Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre ed. by Donna Coates

Reviewed by: Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre ed. by Donna Coates Anne Nothof Donna Coates, ed. Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2015. 328pp. Paper, $34.95. This comprehensive collection of essays on seminal Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock originated in a 2012 conference held at the University of Calgary in celebration of her seventy-fifth birthday and her extraordinary contributions to theater as playwright, director, actor, mentor, and educator. Although she is best known internationally for Blood Relations—a metatheatrical interpretation of the Lizzie Borden story—this collection reveals her wide range of subjects and styles. It also broadens the range of critical approaches to her work and brings together essays by established and emerging scholars whose diverse theoretical approaches further illuminate the plays and extend their critical analysis into a wider sociopolitical arena. Pollock’s plays function as a catalyst for an exploration of contentious issues—from the trauma of political torture to mourning rituals—demonstrating just how theater can engage an audience in complex ideas. The collection also includes a new play, Sharon’s Tongue, comprising a collage of ideas and issues that have preoccupied her writing. Finally, Pollock’s cbc radio reviews—frank, informed, entertaining—provide further insight into her views on the making of theater. Despite the different critical approaches, most of the essays rely more on text than production values. Few attempt to locate Pollock’s plays in a Canadian theater historiography, although some make comparisons with other playwrights. Donna Coates’s introduction justifies the collection’s title by listing Pollock’s many awards and honors and her extensive body of work, thus providing a useful bibliography. Jerry Wasserman’s “Walsh and the (De-)Construction of Canadian Myth” is an appropriate opening gambit, with its engaging, informal account of its author’s discovery of the personal and political significance of Walsh when he first arrived in Canada from the United States in the 1970s. In the play, Sitting Bull is the tragic victim of cross-border politics. Shelley Scott’s essay on Blood Relations as a murder mystery provides an intertextual overview of previous scholarship on the work, plus a refreshingly disarming approach that uncomplicates the labyrinthine theories the play has inspired. [End Page 370] Several essays—Jason Wiens’s “Ownership and Stewardship in Sharon Pollock’s Generations,” in particular—display considerable innovation and imagination in their approach to theory. Wiens provides a context for the play in “a political regionalism that was informing the increasingly hostile debate over federal versus provincial control of natural resources in the 1980s” (48) and shows how “the play works to make visible the material reality of invented property relations at both the domestic and wider political level” (49). Cynthia Zimmerman engages in an insightful analysis of the effects of staging, set, and costume design in two different productions of the autobiographical play, Doc, to support her thesis that it is the daughter, not the dysfunctional parents, who is the play’s focus. Wes D. Pearce lucidly investigates the metaphorical significance of the scenography in productions of several plays. In Carmen Derkson’s convoluted analysis of the use of “sound” in Fair Liberty’s Call, the play is almost subsumed in theory. Kathy Chung privileges the play, not theory, in her perceptive interpretation of stage directions that bring Fair Liberty’s Call to life. She makes convincing use of theory on rites of mourning and loss, which “highlights the historic brutality and injustices at the origins of Canada” (141) in the fraught Loyalist relocation to New Brunswick from the United States. Tanya Schaap’s essay on Man Out of Joint investigates the brutalities at Guantanamo Bay, based on research into “trauma narrative,” which “embraces avant-garde and experimental techniques in [an] attempt to mimic or mirror the effects of trauma” (153). She considers the ways in which Pollock’s play raises questions of collective responsibility. Donna Coates’s analysis of the same play also probes sociopolitical issues through detailed research on the United States’ use of female torturers, showing how Pollock reveals the ugly face of American imperialism. Coates also interrogates feminist arguments about exercising power in a perceptive comparison with...

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