“The Collected Plays” by Gwen Pharis Ringwood

The major criticism I have of this kind of collection is that even when it is put together by the author, as this one was, the editor should exercise more discretion over the plays chosen. The favourite play of the author may not necessarily be the best one, and anthology editors should be concerned with presenting the best. This especially applies to regional literature, as a “collected works” is supposed to give a wider exposure to an author who may not be particularly well known outside his own area, but who an editor feels needs to be better known because he has universal qualities.

Gwen Pharis was born in Washington State and moved to Alberta in 1913, three years later. She studied at the University of Alberta and went for further study to the University of North Carolina in 1937. As Margaret Laurence ironically notes in her Preface, it was in the United States that Pharis was encouraged to write “regional” plays about the Canadian West. Her first play, The Dragons of Kent (1935), was produced at the Banff School of Fine Arts, of which Pharis was the first Secretary. She was eminently successful at the Playmakers’ School in North Carolina, and after taking her MA there, she returned to Alberta and won first prize at the 1939 Dominion Drama Festival. In the same year she was appointed Director of Dramatics for the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta and married Dr. John Ringwood. Since that time, she has produced a steady stream of work, not only writing plays, but adapting novels for the stage and writing libretti for musicals and operas as well. She has always had a great interest in children’s theatre, folklore and historical research, and as this book went to press (1982), Ringwood was working on an autobiography. For those who want more such information, this Collected Plays has a useful, and as far as I can determine, definitive bibliography of most of her plays and secondary literature about Ringwood.

Rmgwood’s cultural background was more or less British until she returned to the United States; there was no encouragement to do very much except imitate the “best.” But while she was in North Carolina, Ringwood came into contact with what Margaret Laurence terms “1930s American, out of ancient Greece” drama, particularly the declamatory work of writers such as Eugene O’Neill and Sherwood Anderson. The result was that while Pharis was attempting to write about Canada, she was trying to do so in a stilted, rhetorically overblown manner, where Canadian farmers declaim tendentious phrases and affect high-flown philosophical attitudes. Ringwood was not able, in her early career, to use familiar idioms and speech patterns, and perhaps was mistakenly assuming that the heady rhetoric would elevate the banal into the sublime. Fortunately she got over this phase in a hurry.

Ringwood’s themes are surprisingly consistent. They are always there, lurking in the background, giving a cohesiveness to her work which, paradoxically, allows a reader unfamiliar with the regional environment to understand it. Ringwood’s themes, and obviously these are not all of them, are the battle of man and nature, the buying and selling of land, the impact of white society on natives and vice versa, and loneliness.

The single most moving aspect was Ringwood’s exposure of the meaninglessness of much of the life of these prairie people, especially that of the women. There was a division between man’s work and women’s work, for example. In Pasque Flower, Jake complains to Lisa, “I wish you’d do your buying from now on. A man feels like a fool trying to match thread.” Jake’s life is wholly taken up with acquiring other people’s property and competing against the land and weather. The women cook, sew, suffer and get bored; they yearn for somethmg outside the enervating round of domestic duties, but they rarely find it. Women end up bitter and even more bored. Sometimes it looks as if they are about to take lovers, as Lisa almost does in Dark Harvest, a play developed from Pasque Flower. But apart from the odd stranger, or the husband’s doctor-brother, all the men are pathologically obsessed with proving their manhood by getting more land or money and blundering blindly over everything which does not immediately increase their power. Ringwood connects the lust for land, which the men had in the earlier plays, with family conflicts in the sixties, where having hair over one inch long was an admission that you hated the capitalist system and wanted to overthrow the government. In the early plays the women seem to stand for what is sane, good, and meaningful; in the later ones the children stand for the same values. Men are often portrayed by Ringwood as using brutality and tyranny to cover their own inadequacies, while many of the women cling to something called “loyalty” in order to provide themselves with an illusion of stability. Lisa, in Dark Harvest, defends her husband by saying that if she is unhappy it is her own fault:

That’s not Gerth’s fault, David. It’s my own, something in myself, some restlessness that won’t be satisfied. I thought a child might bring me peace, but then our child died and there haven’t been any more… I just let things happen to me, just wait and let them happen.

This attitude seems depressing in such a potentially strong person, not so much because it suggests resignation, but because it emphasizes that Lisa has more insight into her own and Gerth’s characters than Gerth himself does. This often seems to be the case with Ringwood’s antagonists. Jasmine knows her limitations in The Lodge and understands those of the others, but she also sees more than they do: Ringwood shows that there can be some understanding between white mechanistic civilization and the more spiritual one of the Indians.

Ringwood has a wide dramatic vision: she can take the same themes and relate them to the times without awkwardness or contrivance. Because the later plays develop a very definite relationship with the outside world, Ringwood transcends regionalism. And by choosing to write about how wider intellectual and cultural vistas developed, she is also being true to history and realism. ■

John Butler is a Winnipeg critic who contributes regular theatre reviews to the NeWest Review.