The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

the stucture of tragedy, [knows] the
denouement is always swift.
or political history—
The history of Grenada was quite different.
Would you
like to hear it?... Grenada happened in
the following way...
Atwood turns the tables on her interviewers,
teaching them before they can quiz her.
Defensive, didactic, and somewhat
pompous, the author protects herself.
In "Unearthing Suite," however, the
author arranges her own revelation of self,
and this is far more satisfactory. Atwood's
voice in the telling is warm, relaxed and
very funny. A family is presented and considered,
its mysteries probed, and left
intact. Like the interviews, the story is an
attempt to understand origins and identity,
but this time there is no sense of threat,
protection or defensiveness. The narrator
(who presents herself as incurably lazy)
contemplates her elderly and ferociously
active parents and wonders about their
own approaching death and her own
entropy: "As for me, I will no doubt die of
inertia." As she meditates on the enigma of
her parents' lives ("What is my mother's
secret?") and compares their own vigor and
industry to her purported sloth, the narrator
and her story succeed where the taped
interviews failed. The reader is presented
with a view of the author's parents (virtually
identical to those portrayed in
Surfacing) and author that is at once revelation
and concealment, a sense of mysteries
considered and not yet understood.
Atwood is able to construct this representation
in a manner far more gracious and
self-deprecating than in either of the taped
interviews. It is no doubt instructive that
the author's fictionalized representation of
herself and her origins should be so much
more satisfying and complete than any socalled
factual interview.
Creating Collectively
Diane Bessai
Playwrights of Collective Creation (The Canadian
Dramatist, ed. Christopher Innes, Vol. II). Simon
& Pierre n.p.
Helen Peters
The Plays ofCodco. Peter Lang $26.95
Reviewed by Neil Carson
Two recent publications underline the
importance of collective creation to the
development of drama in English Canada.
The method of actor-generated "playwrighting"
by which the performers produce
their own script during rehearsals is
by no means unique to Canada. But it has
probably played a more important role here
than elsewhere. This fact presents its own
problems to those attempting to record the
history of Canadian drama.
Primary among these is question of evidence.
Since many of the collectively created
plays have never been published there
is no agreed-upon body of material for the
historians to discuss. Furthermore, when
performances can be reconstructed there is
disagreement about how they should be
evaluated or related to similar works elsewhere.
Diane Bessai addresses this latter problem
in Playwrights of Collective Creation, the
second volume in The Canadian Dramatist
series edited by Christopher Innes. The title
is somewhat misleading, suggesting as it
does a comprehensive study of the subject,
since Bessai focuses only on the work of
Paul Thompson and three of the several
playwrights who have worked with him. In
the first half of the volume, she discusses a
number of works collectively created at
Theatre Passe Muraille during the 1970's. In
those years, Thompson and his actors
sought to attract new audiences and to
explore those indigenous subjects ignored
by the regional theatres. To do so they
employed a number of theatrical tech-