Escape Acts: Seven Canadian One-Acts

Judith Rudakoff is an associate professor of theatre arts at York
University at co-editor of Dangerous Traditions: A Passe Muraille
Anthology.

The strength of this anthology of short one-act Canadian plays lies
primarily in the range of roles it provides for women actors. With an
age range that moves from teenage to 70s, the small-cast pieces offer
many strong, well-defined characters, each with a unique voice and each
engaged in an intriguing setting. Many ethnicities are represented, as
are many geographical, social, and political landscapes, making Escape
Acts into a veritable smorgasbord of possibilities. The editor
thematically links the pieces as “escape” plays, but even stronger
in most of the works is a distinct movement toward finding voice, self,
and home.

If the tone of “Texas Boy” is a bit precious, and the notion, in
“The Sand,” of finding self and voice through the perceived
exoticism of a foreign culture a little suspect, the passion of
“Vengeance” is direct and moving and the quirky characters and
bizarre synchronicities of the real world of “Life History of the
African Elephant” are engaging. “Senetta Boynton Visits the
Orient” takes anecdotal humor into the realm of social criticism in
one deft move, and “Irene & Lillian Forever” deals with themes of
tragic proportion in a pithy slice of the quotidian. Of the seven
anthologized pieces, only the final one, “Dayshift,” seems out of
place: in its lonely and alienated waitress gone slightly mad in an
isolated community, it provides a faint echo of Wendy Lill’s nurse in
the more developed “The Occupation of Heather Rose.”