The bare bones of the story are now hardly coherent and just about inaudible, what with all the gallivanting around the cramped stage. Onstage, there's barely a trace of that poetic, elegiac quality you find in Reaney's text. Waiting for the Parade at Shaw last year?) Examine, then, Tarasiuk's staging of a work written by a man known as much for his poetry as for his plays and libretti. Of course, museum theatre is not exclusive to Canadian plays, but it suits many of them particularly well. The nationalist project of 1970s Canadian theatre has served its purpose well, but in 2005 we're not served well by it. The more revivals of plays from that decade and early 1980s I see, the more I question the critical and canonical claims made for them - not as milestones in the history and evolution of a distinctly Canadian drama but as living, breathing theatre to return to year after year. Judging from Andrey Tarasiuk's valiant but faltering production, the work is impossible to stage today without cataloguing all that's excessive and dated in style if not content about Canadian theatre of the 1970s. The Donnellys' canonical ubiquity on one hand and absence from our stages on the other are not unrelated. Sticks & Stones (at its smallest venue and for a relatively short run), as part of its Cancon initiative.
The Stratford Festival is currently staging part one of the trilogy, Many theatre professionals know it (by reputation) and love it (as text) but have never actually seen it performed, save perhaps the odd production in summerstock or straw-hat theatres.
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