The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review

Todd Pettigrew teaches English at McMaster University.

This anthology draws from the pages of the Canadian Theatre Review 15
pieces that represent important innovations in Canadian drama. Alan
Filewod’s emphasis is on playtexts that question the way in which
theatre works in this country. (The reader is advised to skip
Filewod’s remarkably unhelpful introduction, which reads, alternately,
like an advertisement for the CTR and a glossary of contemporary
literary-critical buzzwords.)

There are two standouts in the anthology. John Palmer’s Henrik Ibsen
on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama is a delightfully ironic
comment on young national theatres in general and Canadian theatre in
particular. Polygraph, by Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage (with English
translation by Gyllian Raby), is a superb play—complex, powerful, and
controlled. Like many plays in this anthology, it pushes the limits of
theatrical convention by introducing nontraditional elements into the
staging. At the other extreme are The Anna Project’s This Is for You,
Anna, a self-indulgent, self-conscious mess, and Sky Gilbert’s
juvenile and unsophisticated Lola Starr Builds Her Dream House.
Notwithstanding plays like these, The CTR Anthology has a great deal to
offer.