MARY JANE MILLER
Why would anyone in the late twentieth century write a melodrama based on John Richardson's three-volume novel Wacousta! Reaney gives us several reasons: 'as far back as 1832, one of us made a break through; why waste the achievement?' (p 159), 'it is a trilingual show - English, French and Ottawa' (p 157), 'After all a story where the hero, upon public humiliation, grows into a giant deserves support.' (p 8)
Since The Sun and the Moon (1962), Reaney has repeatedly drawn on the narrative conventions and character stereotypes found in nineteenth-century romantic melodramas and gothic novels, often as a thematic counterpoint to the main plot of his play: Rider Haggard's Dawn is used in Listen to the Wind; the 'Black Donnelly' Medicine Show in Part 1 of The Donnellys. Their descendants, Ranch Romances, radio serials and comic strips, appeared in Colours in the Dark. However, with Wacousta! Reaney for the first time has focused his play almost exclusively on this kind of material. Surprisingly, although he has access to it, he has made little use of an 1850's melodrama adapted from the novel.1 Instead, as is his custom, he has used a variety of sources including improvizational acting workshops in eighteenth-century infantry drill, the pronunciation of the Ottawa, language, and the game of lacrosse.
Reaney borrows much of the plot of the novel, giving in a flashback the central love triangle of Clara Beverly, a young naïf discovered in the Scottish mountains by Captain Morton who becomes her betrothed, and Major de Haldimar who betrays Morton, marries Clara and after her death, takes a posting with Frederick and Charlotte, their children, in the North American wilderness. As in the novel, Morton, ruined and maddened by his rival's success, comes to North America where he lives among the Indians as the terrifying, vengeful Wacousta. In addition, Reaney uses Pontiac's capture of Detroit, plot devices like two miniature portraits as a means of recognition, and the character of Ellen Halloway who also seeks revenge on de Haldimar because one of his merciless orders has unjustly widowed her. The playwright also fleshes out the novel's sentimental triangle which connects Frederick, his love (and cousin) Madeline, and an 'Indian maiden' Oucanasta. He even adds a subplot which has Charlotte in love with Pontiac's brother Le Subtil.
Although the play's Indians are not the novel's romantic savages, Reaney's North American wilderness owes much to Richardson. Reaney tries to capture the novel's atmosphere in all its beauty and terror, building layers of sounds and gestures in sequences which were developed in workshops held with groups as far ranging as local enthusiasts in London to high school students in Timmins and actors from the NDWT theatre company.
In addition to the playscript itself, Wacousta! devotes 50 pages to pictures, journal entries and an overview of the work in progress by the various participants. It may be that for future theatre historians trying to relate Reaney's accounts of his creative processes to his published scripts, these impressionistic, occasionally critical, often confused notes may be the most valuable thing about the book. On the other hand, with the exception of the pictures of the public performances in the Talbot Theatre, University of Western Ontario, most of the photographs are more like family snapshots than useful records of the play in progress and could have been omitted.
If Reaney wanted 'to cultivate an audience for [Richardson's] Wacousta!' (p 159) in places in Ontario, he apparently had some success. If he wanted to replace the rather clumsy spectacle, slap-stick business, racist caricatures and cliché-ridden dialogue of the 1850s stage version2 with stage metaphors, patterns of blocking and poetic diction which evoke the novel's eerie landscapes and super-human figures, he also succeeded. Wacousta! is a good story, just as he claims, and Reaney has made an entertaining evening of it. However, setting aside the play's sources and methods of preparation, one must ask where Wacousta! stands in relation to Reaney's other work.
Reaney draws some very characteristic thematic patterns from the inchoate material of the novel, among them Charlotte's Blakean childhood in the new world in which adolescence is shackled to the log of adult experience and unfulfilled love. In typical Reaney fashion, the metaphorical log is also an actual one hampering her movement on stage. As well, in the relationships between Clara and Captain Morton, Frederick and Oucanasta, and Charlotte and Le Subtil, Reaney emphasizes variations on Richardson's theme of love between an innocent alien and a civilized European. Above all, we see a lover betrayed whose rage destroys the innocent as well as the guilty before he brings on himself his own spectacular destruction.
Facets like these yield to traditional methods of analysis, and Reaney's plays always contain profit as well as pleasure for scholars of literature. However, in contrast to many Canadian playwrights, Reaney's collusion with the actors and director creates on stage complex, carefully patterned sounds and movements I more like a film or a symphony' (p 111), which are not easily recreated in the mind's ear and eye from directions in the text. For example:
A ball of green wool has been unrolled from actor to actor to create a dense pattern of foliage ... night sounds, a faint drumming, the snap of a twig, an occasional murmured Indian word (p 34).
This is the merest sketch of the atmosphere created by sounds, gestures, props and group movement which clarify and extend the levels of meaning for lines like
Oucanasta: Comb the hair of your mother with loving feet
Touch be your lantern ...
Frederick: My Hat!
Oucanasta: The forest says - I will be your hat instead ... Let the forest be in you, Frederick, not always Frederick in the forest - (p 35)
Evocative dialogue and a carefully textured visual and verbal ambience form the context for some extravagant theatrical gestures in this play: The company fall into the shape of a giant on the floor with Morton as its head (p 94). Yet Reaney also uses small realistic details to give Wacousta! credibility, as in the sequence where Charlotte and Madeline play with the only shuttlecock west of Montreal, an economical device which evokes the distance and otherness of the wilderness and also serves as a key to the subplot of the romance between Charlotte and Le Subtil.
However, it must be said that the prevailing visual conventions of Wacousta! - dissolves, superimpositions, freeze frames, split screen effects and flash backs - can become too literal as in the red and blue cloths, model schooner and tree branch which represent Wacousta's entrapment of Clara, Madeline and Frederick (p 58). They can also be confusing for reader and audience alike.
Unfortunately, some of the dialogue is also laboured, as in the following example, when Reaney tries to fuse the nineteenth century conventional stage direction, 'Picture. Curtain', with a Jacobean-like effect. He even embellishes it with an important motif related to the theme of the ambiguities of art, and further extends it with a couple of strained metaphors, all of this leading to a climax in the plot. In the scene, Wacousta and Ellen Halloway have captured Madeline and Frederick, and are threatening them before their father's eyes:
They have knives...WACOUSTA: In pursuit of the self-splitter and the constantly regulatory snake who had venomed every moment of my existence, the thought occurred to me that if a painting had for the first and only time made your father feel something ...
ELLEN: This brush - sharp, one hair of steel!
WACOUSTA moving with Ellen, like duellists from child to child Across his children's throats - in death and art the figures are still - a miniature roused his lust, this balanced full size canvas of revenge may rouse at last
WACOUSTA and ELLEN: what we have felt! each has a knife at a de Haldimar's throat about to strike when - (p 97)
As a script which others can bring to life Wacousta! is problematic,
although, if the bare bones of the play were fleshed out with the inventiveness,
devotion and hours of extra rehearsals demanded by the script, it would
be an entertaining evening. For the reader or critic, however, Wacousta!
has fewer rewards than most of the other plays in Reaney's canon. It lacks
the detailed characterizations in key roles, variations in tone, complex
ideas fully explored, and poetic diction of other of Reaney's memorable
works. Instead, Wacousta! is simply what the title says, a melodrama.
JAMES REANEY, "Wacousta!:" a melodrama in three acts with a description of its development in workshops, Toronto: Press Porcepic, 1979, 163 p. ill., bib., $5.95 (pbk)
Mary Jane Miller
1 Wacousta! or the curse: a romantic military
drama in 3 acts ... by R. JONES printed for the first time in Reaney's
occasional theatre letter 'Halloween', Black Moss series 2, number
1, Spring 1976
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2 WACOUSTA: I have not lived in vain. Come my fair captive; thus I raise you to my breast that was your mother's worshipped temple ...
CLARA: Unhand me - monster - fiend! I have myself the power to die!
Draws Dagger. Approach one step toward me and at your feet I fall a
lifeless corpse'. Black Moss, op cit p 69
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