Ross Stuart
Editor Diane Bessai's Afterword, a primer on the evolution of prairie theatre, is alone worth the price of her valuable anthology, Prairie Performance. The title is particularly descriptive: all seven short plays and the one television script by W.O. Mitchell have proven themselves in performance, often in several different forms, on stage, radio and television. Although the collection is not truly representative of writing in all three prairie provinces (there are no plays at all from Manitoba), all but one of the plays reflect the traditional character and feeling of the region as a whole.
Because the book is organized according to time of action rather than to time of writing, similarities in theme are emphasized but the development of playwriting in the west is not. We must accept Diane Bessai's judgment that for the two youngest writers she includes, their 'regional content . . . is entirely unselfconscious in that the prairie milieu is to them the natural focus for dramatic expression.' Such was not the case even twenty years ago.
The twin cornerstones of prairie playwriting are Elsie Park Gowan and Gwen Pharis Ringwood, women who, again to use Bessai's description, possessed 'a healthy western spirit of pioneer determination'. Gowan is represented by her gentle comedy, Breeches from Bond Street, long a fixture in little theatre repertoires across the west. A rejected mail order bride reforms an aimless but charming remittance man in a late nineteenth century prairie settlement. It is a time of new beginnings, both for the protagonists and for the land itself. This optimism, never as strongly evident in any of the other plays, is expressed most graphically in one of the final speeches: there's 'always hope, in the West, if we got the spirit in us'.
Rather than her readily available Canadian classic, Still Stands the House, Gwen Pharis Ringwood is represented by a rather contrived farce, A Fine Coloured Easter Egg, set in the 1950s. The traditional life of a farm family, symbolized by a handpainted Easter egg, is threatened by oil exploration. The promise of prosperity (and mass-produced chocolate eggs) causes nothing but problems.
The conflict between old and new is captured more poignantly in Frank Moher's The Broken Globe, based on a story by Henry Kreisel. The farm has passed down from grandfather to father but not to son. The son chooses his own way and rejects immigrant beliefs and values. The play pits father against son, religion against science, Ukrainian against Canadian; battles which both sides lose.
Canadian Gothic, the first success of Prairie-expatriate Joanna Glass, is set in the small Saskatchewan town of Cardigan in the 1950s. Cardigan seems unaffected by progress, overlooked by prosperity; it is a bulwark against change, strong enough to withstand even the turmoil caused by the love affair of an Indian boy and a white girl. The mother captures the monotony in a remark early in the play when she recalls how she knew soon after her marriage that 'the routine we'd set ... was the one we'd follow the rest of our lives'.
The town in Ken Mitchell's often-produced This Train, retitled and appearing herein as Wheat City, does change with time, but for the worse. It gradually erodes and disappears, like dry top soil in a prairie gale. 'We're the last people left in Wheat City', one of the two pathetic losers realizes near the end of the play, looking off towards the town 'in both hope and despair'. Using only two characters on a deserted railway station platform, Mitchell captures the sound, feeling and rhythm of a decaying town baking under a scorching sun.
Gordon Pengilly's Seeds, set in another 1950s farmhouse, echoes the mood and style of The Broken Globe, Canadian Gothic and Wheat City. The play skillfully shifts back and forth between present and past and between reality and memory. A farmer and his wife, talking more to themselves than to each other, remember, hypnotically, almost poetically, their own fatal love triangle to the accompaniment of a moaning wind.
W.O. Mitchell's television play The White Christmas of Archie Nicotine takes a simple incident, the efforts of an Indian to sell Christmas trees from the front lawn of the United Church manse, and turns it into an entertaining, thoughtful parable on the meaning of Christmas. A confrontation of cultures here leads to understanding, over a celebratory Christmas moose. Although the text is printed as a teleplay with occasional camera directions, it could easily be adapted for the stage.
The odd-play-out, Wilfred Watson's The Woman Taken in Adultery, is set, according to the author, 'in a shopping centre in Edmonton, Alberta', blessed with a statue of Jesus, 'courtesy of the Alberta Government Cultural Branch'. Actors serve as chorus, a Salvation Army band and characters named after Alberta towns, such as Teresa Wetaskawin and Sally Ponoka, in this amusing, imaginative rendering of the biblical story of the title. Lawyers and a social worker exploit the unfaithful wife to entrap Jesus, but he outwits them all, by instructing 'he that is without sin among you' to cast the first stone. However Watson is not content with this traditional ending. Instead the women in the cast attack the men, who hide behind the statue, until 'the shouting and stone-throwing reach an orgasmic abandon'. Watson's unique writing style, an artful blending of the historical and contemporary, of myth, morality, satire and slapstick, helps make the play fresh, lively and provocative.
Wilfred Watson's play is the least overtly 'prairie' work in the volume. The rest are replete with typical prairie imagery, symbols and concerns, such as the land, weather, fertility, wheat, the family, isolation, friendship, and the importance of heritage.
The editor has anticipated the major criticism about Prairie Performance. She admits the plays, even by the young writers, 'show their generation's fascination with the western past of the 1930s and 1940s'. The collection gives little insight into western alienation or contemporary problems facing a region struggling with the rewards and difficulties of immense wealth. On the contrary, this anthology will probably reinforce prejudices and preconceptions of a predominately rural west filled with rustic characters.
Prairie Performance is fine as far as it goes. What is needed now is a companion volume of plays which confront what Diane Bessai calls 'the continuing impact of technology and urbanization on the traditional stabilities of prairie society'.