Original plays have very much proved their worth in this country, revivifying, identifying, so much so that it has been doubly unpleasant to watch the muting of our theatre movement in the last four years, and to watch, as well, the general feeling arise that something has not quite peaked as it should have. Theatrically in this country, we're not as far ahead as we should be. And, in film, opera, puppet theatre - we're in, varying ways, behind where we could be. What a surge forward Australia has made recently with its film renaissance - Breaker Morant, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. Even New Zealand has caught up with Smash Palace, while we must bear with such titles as Meatballs, The Wars, Animal House, and Porky I, Porky II. Perhaps it would be a good idea to curse our miserable aesthetic fate and turn our face to the wall?
This sort of thing has happened before in Canada. In 1906, Sara Jeannette Duncan was all set to stay, spiritually, in Canada and write a sequel to The Imperialist, a really bright novel, not unlike the Australian novel of the same time-frame - My Brilliant Career. A continuation of The Imperialist might have started a literary movement somewhat more complicated than the contemporary Marjorie Pickthall and L.M. Montgomery novels, might have provided a pacer for the Leacock satires which are not the village idylls they are so often though to be. What did the reviewer in the Globe do? Why slam The Imperialist, perhaps one of the best novels ever written about our society, because 'women shouldn't attempt writing about politics. They know nothing about that, and should stick to the domestic circle.' As a result, Sara Jeannette Duncan dropped plans for a sequel, and 'went back' to England. In connection with this cultural disaster, future historians may note that, in the seventh decade of the twentieth century, the anglophone part of the country, at last, started a small theatre renaissance with some premieres and national tours; however, the entertainment page of the Star, or so it is rumoured - we have no investigative arts journalism in this country, decided that Kareda had been overpraising things and that Gina Mallet should be brought in to see if the ginger could not be taken out of the new play movement. As Keith Turnbull remarked to me at the time, this could never have happened in any other country in the world, nation of the meek who shall not inherit that we are, we lie back and take it. Again, when Robin Phillips said that our plays were grotesques, unrecognizable to other nations as plays, and that the only cure was adaptation of Paul Gallico or perhaps a sane Canuck novel, no one protested. In Dublin, the man's house would have had its windows broken. In Burma, a mob might even have decided to have a go at the Star entertainment desk, but passions don't flare up in Canada. If anything, they turn inward and smudge.
Let's leave the front end of the problem alone for a while. After all, younger people are coming up every day, and perhaps one of them will have enough bezaz someday to take over the Stratford Festival while the other one starts writing arts journalism for the Toronto papers that can be published in book form, not quietly forgotten along with the theatre movement its lack of direction helped muzzle. Going to the other end of our theatre movement, I have decided to swallow my wrath and have a try at a theoretical problem so abstruse that its solution will not raise the dander of anyone with cultural power to scorn or even to encourage.
Just suppose that some day, perhaps a century from now, we might have a viable national theatre with a repertory of classics written by our own playwrights. When and if we do - what would be the oldest play in that repertory? You see I see, as past runners of our National Art Centre did not, I see the problem in terms of a national theatre presenting a cycle of plays that tells the story of our people. That's what the girl wants to do in the Australian film, My Brilliant Career... 'tell the story of my people.' This means that everything from Female Consistory to Automatic Pilot to Red Emma to the vulgar 'adaptation' of Anne of Green Gables at Charlottetown is eligible; we exclude not Zastrozzi simply because it's plotted by Shelley and set in Italy. So is Romeo and Juliet, and so on. Imagine yourself for a moment in charge of a National American Classical Repertory; well, there isn't one, but our southern cousins are sifting through the past at this very moment and having second thoughts about some of the plays that seemed like sure candidates even ten years ago; for example, is not the best thing about the sentimental Death of a Saleman [sic] its lighting? Is the once sacred O'Neill not too jumbo-like, too pachydermatic? For those critics involved in theorizing about a classical repertory for an American Film Theatre, since the Americans invented film and really love it, the task I have announced is much easier. In a repertory film palace of classic American films, Griffith's Birth of a Nation would have to be # 1. What is our Birth of a Nation? And what if we're not really good at theatre anyhow, but should really be showcasing our - what?
Les Anciens Canadiens by Aubert de Gaspé happens to be the play which I think might some day be the first, or most ancient, play in the repertory of a national theatre. An historical romance published in the early 1860s, it was adapted by two young seminarians soon after publication, or so I hear, for at the time of writing this I have never run across anyone who has seen either a production or even a manuscript copy of the script. One of the earliest Canadian novels, De Gaspé's story very much fits into the spirit of - 'telling my people's story.' Its author has attempted to archetypalize the old French Canada before the conquest, to show its death and revival since. The plot involves a David and Jonathan pair taken from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels as are similar pairs in our own John Richardson's romances, another early archetypalist of our past - Wacousta, The Canadian Brothers, Westbrook the Outlaw. In Les Anciens Canadiens, the 'brothers' are a young Scottish nobleman and a young Québecois seigneur who, childhood friends, grow up to appear on opposing sides during Wolfe's invasion of New France. Forced to do so by a nasty English superior, the Scottish brother burns down his friend's manor house and - I leave you to fill in the rest because, of course, there is a sister of the seigneur who loves the Scottish boy, but can now not quite bring herself to marry him; however, in the manor house built after the Conquest they live as sister and brother ever afterwards. Unless you've read both Scott's Guy Mannering and Richardson's Wacousta, you may have forgotten to add a mad prophetess who foretells some of this unnatural behaviour. All of this no doubt sounds silly and gothic enough, but no more so than some of the goings-on in D.W. Griffiths, or in William Faulkner's stylizations of his Mississippi past. It also sounds like a John Ford movie. If ever found, I'm sure the script will need some reworking if not total renovating; ideally, it should be adapted by a Québecois with a bilingual production, or it might perhaps be turned into an opera. Whether this will ever happen again, I cannot prophecy, but at its original premiére, the author of the novel travelled down the St. Lawrence to the theatre in a boat greeted at every village by celebratory rifle-salutes. The idea seemed to have been that here comes our local bard who has helped give us the beginnings of our own theatre. In reading a two volume biography of William Faulkner last summer, I noted a similar scene when, after the Civil War was over, his grandfather, on returning home to Oxford, Mississippi, wrote and produced a play; even in defeat, a community can somehow correct the balance in both Mississippi and Quebec with a new play.
And, with the revival of this old play - Les Anciens Canadiens - to my mind what has quietly happened during the past decade or so in our theatre movement would then be complete. It would now be possible to put on an almost continuous dramatic telling of 'our story.' Naturally, there's a great deal of re-working and barnacle scraping still to be done, but at least the prototypes have been hewn out, and, in the case of MacKenzie King, the Allan Stratton play - Rexy - stands finished, highly polished, and ready for revival. I find it useful to think of other country's theatrical parallels. For example, in the Elizabethan theatre you find primitive Falstaff plays and Ur-Hamlets later followed by new models. In this connection, I was cheered when a Banff journalism student did a newspaper article about my theatrical adaptation of The Canadian Brothers with the title - 'A Canadian Oresteia.' At last someone is thinking of our archaic past in terms of archaic Greece, and, about time too, in view of O'Neill's venture in this direction with the experimental Mourning Becomes Electra, as well as Wagner's stirrings of ancestral cauldrons. Yes, I know it's very much a situation where a baby tries on its father's armour, but from my viewpoint that sort of activity cannot start too soon. All of this requires ambiance: more and more people thinking this way, asking for it, nudging aside the nay-sayers, writing letters to newspapers, building up the atmosphere for a breakthrough. I should now like to present how this has already worked on a smaller scale in another part of our country altogether from either Québec or anglophone Canada.
To begin with, one of the nations within our nation, if nation it be, is the Six Nations settlement at Oshweken, just outside Brantford, on the Grand River. In the mid-forties, a lady called Emily General could see that the chiefs were keeping the old stories to themselves, could also see that technology was swiftly stealing away the young people's attention from their own traditions. Nashville and Los Angeles were taking over instead. As a student of mine, Robert Krieg, discovered, Emily General next visited her cousins in upper New York State at Ticonderoga to see a pageant play about Red Jacket, a Seneca chief at the time of the American Revolution.
Using this play as a model, she went back to Oshweken and soon, on her farm, had an annual summer theatre established, an outdoor theatre where a regularly performed cycle of eight plays solves the problem of secretive chiefs and Nashville. My favorite play of this cycle is about Pauline Johnson, the Six Nations poet. Even though the taped sound and dialogue are by no means ideal, there is an effortless charm to the way the heroine is mythologized by an outdoor production with a small pond across which she can enter by canoe and behind which various scenes unfold, with old trees behind them and real water in front of them. Most people stick up their noses at 'pageants', but what happens at Oshweken is more, to my mind, like miracle plays. And out of 'miracle plays', as we well know, eventually something much tighter and sophisticated can grow. It remains to be seen what happens next at Oshweken, but in many ways its theatre is much ahead of the rest of the country if only because it has decided on its past.
Community identification has occurred elsewhere in Canada with such a phenomenon as Paul Thompson's Farm Show out of which a really strong local theatre has grown - the Blyth Summer Theatre whose School Show (Ted Johns) and Quiet In the Land (Anne Chislett) are almost perfect examples of what can come after the pioneering phase is over. Both my home town, Stratford, and also where I work, London, Ontario, have several times come very close to creating an original home-made theatre, an alternative to Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. In these latter cases, what always seems to happen is a fatal lack of savvy at the last moment, and the tendency of meek Canadians to buckle when an outsider barely breathes defiance. Quite often, the failure seems to start at the very top.
Let's look at the National Arts Centre for the last two decades. Worth recounting too is the famous visit paid this institution by Joe Papp. Joe Papp's visit? Again, I am not quoting from a recently published book or even article on crucial moments in a recent cultural history. It's possible to know far more about an actor in nineteenth-century Canada who died of greasepaint poisoning than it is to know anything about really important things that happened in the last decade.
Quite some time ago, it used to be that the powers in control at the theatre wing of the National Arts Centre, or Beehive, would ask me up to discuss with them the sort of grass roots theatre that my Listeners' Workshop used to represent in the town where I work. They would discuss with me the theme of this talk: how do you root a theatre in the community, create new plays, fulfill what seemed to be the mandate of building the nation's theatre? And I would say: why not establish a network of children's theatre workshops that would feed into the National Theatre from both Ottawa and Hull out of which would, eventually, come, at least, Ottawa playwrights and actors, even theatregoers immunized to the phobia so many have in this country to new works about themselves. As living proof that this works, I have only to point to Allan Stratton, author of such successes as Rexy and Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii. He started out in Listeners' Workshop, his first play was published in London, Ontario in Alphabet; at present, his collegiate, Oakridge, leads the town with regard to plays produced and written by the students themselves. But no matter how I peddled the Listeners' Workshop to my powerful customers, they somehow could never get their feet wet. I now know what was wrong; my idea wasn't expensive, wasn't materialistic enough. For some reason or other, in Canada, perhaps because we're a nouveau riche country (and now nouveau pauvre! just as we're catching on to all this) in Canada, we can build theatres costing millions, we can design costumes worth the same, but we never seem to realize that the theatre and the costumes follow ideas, not precede them. And ideas need ambiance, not money.
And so, Joe Papp, from the New York Public Theatre, came to visit the very theatre in the National Beehive I have been describing. For the city-state of New York, he had been successful at last, after many setbacks, in forging a sort of national theatre. Some of his first originals he called 'Hunchback' plays, but slowly things got better until Chorus Line took off and financed further experiments. His attitude to unsympathetic reviews, so unlike our gentle Canuck acceptance of Karma, was to fight back vociferously. And his reaction to our theatre problems was to say that he was tired of receiving Canadian plays by writers who whined about non-acceptance in their own bailiwick. If you want a native theatre, he said, put on native works regardless; eventualy, [sic] they will start to improve through survival of the fittest. I think he's right. There's always a shadowy mycellium phase in the history of a cultural break-through before the puffball explodes one morning above ground - as it were. What we lack is a Diagheliev, raised in the dull town of Perm (which you may remember as the place Chekhov's Three Sisters wanted so much to leave) and, for that reason, all the more able to will the appearance of artists who might liven up things. I think I know how the nursemaiding is done, but, unfortunately, I can't be five people. Just lately, though, I have begun to notice that our culture is producing such midwives. When the Beckwith opera Shivaree was in the works, a crucial organization appeared out of the blue called Comus Productions devoted to the development of new musical theatre in this country. Where have you been all my life, I thought. How can we create ten more of you? Perhaps a similar wave of new personalities and professional middlemen is just appearing on our theatre scene. Is it not a trifle late with the baby so blue in the face? Still, a midwife is a midwife.
Perhaps the organizational-cum-creative problem that seems so easy to solve in a neighbourhood or community, but seems so difficult on a federal scale, can be more clearly seen in connection with our very weak operatic and puppet traditions. Again, there is precious little journalism, and practically no books. If you know of a book on the theory of Canadian opera, I wish you'd tell me. There does happen to be a recent book on our puppetry tradition, and from it (Kenneth McKay, Puppetry in Canada) I quote a sentence that sums up more than just the puppet scene: 'Perhaps even more surprising is the lack of influence on British Columbia puppetry from the mask traditions of the Pacific Coastal Indians. Although their carving is a significant part of the local heritage and increasingly respected by West Coast artists in general, easily accessible in several locations ... it has had little impact on puppeteers.' What happens, of course, is that the local puppeteers are doing Alice in Wonderland and Punch and Judy; if they were telling stories about Wacky Bennett and Amor di Cosmos, famous premiers of the province, or the sort of mythologizing Earle Birney accomplishes in The Damnation of Vancouver, the urge to use the local mask tradition might be more uncontrollable. What happens in puppetry here is what happens on a grander scale with opera and theatre. The colonial mentality always gets ends and means mixed up and thinks that puppetry is about puppetry, is about the craft of puppeteering, as high school drama productions are so frequently about the play's lighting. When all the energies are poured into the craft, a ready-made script from another tradition saves time. Why not start things the other way around? Why not say that puppetry is about telling stories, and forget about the craft aspect. Let that assume shape from the shape of the story you're telling. If this happens to be a local story about a local hero, the lighting, the acting, the look of things will come out of that, rough at first, but fast learning how to give itself a new integrity. In Brandon, Manitoba, I have watched this happen in the puppetry work of Chris Hurley who is fond of developing stories written by the local children.
Recent developments with regard to Music at Sharon, an annual festival celebrating Ontario musical traditions at David Willson's Temple thirty miles north of Toronto, make one suspect that out of that very beautiful wooden building, the remains of a religious commune established in the nineteenth century by heretic Quakers with a love for music and art, may come a renewal of our musical traditions that extends the insight behind David Willson's emphasis on a new hymn and a newly composed meditation every Sunday. In effect, what David Willson established, with his seven hundred hymns and his preference for listening to the Word of God now rather than accepting only past receptions, was the aesthetic basis for some of the statements I have been making about new plays, new operas, new puppetry.
But let me return to the original impetus for this paper. I was asked to do a paper on my work with children. I rather shied away from this since that work is generally taken as a sign of my own infantilism; as if having, and being interested, in kids was somehow less mature than being a surly old confirmed bachelor who never rocked a cradle in his or her life. But you can see the interest peeking through what I have said - the belief that going back for refreshment to the primitive roots of our theatre is somehow involved with an interest in everything that children (our own primitive selves) do. I decided then to do a paper called Towards a National Repertory; this developed into a specific task that such a conference as an ACTH one might conceivably be interested in. The task of hunting for an obscure MS somewhere in a seminary in Quebec gets involved with the whole state of theatre arts - opera, film, puppets, stage - in our country. It seems absurd to care, in the face of the defeat our theatre movement has recently suffered to worry about Aubert de Gaspé, but I think not. This turning back to the historical past all started with me when, in researching old London, Ontario newspapers I ran across an advertisement for Louisa Medina's adaptation of John Richardson's Wacousta. I found the MS through the helpfulness of a friend in New York; next Black Moss Press, a shining cultural beacon situated in Windsor, where it is very much needed, published this MS which eventually became my own Wascousta, a play that, reviled in the Golden Crescent, had enthusiastic followings in the hinterland - e. g., Sault Ste Marie, New Liskeard, Port Dover - places who have not quite yet been swept into the orbit of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Because we used native people in the cast (Brian Johnson of the Globe called one of them a Fat Indian) a theatre movement even developed in Northern Ontario with native people involved in their own traditions. All that - and also a gorgeous production of the sequel Canadian Brothers in Calgary last fall - because of an ad for a melodrama in a ragged yellowing old 1850 backwoods newspaper!
Does this mean that I want a theatre locked forever in native themes, Canadian stories and traditions? Not at all. When this essay was first given as a paper at the Association for Canadian Theatre History Conference in Guelph in June, 1984, one of the most interesting reactions from the floor was a young man who said rather musingly that the Elizabethans had got rivetted on British history for about ten years, and then went on for another ten years chiefly to write about Italy. If someone will just take over the Aubert de Gaspé job, I myself would like to move on to a Pericles of Tyre kind of play using the Great Lakes for the Mediterranean with scenes in nineteenth century Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, the Erie Canal, Irish gangsters, Molly Maguires, ministers who are secret brothel keepers in Toronto etc. Or, having recently become fixated again on the Brontë children's youthful writings about Angria and Gondal, why not use their method where the scenes in African kingdoms turn out inevitably to have moors on their northern limits and thus - inevitable gradations into the Yorkshire outside their own nursery window?
How to surn all thus up? After we've told our own stories, sung our own soaps, and painted our own pictures for a while, perhaps that leads into the next stage - simply painting, singing, and telling.
When I finished giving the above as a paper at the aforementioned conference last June, fellow dramatist Carol Bolt came on stage and said she hoped that the dramatized version of Les Anciens Canadiens would never be found! For her, the best new plays were those dealing with the author's personality. Since my ideals are directly opposed to personality-expression as the only avenue open to the playwright in a society slowly crumbling into millions of lonely people watching the soaps or talking to their computer-therapist, I was very happy when, 'pat ... like the catastrophe of an old comedy' Len Doucette from Scarborough College rose and said that he knew where to find the dramatic adaptation of Les Anciens Canadiens. The adaptors were Camille Caisse and Arcade Laporte; Robarts Library and Metro Reference Library (Toronto) both have copies. If you're interested in further information, you might consult M. Doucette's Theatre in French Canada, 1606-1867, just issuing from University of Toronto Press. Originally, he tells me, the adaptation of Les Anciens Canadiens contained only male parts because of the seminary situation; a convent then adapted the female half of the story. But whether the two institutions ever joined forces for a 'both sides now' presentation remains obscure.
References
Readers may want to consult the following:
JAMES REANEY 'Tales of the Great River: Aubert de Gaspé and John Richardson' Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada Series IV Volume XVII 1979
ROBERT EDWARD KRIEG Forest Theatre: a study of the Six Nations' Pageant Plays on the Grand River Reserve. Department of English Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Ontario 1978
MARIAN FOWLER Redney: a Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan Toronto 1983
KENNETH McKAY Puppetry in Canada, an Art to Enchant. Ontario Puppetry Association Publishing Company, Toronto, 1983.
JOHN BECKWITH, et al Musical Toronto/A Concert Party Marquis Records, Suite 300, 144 Front Street West, Toronto M5J 2L7
LARRY LAKE, JAMES MONTGOMERY et al Music at Sharon, a Celebration of 150 Years, 1831-1981 Melbourne Records, Toronto, 1982
SIR CHARLES G.D. ROBERTS tr Canadians of Old New Canadian Library 106, Toronto, 1974
PHILIPPE AUBERT DE GASPÉ Memoires (1866) Bibliotheque Canadienne-Français, Fides, Montreal 1971