Airborne: Radio Plays by Women

Cecily M. Barrie is a graduate drama student at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

This collection comprises six plays commissioned by CBC’s
“Morningside,” to salute the Second International Women Playwrights
Conference, held in Toronto in 1991. The three Canadian writers have all
received a Governor General’s Literary Award for drama in English;
Anne Chislett, Sharon Pollock, and Judith Thompson are joined by three
writers from New Zealand, Italy, and Argentina.

Jansen’s introduction is a thoughtful discussion not only of the
plays in this edition but also of the genre of radio drama and, in
particular, the valuable contribution CBC Radio has long made in
disseminating superior dramatic writing to “a far-flung dramatic
audience.”

Each play in the anthology is introduced with a photograph of,
interview with, and biography of the playwright—addenda that open out
comparison of the plays’ styles and themes to include the contexts of
their creation. Thus, Jansen has produced more than just a collection of
oral works in written form.

The three Canadian plays are Thompson’s “White Sand,”
Chislett’s “Venus Sucked In: A Post-feminist Comedy,” and
Pollock’s “The Making of Warriors.” “White Sand” is set in
Toronto; its theme is racism and the anti-immigrant violence it
engenders. Much of the play is in the form of parallel plot lines
involving a neo-Nazi extremist and a West Indian newcomer; these
represent the public and private voices of the immigration problem and
the pain-filled lives of both the hater and the hated. The climax occurs
when these dualities collide and the pain goes on. “Venus Sucked In”
is also set in Toronto; in it, Chislett combines three generations of
women from a single family in a waggish look at Canada in the
post-feminist 1990s. The plot follows a 16-year-old as she ponders the
women with whom she identifies herself. “The Making of Warriors,”
like much of Pollock’s work, is set in the nebulous world of dream and
memory, where time and space blend without restriction. The theme is the
struggle of two oppressed groups: First Nations people in the 1970s and
women throughout society in the 1800s. The link is between two actual
women (one in each era) who overcame oppression and became warriors for
justice. The powerful climax records the fate of the women as well as a
message for those who fear to be warriors.

The three non-Canadian plays are Renée’s “Te Pouaka Karaehe: The
Glass Box”; Dacia Maraini’s “Mussomeli-Dьsseldorf” (translated
from Italian by Margaret Hollingsworth); and Diana Raznovich’s
“That’s Extraordinary!” (translated from Spanish by Rosalind
Goldsmith). Renée, a New Zealand Maori, writes “about the conflict
between city and country values” as they relate to aboriginal people,
especially a Maori woman who has a position of power in white society
and so also struggles with sexual stereotyping. Maraini’s play is
about a mother and her precocious daughter on a train ride to confront
the peripatetic husband/father whose invisible presence hangs like a
black cloud over the lives of both women. Raznovich’s play is a black
comedy about how a suicidal woman and her unhappy plight become grist
for a tabloid radio program by which listeners “can enjoy listening to
a real suicide in the comfort of [their] own home.”