In Praise of Canadian Plays

Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I like Canadian plays. They speak to us in ways that other plays do not. This essay will explain why I feel this way, and what I hope Canadian high-school drama teachers might do about it. 

First, some history. As I’ve often told my students, I’m so old, and Canadian playwriting is so young, that we kind of grew up together. In 1970, the federal government instituted a new set of grant programs which seeded a great many new organizations, some of them theatre companies. I joined one in Vancouver, and we agreed that it would be fun to do Canadian plays, but they were few and far between. So we started writing our own. And it soon became apparent that this process was happening across the country. 

Of course, there was theatre on Canadian soil long before the 1970s. There has been performance by First Nations artists for centuries; and even the first theatrical work by European settlers, an outdoor masque called Le Théatre de Neptune, took place in 1606 – during Shakespeare’s lifetime! Since then there have been such pioneer English-Canadian playwrights as John Coulter, Robertson Davies, Mazo de la Roche, David French, John Herbert, Eric Nicol, James Reaney, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, George Ryga and Herman Voaden. And the Québecois were way ahead of us, but their works were not yet in translation. 

When more English-Canadian plays started getting produced, they were at first greeted with skepticism and even derision. When George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe opened in Washington, D.C. in 1973, the New York Times drama critic Julius Novick wrote: “‘Canadian Playwright.’ The words seem a little incongruous together, like ‘Panamanian hockey-player,’ almost, or ‘Lebanese fur-trapper.’” Seldom has so much contemptuous stereotyping been squeezed into so few words. 

But it’s hard to convey the excitement, in the early to mid-1970s, of starting to hear local, regional or national references in theatre dialogue. The first time it really came home to me that we were watching Canadian theatre was on the opening night of the late Betty Lambert’s 1975 sex comedy Sqrieux-de-Dieu (“Screw-de-Doo”), when a character expressed a taste for the dairy product Velveeta, and another exclaimed, “That’s disgusting. Only Americans like that sort of cheese.” 

In the years that followed, the examples started coming thick and fast. I would like to cite one favourite, in a TYA script for elementary-school audiences by David S. Craig, Danny, King of the Basement – Craig’s response to the news, in the early 2000s, that 25% of homeless people in Toronto were children under the age of 12. 

In Craig’s play, Danny is a Toronto boy who, with his mother Louise, has spent his life migrating from one temporary home to another. In one scene, Danny goes over the possible routes they might take to get to the local Human Resources office: “Well, we could go streetcar to Yonge Street and then subway south to Summerhill, Rosedale, Bloor, Wellesley, College, Dundas, Queen and walk west. Or, we could go streetcar to St. Clair East and subway south to Davenport, Spadina, St. George, Museum, Queen’s Park, St. Patrick, Osgoode, St. Andrew and walk east. Take your pick.” We later learn that, due to his being repeatedly transferred from one school to another, this very bright boy has memorized the names of the stations without yet knowing how to read.

Craig adds this note to his script: “This play was set in Toronto, and all the place names refer to real locations in that city. This was to emphasise to Toronto audiences that Danny’s story was real and current. Producers mounting this production in other centres can apply to the playwright or his agents for permission to alter these references so that audiences in their community can have the same experience.”

This is a great example – though hardly the only one – of the beauty of plays set in one’s own land. I love the image of children at a performance of Danny, beginning to understand that homeless kids are not an abstract statistic, but may be among their friends – and of homeless kids themselves, watching this play and feeling well represented by its resourceful, resilient, imaginative, smart and funny hero. 

Of course, Canadian plays need not be full of Canadian place-names. They have a style and spirit and way of presenting themselves that is familiar to Canadian theatre-goers and increasingly becoming recognizable to audiences elsewhere. 

And so it’s been a joy, over the decades, to see our playwriting take root, and thrive, including or especially at the high-school level. And over the years, it has also become standard practice in our high-school drama festivals to see student actors performing in professionally-written Canadian plays – which, when I was starting out, likewise seemed an impossible dream. 

And that’s why, last year, adjudicating a TAEA Festival, I was startled to discover that out of their 11 plays, only three were written by Canadians – and all three of those Canadians were participating students! In my closing-night comments, I expressed the hope that this was just an odd coincidence and not a sign of some looming trend. 

Of course, there’s no sin in producing plays from other countries. One of the reasons I’m a fan of TAEA is its continuing efforts to forge links with our colleagues in the U.S. The international exchange of plays can only be good for us all. 

However, still and all, let me close with a pragmatic exhortation: look for Canadian scripts. Go to the websites of such publishers as Playwrights Canada Press, Talonbooks, Coach House, and J. Gordon Shillingford’s Scirocco imprint. Perhaps most useful of all, in its way, is the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s “Canadian Play Outlet,” an extensive database which will arrange scripts for you by cast size, length, subject matter, appropriateness for schools, and other criteria.

Read some! Get your students to read some! And let’s continue to build on the last several decades’ progress in the advancement of that noble artifact, the Canadian play.