Among the many anniversaries being celebrated in 1982 - the centenary of the births of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E.J. Pratt, the twenty-fifth of the Canada Council - one is of special significance to the Canadian theatre community - the tenth anniversary of Playwrights Canada. This organization has played a crucial role in the burgeoning of Canadian drama in the last ten years because it made available quickly and inexpensively playscripts at a time when new theatres, new audiences, and new playwrights were desperately looking for one another. For many of the happy unions that resulted from this, Playwrights Canada was the matchmaker. Though other publishers have made Canadian plays available during these years, especially Talonbooks, Simon and Pierre, and Canadian Theatre Review, none can match Playwrights Canada in quantity and singleness of purpose.
What eventually emerged as Playwrights Canada came from a meeting in 1971 at Stanley House, Canada Council's secluded meeting place in the Gaspé. Ten Canadian playwrights and theatre administrators, English and French, met with David Gardner, then Theatre Officer of the Canada Council, and an American, Arthur Ballet, Director of the Office for Advanced Drama Research in Minneapolis, for five days in July for a seminar on playwrighting in Canada. Playwrights included in the seminar were Carol Bolt, Marc Gélinas, Jack Gray (then Acting Secretary-General of the Canadian Theatre Centre), Tom Hendry, and George Ryga. The group came up with a strong statement entitled 'A Strange Enterprise: The Dilemma of the Playwright in Canada', which included among its recommendations that subsidized theatres produce fifty percent Canadian plays, that funds be made available for the publication of all new professionally produced plays by Canadians, and that the Canadian Theatre Centre publish regularly a listing of new works by Canadians and a regular catalogue of plays by Canadians.
Partly as a result of this meeting and another playwrights' conference that summer at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Playwrights' Circle was founded later in the year by thirty-three playwrights, including some of the most prominent English-speaking playwrights in the country at that time - John Coulter, James Reaney, John Herbert, David Freeman, Len Peterson, and Paul Thompson - as well as six who had attended the Stanley House meeting. From a meeting of this group and the Playwrights' Committee of ACTRA an even stronger brief was drawn up which repeated the fifty percent Canadian content demand, emphasized the importance of the publication of Canadian plays, and called for a strengthening of the Canadian Theatre Centre.
The fifty-percent quota was never accepted by government agencies, and the Canadian Theatre Centre was at that time evaluating its own role and would soon close down. That left Canadian playwrights without an organization to act as spokesman and publicist for their growing confidence and creativity. The man who saw this need and moved quickly to fill it was playwright Tom Hendry, who had long been a promoter and publicist of Canadian drama. While he was applying for a LIP grant to open Toronto Free Theatre he also applied for a grant to publish Canadian plays. And so, in January 1972, with the help of $24,000 from Canada Manpower, The Playwrights Co-op was born.
In applying for the grant Hendry had changed the name Playwrights' Circle to Playwrights Co-op. Daryl Sharp, a teacher, editor and publisher, was appointed first administrative director, and a space found for the operation in the Learning Resources Centre of the Forest Hill branch of the Metropolitan Toronto Library on Eglinton Street West; the space was offered free in return for a copy of each play published by the Co-op. Six months later the Co-op got its own space in a former grain warehouse on Toronto's Dupont Street near the Factory Theatre Lab, Phoenix Theatre, and Tarragon.
Its primary work was to mimeograph and distribute plays by Canadian authors, and it had come to fill this need at just the right time. Theatres, schools and readers were looking for new Canadian work and playwrights were more than willing to make their unpublished work available to a wider public. One of the great assets of being published by the Co-op was that scripts were inexpensive and the playwright kept the rights to his plays; he could give them to a commercial publisher if and when there was a wider demand for them. Some of the best-known Canadian plays of those years followed this pattern - French's Leaving Home and Of the Fields, Lately, Hendry's Fifteen Miles of Broken Glass and Gravediggers of 1942 Henry's Lulu Street, and Freeman's Battering Ram. Playwrights Co-op published its first catalogue in 1973 with a total of sixty-four plays. In 1976 its second catalogue listed 102 members and 270 plays. It now has some 170 members and has published over 500 plays.
In the first five years of its existence, the Co-op had as many directors. Daryl Sharp resigned as administrative director in 1973 and went on to become a Jungian analyst; he now has a practice in Toronto, as well as a publishing house, Inner City Books. He was succeeded by an acting director, David Peel, who remained there until Heather MacAndrew became administrative director in September 1973. When she left the Co-op in early 1975, another acting director, Bob White, took over until Paul Morel was appointed to the position late that same year. For some years an important appointment at the Co-op was that of dramaturge, a position held first by Connie Brissenden, who later did much work for the organization in public relations, information, and liaison. The other dramaturges were Bob White, Anton Wagner, and David McCaughna. In May 1976, under Morel's direction, the Co-op moved to its present office at 8 York Street near the Toronto waterfront, in a building owned by the Ontario government which it is able to use rent free.
A new professionalism and some new directions were taken with the appointment as executive director in 1977 of Shirley Gibson, who came to the Co-op after seven years as President of the House of Anansi Press. During her tenure the Co-op began redefining its goals to reach out more to the community as a whole. It sponsored meetings of Canadian playwrights from which the Guild of Canadian Playwrights came into being. Now the playwrights themselves could concentrate on their own concerns and act as their own lobby group. In 1979 Playwrights Co-op changed its name to Playwrights Canada, partly because it was not meeting the requirements of a co-operative in a legal sense. It has worked with the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres in recent years. In 1981 it was instrumental in bringing about the establishment of a Governor-General's Award for published Canadian plays, and saw the first award go to one of its members, Sharon Pollock, for Blood Relations and Other Plays.
Besides its full-time executive director and staff of six, Playwrights Canada is run by a board of directors, ten playwrights from across Canada, elected annually by the national membership; the most recent chairman was Michael Cook. Its budget for 1981-82 is $250,000, which comes largely from grants from the federal government, Ontario, Alberta, and Toronto. This enables it to carry out several programs besides its primary function of xeroxing and distributing Canadian plays. It now publishes a small number of paperback editions of individual plays and collections under its own imprint, Playwrights Press. After sponsoring a competition in 1975-76, it published four volumes of new plays by Canadian women entitled Women Write for Theatre. It has published theatre-related scholarship as well with the important source book, A Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History 1583-1975 by John Ball and Richard Plant, and its Supplement. Playwrights Press has also published The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Plays in English 1766-1978, edited by Anton Wagner.
Playwrights Canada distributes a newsletter to its members and from time to time a playlist for special audiences, especially theatre organizations. It once had a reading service which any aspiring playwright might use to get a full-length script evaluated for a fee of $20; that service has unfortunately been abandoned, as has the position of dramaturge. It has established reading rooms in Canada and abroad, which carry complete or representative collections of its plays; reading rooms are presently located in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Montreal, Fredericton, Sackville, Halifax, Charlottetown, St John's. Overseas reading rooms have been established in London, England, Edinburgh, Wellington, New Zealand and Shanghai, China; similar operations will open soon in Bordeaux, France and Australia. Finally, it has become involved in coordinating tours by Canadian playwrights throughout Canada and abroad, as well as a 'Playwrights in the Schools' program in Ontario.
In spite of these valuable services, Playwrights Canada is not widely known outside the theatre community. There are several large Canadian centres where no reading room exists, including the nation's capital. Plays published by the organization are not widely sold in bookstores across Canada, yet it is the least expensive source of Canadian plays. If Playwrights Canada were better known, their plays would surely be used more widely in schools where Canadian drama is on the curriculum and where more expensive plays are sometimes prohibitive.
Membership in the organization is open to Canadian playwrights who have had at least one play professionally produced; they pay $35 for the first year and $25 a year thereafter. On its tenth anniversary it may be time for Playwrights Canada to broaden its scope by including published plays by non-members in its listings. The glossy tenth anniversary catalogue with its short biographies and plot summaries is a useful reference tool, but it would be more useful if it had a section on non-members with even the titles, publishers, and cost of their plays. The Brock Bibliography stops at 1978, and there is a need for a Canadian 'Plays in Print' in English. Playwrights Canada could fill this need by listing current non-members, who now include among English-speaking playwrights Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Joanna Glass, Herschel Hardin, John Herbert, John Murrell, Mavor Moore, and Beverley Simons; omissions among French-Canadian playwrights published in English are Guy Dufresne, Gratien Gélinas, Jean Barbeau, Michel Garneau, Roland Lepage, and Antonine Maillet.
As part of its tenth anniversary year, Playwrights Canada planned a conference to examine the state of Canadian playwrighting 'ten years later'. That initiative was seized by the Canada Council, which arranged a meeting where it all began in 1971 - at Stanley House - for another five days in July 1982 to examine Canadian drama in its many forms including stage, radio, film, and television. As in 1971, twelve people - playwrights, producers, administrators including three representatives of Playwrights Canada were assembled to discuss how Canadian theatre can best be served after ten years which brought much growth but ended with a stiff challenge from a faltering economy and the imminence of pay television. Playwrights Canada can take pride in the fact that a good deal of credit for those ten exciting years of Canadian theatre goes to their organization and its pioneering work in printing Canadian plays and making them readily available. But they will not be content simply to take pride. They will be looking for new ways in which Playwrights Canada can match in the eighties its remarkable achievement of the seventies.