PRAIRIE FORUM Vol. 21, No.1 Spring 1996 CONTENTS ARTICLES Introduction: Placing Prairie Drama Anne Nothof v TownHall vs. the Barracks: Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Regina PatrickB. O'Neill 1 uThe Actors Excelled-Their First Efforts": Amateur Theatre in Lethbridge, Alberta, 1885-1900 Ches Skinner 17 Spaces and Choices: The Theatre in Calgary from 1944 to 1968 John A. Hawkins 29 Necessary Adjustments: The Problem of CommunitySolidarity in Paper Wheat, The Fighting Days and TheShipbuilder Foxy Persons: Transformation of Narrative Mode in the Prairie Theatre ExchangeProduction of MargaretSweatman's Fox ChrisJohnson 55 Reacting to the Right[eous]: The Political Plays of FrankMoher, Lyle Victor Albert, Raymond Storey, and Greg Nelson Anne Nothof 75 Canada East, Canada West: The Cultural Politics of Geography Revisited Moira Day 99 REVIEWS URSELL, Geoffrey, Saskatoon Pie; MITCHELL, Ken, ThePlainsman; KERR, Don, Talking Back; SAPERGIA, Barbara, Roundup by Don Perkins 121 MANN, George, Theatre Lethbridge: A History ofTheatrical Productions in Lethbridge, Alberta (1885-1988) by Ross Stuart 124 FRASER/Brad, TheUglyMan: A Play; FRASER, Brad, Poor Super Man by Debby Thompson 127 JOHNSTON LEWIS,[acqui and WARREN, Diane, comps., Eureka! Seven OneAct Plays for Secondary Schools by Joyce Doolittle 129 CONTRIBUTORS 132 INDEX 133 PRAIRIE FORUM: Journal of the Canadian Plains Research Center ChiefEditor: Patrick Douaud, Education, Regina Editorial Board: I. Adam, English, Calgary D. Gauthier, CPRC, Regina P. Ghorayshi, Sociology, Winnipeg S. Jackel, Canadian Studies, Alberta M. Kinnear, History, Manitoba W. Last, Earth Sciences, Winnipeg A. Leger-Anderson, History, Regina P. McCormack, ProvincialMuseum, Edmonton A. Mills, Political Science, Winnipeg F. Pannekoek, Alberta Culture _______--.:an=.:.=d=-:M~u=lt=ic=..:u=l~tu""""'r__=alism,-E-dmQnlQn---~---.-.~.­ D. Payment, Parks Canada, Winnipeg T. Robinson, Religious Studies, Lethbridge L. Vandervort, Law, Saskatchewan J. Welsted, Geography, Brandon B. Wilkinson, Economics, Alberta Copy Editors: Agnes Bray, CPRC, Regina Brian Mlazgar, CPRC, Regina Book Review Editor: Agnes Bray, CPRC, Regina PRAIRIE FORUM is published twice yearly, inSpringandFall, atan annual sabsclipdoiiIaLeof $103.00 fbI htdividuals altd$28.00 fbI lltshLaholis. hi addition, 7% GST mustbe addedto all Canadianorders. Out-of-Canada orders, please make payment in Canadian funds and add $5.00 for postageandhandling. All subscriptions,correspondenceandcontribu­ tions should be sent to: The Editor, Prairie Forum, Canadian Plains ResearchCenter,University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, S4S OA2. Subscribers will also receive the Canadian Plains Bulletin, the newsletter of the Canadian Plains Research Center. PRAIRIE FORUM is notresponsiblefor statements,eitherof fact oropinion, made by contributors. ©1996 CANADIAN PLAINS RESEARCH CENTER ISSN 0317-6282 Introduction: Placing Prairie Drama Plays grow out of specific places, rooted in a soil which is layered with the accretions of people and events, weather and time. Their essential conflicts are conditioned by the landscape in which they are set, whether ancient or modem, urban or rural; their focus is widened or contained by the horizon, and their spatial relations bylandscape or cityscape. Canadian poets such as Al Purdy and John Newlove are highly sensitized to the interactive relationship of mind and land - the convolutions of which can "run parallel with [the] brain"! - and with the psychological tensions which a landscape of extremes can impose: Not to lose the feel of the mountains while still retaining the prairies is a difficult thing. but I remember plains and mountains, places I come from, places I adhere and live in? The articles in this special issue of Prairie Forum interrogate the ways in which Canadian prairie drama has shown the individual or group in the -_···_-~--pro-cess~of--setf:;-definittrrnin-t~rms-ot landscape, community-;mSfory, politics,--- and religion, creating a specific place from which to speak, and resisting the tendency of the "centre" to marginalize the West. They implicitly counter the contention of Toronto critic Robert Wallace that a critical approach to Canadiandrama "basedon environmentaland geographicaldefinitions" is "outmoded and nonproductive," and that "regionality be approached as a social and imaginative construction, not as a geographical condition.r" Accordingto Wallace, the topographyof a particularspacehas little bearing on the character of the region, which is determined primarily by ethnicity, class, ideologies, even voting patterns. As the following articles show, prairie drama does indeed reflect the social diversity of the population,but it is also characterized blT the ways in lArbich individuals and commupities respond to environment, transforming this response into a regional mythology. Robert Kroetsch understands this compulsion to find names for the elements of a landscape, to create a "narrative of place" which informs and illuminates the lives of its inhabitants. For Kroetsch, local pridecomes from "an awareness of the authenticity of our own lives.... To understand ourselves becomes impossible if we do not see images of ourselves in the mirror - be that mirror theatre or literature or historical writing. A local pride does not exclude the rest of the world, or other experiences; rather, it makes them both possible. It creates an organizing centre."! Similarly for GeorgeWoodcock, "thereare no universallandscapes":"itis in regions that landscape combines with history to create traditions ... if there is anything to which modem man [sic] seeks to place himself in totemic relationship, it v is the land.r" ForHenryKriesel, IIall discussion of the literature producedin the CanadianWestmustof necessitybeginwiththe impactof the landscape upon the mind.?" an impactevoked, for example, in WolfWillow byWallace Stegner: Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was morebeautiful. Even in drouth or dust stormor blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint againstit. You don'tescape sky andsun, butwearthemin youreyeballs and on yourback. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark. It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humbleones. At noonthe totalsunpoursonyour single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed.7 For the first Europeanimmigrants to the Prairies, drama wasa meanSOf-­ surviving in a hostile environment - psychologically and emotionally. Early theatre in the West reflects a determination that theatre should happenregardless of physicalor economicprivation," createdoutof thefear that a tenuous hold on the land could be easily shaken off," It obliged individuals to draw on their own creative talents within a context of group action and cooperation needed to jointly achieve goals and build a sense of community. Prairie theatre developed originally as an amateur exercise, nurtured by the Dominion Drama Festival, and in Alberta by the educational outreach programs of Elizabeth Sterling Haynes. Although the "regionalization" of professional Canadian theatre began in the late 1960s, lEe;; piuiiic plu) 3 .. cede lap ea flm B1i15 £; mall cowpapies vdth ? mandate to commission, workshop and produce Canadian plays ­ Workshop West and Theatre Network in Edmonton, Twenty-Fifth Street Theatre in Saskatoon, and Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. Contemporary prairie plays are often set in small towns, depicting the tension between what Robert Kroetsch calls "the sense of roots and the sense of motion" - for example, The Last Bus by Raymond Storey, Kidnapping theBride byFrankMoher, The Mail Order Bride by RobertClinton, The Prairie Church ofBuster Galloway by Lyle Victor Albert, Sky and TheSoft Eclipse by Connie Gault, Footprints on the Moon by Maureen Hunter, The Bordertown Cafe by Kelly Rebar. Drama set in the urban prairie also resonates with a desperate attempt to establish a sense of place and self in a hostile environment - the gothic tragi-comedies of Brad Fraser, for example- Unidentified Human Remains andtheTrue Nature ofLove and Poor Superman. His "rural" prairie play, The Ugly Man, transposes Jacobean vi tragedy to a western landscape, but its locale is more that of Bonanza than an Alberta ranch. Prairie plays may also be placed anywhere in a wider "Western world," the witty comedies of Stewart Lemoine and the puppet theatre of Ronnie Burkett, for example. However, as Diane Bessai points out in "Centres on the Margin: Contemporary Prairie Drama," these plays are still conditioned by their perception of the self in relation to a perceived "centre" of authenticity and importance. Their satiric edge may function to undermine power centres, or to recast them in terms of specific western locales: Just as the dramatic rendering of place ... gives the autonomy of centre stage to characters who by circumstance are literally decentred by gender, age or social or geographical environment, so are their writers striving to centre regional