The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Plays ofCodco, will remain in a kind of academic
limbo accessible only to students
and highly skilled readers.
Rising Playwrights
Colleen Curran
Escape Acts: Seven Canadian One-Acts. Nuage
Editions n.p.
Harry Standjofski
Urban Myths: Anton & No Cycle. Nuage Editions
n-P-
Jeanne-Mance Delisle
A Live Bird In Its Jaws. Nuage Editions n.p.
Reviewed by Paul Malone
Escape Acts, edited by Colleen Curran, presents
seven short plays whose settings purportedly
traverse the country from Nova
Scotia to B.C. That is to say, one play takes
place in B.C. and the rest east of Thunder
Bay or nowhere specific (although two of
them were produced in Calgary).
Fortunately, the major claim of the plays to
thematic unity is the broadly denned idea
of "escape," which ties them together nicely,
and the high quality of the offerings offsets
any possible complaints about an Eastern
Canadian bias, especially with Toronto so
little in evidence.
Beginning in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, for
example, Bonnie Farmer's Irene and Lillian
Forever presents an affecting scene from
black working-class life and shows that
poverty can drive people both to dishonesty
and to solidarity. An extremely skilful
first play, all the more valuable for giving
exposure to a little-seen aspect of Nova
Scotian society. At the opposite end of the
spectrum if not of the country, Curran's
own Senetta Boynton Visits the Orient is a
shaggy-dog mixture of dotty travelogue
and senior-citizen romance that bounces all
over the world in a church hall but never
quite gets to the Orient. Perhaps the flimsiest
selection, but lively fun. In Vengeance,
set in Montreal, a retired opera singer from
the old country hires a caregiver who turns
out to be no stranger. Aviva Ravel deftly
subverts the dusty at-last-I've-tracked-youdown
thriller motif without disappointing.
In Laurie Fyffe's brief but charming Sand, a
Mississauga housewife belly-dances out of
stifling bourgeois respectability to the everchanging
desert of her fantasies. Texas Boy,
by George Rideout, is a perceptive picture
of first love, an affectionate look back at the
60s, and an examination of some of the differences
between the US and Canada, then
and now. The longest selection, Clem
Martini's sure-handed Life History of the
African Elephant, is an off-kilter romance
that provides gentle fun and genuine
warmth out of some very Ortonesque
ideas. Finally, Meredith Bain Woodward's
Day Shift is a finely drawn character
vignette of a woman confined to a life without
promise in rural B.C.
Equally promising are Harry Standjofksi's
two plays collected in Urban Myths. The
first play, Anton, is about three wealthy sisters
trapped in a big house, occasional desires
to go to Moscow, the felling of trees, nostalgia,
and yearning for love. Only one of the
onstage characters is a Russian, however;
the others are anglophone Montrealers,
and the title is not only a reference to
Chekhov (whose work is done homage
here), but also the mnemonic for a bank
card number. The play's monetary subtext
juxtaposes the far-off opening up of
Eastern Europe—the play is set in 1989—
with the characters' and the author's lack of
satisfaction with Western wealth and capitalism.
Standjofski deals with a similar
theme in less naturalistic fashion in the second
play. No Cycle's title is also multileveled,
referring to the Japanese Noh
theatre, which provides the play's five-part
structure, but also pointing up the spiritual
poverty of Western culture, "where the
death and resurrection of Christ is celebrated
with a bunny hiding chocolate eggs