Staging the North
edited by Sherrill Grace, Eve D’Aeth, and Lisa Chalykoff
a publication of 12 Canadian plays to be launched in May/June 1999
Playwright’s Canada Press
September, 1998
In the words of our national anthem, we are “the true North strong and free,” and Canadian artists, from Lawren Harris and Margaret Atwood to Stan Rogers and Susan Aglukark, celebrate this northern identity. Staging the North bring together, for the first time, 12 Canadian plays in English that explore and dramatize, what geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin has called, “our complex nordicity.”
The North represented in this volume are many and varied. They range from the high Arctic in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Terror and Erebus or Geoff Kavanagh’s Ditch, which reconstructs the disaster of the 1845 Franklin expedition, to the provincial norths of Ontario and British Columbia in Mansel Robinson’s Colonial Tongues, and Philip Adams’ Free’s Point. These plays offer readers and performers many perspectives on the North. Some are by native northerners like Sharon Shorty, with Trickster Visits the Old Folks Home, David Qamanig and Tunooniq Theatre’s unique Inuit plays, and the Patti Flather/Leonard Linklater award-winning play, Sixty Below, about survival in Whitehorse. Others are by playwrights living in southern Canada, like Henry Beissel, who creates a magical word in Inuk and the Sun, or Herschel Hardin, who anatomizes the human tragedy of souther, white exploitation of Inuit culture in Esker Mike and His Wife Agiluk.
Staging the North also includes moving personal insight into what it means to be a northern nation in Wendy Lill’s shattering monodrama of a young nurse’s encounter with an isolated community in the The Occupation of Heather Rose and in Lawrence Jeffery’s unforgettable retelling of the Hornby disaster—from the point of view of the youngest protagonist—in Who Look in Stove.
Canadian poet Earle Birney once said that Canadians were haunted by their “lack of ghosts.” But Birney had not read or seen these plays. Staging the North is haunted by some very Canadian ghosts and by the dreams of adventure, community, and landscape that make us who we are. At the end of the 20th century, with Nunavut about to become a reality, those drams are as powerful as ever. The dreams, like these plays, will carry us into a new century.
Staging the North, Playwrights Canada Press, May/June 1999
ISBN 0-88754-564-5 $35.00 (bibliogrpahical references/index)
