Staging the North: Twelve Canadian Plays

• Published in: Canadian Theatre Review
• Main Authors: Grace, Sherrill, D’Aeth, Eve, Chalykoff, Lisa, Clement, Lesley D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2001
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; Arctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.105.012; https://ctr.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/ctr.105.012

Because of the diverse perspectives provided by both visitors to and residents of these various Northern “stages,” Staging the North: Twelve Canadian Plays challenges the existence of any monolithic idea or myth of the North. “Degrees of North,” Sherrill Grace’s valuable introduction to this anthology, indicates that the editors were aiming for this kind of interrogation when selecting plays for inclusion: “Whose North? What stage?… Which playwrights? Staging for whom? The ‘true North,’ like the ‘we’ who guard it in the Canadian national anthem, is a complex, changing, and problematic term” (ix). Staging the North successfully captures the “complex, multiple identity” of the North and, by implication, Canada (xxi). The winter 1992 issue of Canadian Theatre Review, devoted to “Arctic Theatre Makers,” observes that “throughout the North, theatre has evolved from the oral traditions of storytelling” and that therefore scripted plays are unusual (3). Sherrill Grace and her co-editors have compiled a useful anthology with extensive introductions to each play and playwright and a representative sampling of regions, terrains and outlooks. There is, however, unity in this diversity, if not a pattern in the mosaic: the indebtedness that all twelve plays have to the oral and visual traditions of those art forms indigenous to the North.