Roundup

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and director of La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Barbara Sapergia appears to be following the careful, Prairie-rooted
career steps of Ken Mitchell. And with similar success to date. She has
taken Roundup through a one-hour CBC radio version, honed it through the
workshop process, premiered it at Twenty-Fifth Street Theatre, and now
published it.

Although the play is set near Assiniboia in the 1980s, it follows very
much the line of what might be called homestead plays, of which Gwen
Pharis Ringwood’s Still Stands the House is perhaps the first to
spring to mind. Moira Day has characterized the traditional homestead
play as pitting human nature against the climate. Another Twenty-Fifth
Street creation—Paper Wheat—introduced a political aspect.

Sapergia expands the concept into the contemporary economic and
industrial climate, still fed by that primordial human need for roots
and continuity. Her own preface most eloquently explains what this play
is and is not: “Roundup is not a documentary on ‘farm problems,’
or a recipe for ‘saving the family farm.’ It’s a playwright’s
approach—an attempt to explore some of the many things, good and bad,
that agriculture has meant to prairie people; and to look at what the
‘farm crisis’ means to actual people.” The actual people in the
premiиre presentation played out the plot in counterpoint to the
realistic tasks of a roundup day as “an entire meal for ten people was
actually made on stage.” Grimness, realism, and down-home humor mark
the interactions of these Prairie folk.

A foreword provides background on the farm situation and the play’s
main female character.