Voices of the Land: The Seed Savers and Other Plays

and natural sounds emitted from all four corners of the stage area.For me, the audience surrounding the stage became the energy of the wind in that production.In a later production at the Station Arts Centre in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, also directed by Michael Clark, the set by necessity was more contained, but the wind was still there.The audience brought it in with them, along with the yellow of July canola, and their sensory experiences as people of the prairies.These plays are also linked by their rootedness in the prairies, particularly in Alberta.Although The Seed Savers was inspired by the Schmeiser case in Saskatchewan, it could have taken place in Alberta, which is also painted in canola.Cowboy Boots and a Corsage comes from a place in southern Alberta, the Milk River Ridge.I can see it in my mind's eye now: the colours of the shortgrass prairie, the roll of the land toward the river, and the wind, the heat, the magic of that untouched virgin prairie.The Early Worm Club is set in a boreal forest near Edmonton.I can smell the trembling aspens and balsam poplars and black spruce, and the spring mushrooms.Abby's Place is set at a deep and quiet lake in northern Alberta, frequented by white pelicans, redwing blackbirds, and goldfinches.These plays are about places I know and love, and they all look like Alberta.There's a hopeful time lessness in that, for me.As Abby says in Abby's Place, "There will always be the lake," and Mindy says in The Seed Savers, "Nature has us all in her hand."The connections made in these plays depend on the land that endures to show us who we are.-k at He r i n e kol l e r xVii Katherine Koller's Prairie Synergism Women on the Land Voices of the Land brings into the present a long tradition of Canadian prairie plays by women that enact the synergistic relationship of place and person.The landscape acts upon the protagonist in both antagonis tic and supportive ways.It may be the occasion for struggle, but also of redemption.It can be both debilitating and energizing in the heroine's journey toward selfaffirmation.As in the prairie plays of Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Elsie Park Gowan, Sharon Pollock, Joanna McClelland Glass, and Connie Gault, in Katherine Koller's works the Canadian wilderness resists the idealization of the pastoral motif: a withdrawal from society into an isolated, unspoiled natural environment in order to refresh the spirit and stimulate the imagination.Her Western Canadian protagonists learn to embrace the landscape's terrible beauty and power in the process of discovering their own strengths.This perspective is also evident in W.O. Mitchell's early plays and novels, and particularly in Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow (1968), where the prairie landscape is present as a defining condition of life -endlessly changing but timeless, adversarial but mindexpanding: Desolate?Forbidding?There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful.Even in drouth or dust storm or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all of the senses.You don't get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it.You don't escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back.You become acutely aware of yourself.The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small.But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people.But not humble ones.(8) xx Saskatchewan, depicting the emotionally debilitating consequences of living in isolation on the prairies and the conflict between a repressive father and his freespirited wife and daughter.Play Memory (1983) returns to a bleak prairie landscape in rural Saskatchewan during the Depression, portraying an authoritarian father's attempts to control his wife and daughter, with tragic consequences.Kelly Rebar's Bordertown Cafe (1989) also considers the generational prairie family dynamic and the struggle of the younger generation to determine where is "home."Set on the Canadian side of the Alberta Montana border, it dramatizes the family complexities inherited by a seventeenyearold boy and his divided loyalties to, and frustrations with, his divorced mother and father.The stage directions signal the radical discrepancy between the claustrophobic, limiting environment of the café and the openness and freedom of the prairie: "The closed, tight space of the cafe is contrasted by a sense of overwhelming prairie sky that surrounds the set" (11).In the end, the boy opts to stay in Alberta and help his grandfather with the combining, clearly establish ing that his home is on the prairie.The family dynamic in Koller's plays is similarly portrayed in terms of connection to the land.In The Seed Savers, Joe and Mindy's only son has fled to the city to escape the torment occasioned by the "demented wind" (162) and has died there, his ashes "scattered in a city ravine" (123).But his daughter, Sky, returns to find her place in the prairie landscape and in the family: "Sky takes in the colours, the sounds and smells of fall on the farm.She lets the wind play in her hair, her face, lifts her arms and gives in to it.For the first time in a long time, she's home" (125).In Cowboy Boots and a Corsage, the daughter is tempted to leave her widowed mother, Jeannie, for life in the city with her boyfriend but changes her mind when she visits the crumbling ancestral homestead in the moonlight.She compares Jeannie to the "tough grass" (36) of the untilled prairie, when she finally inherits her mother's determination not to sell out her history.The play's focus is on the land as it partici pates in the identification of a place called "home."Beyond their social implications, Koller's plays in this collection have a mythic dimension.As in the prairie plays of Saskatchewan writer Connie Gault, Sky (1989) and The Soft Eclipse (1990), there is a recognition and acceptance of the extremes of light and shadow that characterize prairie life.The isolation of the landscape may offer respite from predation or intrusion, as in The Early Worm Club, or it may provide the means by which a reconciliation with place and people . . . .No easy gods, and yet they challenge, crying "hunt us down, Uncover us from beneath your monuments of wood and stone, Come, dance and sing with us, For without us you are homeless.Hunt us down for without us you are forever homeless."(490) Cowboy Boots and a Corsage S ce ne 1 Jeannie's Kitchen Music.Jeannie, in her mind, is at her land, where she retreats often.Angelina is seated at the table, set with two cups, a deck of cards, and a cribbage board.Angelina has a tote bag.Jeannie carries a bottle of amaretto.Je annie (To the cows) What are you looking at?Hey, Lola! Matilda!Trudy!It's just me.Just me.I need you girls more than ever now.I wish I could just stand there and watch, like you!You big smart asses!Angelina sneezes.Jeannie brings a bottle of amaretto to the table. Je annieHot tea for your hay fever.angelina Oh, thanks, Jeannie.It's worse this spring.

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