The Hope Slide/Little Sister

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Joan MacLeod is an award-winning playwright whose work has been widely
produced in Canada, Britain, and the United States.

The Hope Slide concerns Irene Dickenson, a middle-aged actress who is
touring central B.C. with a one-woman show about the Doukhobors. We
meet, in flashback, the young Irene, an outsider whose passionate need
to belong leads her to an obsessive love for the rebellious Doukhobor
community and an intense relationship with Walter, another young
idealist. Woven into this multitextured play are the monologues of three
Doukhobor martyrs—monologues that are, in fact, part of the one-woman
show the older Irene is performing. Throughout the play the natural
disaster of the mountain’s slide (which actually occurred near Hope,
B.C., in 1965) becomes a metaphor for the AIDS crisis. In seeking to
bear witness to the Doukhobor martyrs, and in coming to terms with
Walter’s AIDS-related death, Joan MacLeod presents us with a gripping
picture of one woman’s search for meaning in the face of
disillusionment and despair. The play is superbly written and contains a
climax of frightening intensity. It is both an intellectual and an
emotional tour de force and must rank as one of Canada’s finest plays
of the 1990s.

Little Sister is completely different but no less successful. It is the
author’s first script for young audiences and tackles the issues of
self-image, weight preoccupation, and eating disorders in teenage girls.
This story of five teenagers caught in a web of contradictory messages
about how they should look, feel, and behave is a humorous and poignant
examination of the affinities that exist between family and friends and
of how, so often, our self-esteem is governed by how our physical
appearance is viewed by others—or how we think it is viewed. These
excellent plays should be included in any serious collection of Canadian
drama.