions in Saskatoon, directed Woyzeck for his MFA thesis at the University of British Columbia in 1975. In 1982, as artistic director of Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, he directed and designed a landmark production of Rita Joe. The first to use all native Indian actors in the native roles, it was strongly shaped by his Woyzeck of seven years earlier.

McCall had played Andres in a student production of Woyzeck at the University of Western Ontario in 1968 and was attracted by the play's 'primitive, kinetic emotional effect and its humanist politics.' ¹⁸ He chose to direct the play, he told me, because it offered 'the possibility of doing something theatrically that took me into uncharted territory ... putting the audience into a relationship with the play as both spectator and participant.' To that end he formulated the environmental production Bill Reeve has described, seating the audience on the floor amid the action that took place on slightly elevated ramps circling through and around them.

George Luscombe had performed his Woyzeck in a factory basement made into a theatre. McCall transformed a theatre basement (the Somerset Studio at UBC) into a factory, stripping the space down to its concrete walls and floor, installing industrial lighting and building the acting ramps out of plywood platforms and steel pipe. This was to be a 'murder factory,' half laboratory and half carnival, in which 'the event of the evening was a grotesque experiment; everyone was a part of it, actors and audience; the purpose was to create a murderer.' ¹⁹

Julian Hilton argues that the structure of Büchner's play demands of the audience that it 'participate actively in the process of dramatic reconstruction of Woyzeck's crime.' ²⁰ In McCall's production the audience participated in the construction of the crime, as part of the social environment that creates Woyzeck the murderer. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe also directly implicates the theatre audience as representatives of the world that makes Rita into a criminal, tries her, then kills her. When conceptualizing his production of Rita Joe for PTE, McCall recognized that 'the same type of experience was wanted out of that play as Woyzeck' so he went back to his earlier staging, using 'ramps and platforms which wind throughout the theatre. The majority of the audience sits on gym mats ... The action takes place around and about these people on the floor.' ²¹

It is interesting that the original production of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe in 1967 had as the main element of its set 'a circular ramp' that 'dominates the stage ... ' ²² Like Woyzeck, Rita is caught in a vicious circle, a rat in a trap responding to some diabolical experiment that finally kills her. McCall's Rita Joe, filtered through his Woyzeck extended and intensified this stage metaphor to help revitalize for the 1980s a Canadian play which had already become a classic.

No longer is it necessary for the Canadian theatre to borrow other nations' classics. Woyzeck did its job: filling gaps that the new theatre badly needed filled, providing opportunities for some of the most creative talents in the new theatre to stretch their imaginations, flex their ideological muscles, and test their ideas - ideas, imagination and muscle that then often found their way into still newer work. I do not believe we shall see as many Canadian Woyzecks in the next decade as we have during the past two. And in a lot of ways that is a shame - for audiences and especially for Canadian actors. It was certainly the best part I have ever had.

Notes

BÜCHNER IN CANADA: WOYZECK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH- CANADIAN THEATRE

Jerry Wasserman

1 RICHARD MUELLER trans, Georg Büchner: Complete Plays and Prose New York: Hill & Wang, 1963
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2 Quoted by MIRA FRIEDLANDER, 'Survivor: George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Productions,' Canadian Theatre Review 38 (Fall 1983) p 48
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3 The Globe & Mail, Toronto 9 June 1969 p 12.
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4 RONALD HAUSER, George Büchner New York: Twayne, 1974 pp 128-29
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5 RENATE USMIANI, Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada Vancouver: UBC Press, 1983 p 29
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6 George Luscombe, in conversation with me, 26 Jan 1987. All unattributed quotations from him are from this interview.
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7 Ken Gass, founder of Factory Theatre Lab, was an assistant director at the Garret. Bill Glassco, at the time he established Tarragon Theatre, called Herbert, 'because of his persistence, vision and refusal to compromise, the single most important figure of the past decade of Canadian theatre.' See TOM HENDRY, 'The Canadian Theatre's Sudden Explosion,' Saturday Night vol 87 (Jan 1972) p 25
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8 GEORGE RYGA, 'Contemporary Theatre and its Language,' Canadian Theatre Review 14 (Spring 1977) p 8
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9 The plays were 'Private Club' and 'A Household God,' produced and directed by Herbert at the Bohemian Embassy in 1962
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10 John Herbert, in conversation with me, 23 Jan 1987. All unattributed quotations from him refer to this interview
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11 RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES, 'Toronto: Richard Rose in Rehearsal,' Canadian Theatre Review 42 (Spring 1985) p 134
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12 Ibid.
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13 Richard Rose, in conversation with me, 30 Jan 1987. All unattributed quotations from him refer to this interview.
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14 Richard Rose, quoted in JON KAPLAN, 'Los Angeles: Tamara Takes Off,' Canadian Theatre Review 44 (Fall 1985) p 138
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15 RAY CONLOGUE, 'Play Looks at Executive Ambition,' The Globe & Mail 22 Feb 1985 p 16
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16 John Krizanc, quoted in KNOWLES p 140
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17 See BRIAN PARKER, 'The Ballad-Plays of Ryga,' in GEORGE RYGA, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays Don Mills: General, 1971
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18 Gordon McCall in conversation with me, 21 Jan 1987. All unattributed quotations from him refer to this interview
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19 GORDON ROBERT McCALL, 'Woyzeck: Instinct vs Reason' MFA Thesis UBC 1980, pp 40, 56, 63
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20 JULIAN HILTON, George Büchner London: Macmillan, 1982 p 115
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21 DENNIS KUCHERAWY, 'Play Stirs New Controversy,' Vancouver Province 30 Nov 1981 p B6
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22 The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays p 37
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