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Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 23, 2026
Once upon a time, aboriginal voices in Canada were not given much airplay. They were so very marginalized that they weren't even on a blank page, but were assumed to be not worthy of anyone's time or attention. And what would they say, if they could speak? was the question most of the established critics and general audience were asking.
Here is some of the earliest manifestations of what they were saying when they learned that they could speak. George Ryga's plays, three of the four that he had published before the end of the sixties, are in this collection and, in spite of my hope that they would be strong and painful and bare, they are unfortunately filtered through what sounds like--sixty years later--some pretty pretentious and self-consciously artistic staginess. The best is, predictably, his most well known play, The Ecstasy Of Rita Joe. It is delivered by way of court appearances, in which the title character is subjected to more and more institutional judgment and less and less comprehension of her particular ordeal. The Magistrate sums this up when he barks at her, "Don't blame the police, Rita Joe! The obstacles to your life are here, in your thoughts (touches his forefinger to his temples) ... possibly even in your culture" (68). Fortunately, that sort of overt preachiness doesn't happen too often, and it can be forgiven considering that this was, as mentioned, one of the first of its kind. Some wry humor is found in places, such as when Rita Joe says, "My uncle was Dan Joe ... He was dyin' and he said to me--long ago the white man comes with Bibles to talk to my people, who had the land. They talk for hundred years ... then we had all the Bibles, an' the white man had our land" (96). Again, that may be a little bit cringey now, but it was all new when it was first staged. And, of course the play is tragedy, so we get the deaths of both Jaimie Paul and Rita Joe right at the end--one killed by a train and the other beaten and raped--before Rita's sister Eileen delivers the final line: "When Rita Joe first come to the city--she told me ... The cement made her feet hurt" (130). There are all the ingredients for a pretty powerful drama, but Ryga's decision to frame it in a Brechtian musical theatre-cum-discontinuous narrative format makes it, well, too self-consciously dramatic and not enough just plain letting the story tell itself. I wonder what someone like Tomson Highway would do with this. I can't help but think it would be improved.
The other dramas, Indian and Grass & Wild Strawberries are markedly less successful, for very different reasons. Indian is a blunt instrument, a howl of a victim who is left with his trauma and rage but doesn't manage to connect with the audience. We should get a visceral sense of his ordeal, but instead he pounds us over the head with the experience like the title character pounds the post in the final image. Grass & Wild Strawberries fails even more because it is burdened with the stagey effects of overdubbed voice recordings and images that give the impression Ryga was very affected by Tennessee Williams and wants to do more of that sort of thing here. It is much less a story from his own aboriginal roots too and, while by no means should he be confined to aboriginal stories, Ryga is trying to preach another sermon here: this is the end of idealism--which is far too big a story to try to tell in one go. The hippie idealism of Captain Nevada and the union (Solidarity Forever) activism of Uncle Ted are both defeated by the end of the play, but there is far too much confusion and uncoordinated tension between characters to make us feel much of anything at all for Allan and Susan, whom we are obviously supposed to empathize with.
All told, it is unfortunate that this seems to be an artifact of a time that we must look at rather than feel with.
Here is some of the earliest manifestations of what they were saying when they learned that they could speak. George Ryga's plays, three of the four that he had published before the end of the sixties, are in this collection and, in spite of my hope that they would be strong and painful and bare, they are unfortunately filtered through what sounds like--sixty years later--some pretty pretentious and self-consciously artistic staginess. The best is, predictably, his most well known play, The Ecstasy Of Rita Joe. It is delivered by way of court appearances, in which the title character is subjected to more and more institutional judgment and less and less comprehension of her particular ordeal. The Magistrate sums this up when he barks at her, "Don't blame the police, Rita Joe! The obstacles to your life are here, in your thoughts (touches his forefinger to his temples) ... possibly even in your culture" (68). Fortunately, that sort of overt preachiness doesn't happen too often, and it can be forgiven considering that this was, as mentioned, one of the first of its kind. Some wry humor is found in places, such as when Rita Joe says, "My uncle was Dan Joe ... He was dyin' and he said to me--long ago the white man comes with Bibles to talk to my people, who had the land. They talk for hundred years ... then we had all the Bibles, an' the white man had our land" (96). Again, that may be a little bit cringey now, but it was all new when it was first staged. And, of course the play is tragedy, so we get the deaths of both Jaimie Paul and Rita Joe right at the end--one killed by a train and the other beaten and raped--before Rita's sister Eileen delivers the final line: "When Rita Joe first come to the city--she told me ... The cement made her feet hurt" (130). There are all the ingredients for a pretty powerful drama, but Ryga's decision to frame it in a Brechtian musical theatre-cum-discontinuous narrative format makes it, well, too self-consciously dramatic and not enough just plain letting the story tell itself. I wonder what someone like Tomson Highway would do with this. I can't help but think it would be improved.
The other dramas, Indian and Grass & Wild Strawberries are markedly less successful, for very different reasons. Indian is a blunt instrument, a howl of a victim who is left with his trauma and rage but doesn't manage to connect with the audience. We should get a visceral sense of his ordeal, but instead he pounds us over the head with the experience like the title character pounds the post in the final image. Grass & Wild Strawberries fails even more because it is burdened with the stagey effects of overdubbed voice recordings and images that give the impression Ryga was very affected by Tennessee Williams and wants to do more of that sort of thing here. It is much less a story from his own aboriginal roots too and, while by no means should he be confined to aboriginal stories, Ryga is trying to preach another sermon here: this is the end of idealism--which is far too big a story to try to tell in one go. The hippie idealism of Captain Nevada and the union (Solidarity Forever) activism of Uncle Ted are both defeated by the end of the play, but there is far too much confusion and uncoordinated tension between characters to make us feel much of anything at all for Allan and Susan, whom we are obviously supposed to empathize with.
All told, it is unfortunate that this seems to be an artifact of a time that we must look at rather than feel with.
April 2, 2017
I didn't really know what was going on throughout "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe" and "Grass and Wild Strawberries," but that could be because I do not typically read plays and if I saw it as a play I would understand it. I did enjoy "indian" because of the darkness that surrounded it. I also wish it was a little longer.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews