Modern Canadian Plays: Volume 1

"I don't see how a play can be Canadian. I don't think there are any plays that you could call strictly Canadian ... What does that phrase mean?" Now, thirty-three years after Canadian directors spoke their minds, or rather shrugged their shoulders at the seeming hopelessness of de-colonizing Canadian theatre, this fourth edition of the "classic" "Modern Canadian Plays" sets out for us an even broader range of plays than previous editions, outlining a Canadian drama-scene that is far from colonial, inert, middle-class, or middle-aged. Spanning the years from 1967 to 1997, this anthology will likely continue to be the standard anthology for Canadian drama--and not without good reason. Edited by Jerry Wasserman--professor at the University of British Columbia, theatre critic for CBC, and one of Vancouver's most recurring (and memorable) faces on television-- Volume I still contains plays such as George Ryga's seminal and highly political "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe" (first performed in 1967, it was described as a "cicatrice" of Canadian society that "showed the bleeding flesh beneath"), as well as Michel Tremblay's "Les Belles-Soeurs" (one of the most critically acclaimed plays in Canada, translated from the original, controversial, joual). But more to the point, this edition of Volume I carries with it an even more distinct flavour of adventurousness in its juxtaposition of plays that are strikingly, even wildly, various--plays that can only be said to cohere around the difficulty of amorphous notions such as social justice, cultural belonging, and the existence of a collective past. The plays in this fourth edition of "Modern Canadian Plays: Volume I" date from 1967 to 1986.