>>PREVIEW
STILL STANDS THE HOUSE & PASQUE FLOWER
University of Calgary
Written by Gwen Pharis Ringwood
Directed by James Dugan
Runs October 25 to November 5
University Theatre (U of C)
Every year at the Alberta Book Awards, the Writers Guild of Alberta gives out the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama for outstanding published plays. But who was Gwen Pharis Ringwood, you ask?
Like those other leading ladies of Alberta theatre, Betty Mitchell and Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, Ringwood was a pioneer in the field of local drama. She wrote plays long before there were any professional theatre companies in the province – when, in fact, the Canadian Prairies had scarcely any dramatic literature at all. And, decades before the likes of Sharon Pollock and John Murrell, she wrote the first Alberta play to enjoy international success – a one-act Prairie tragedy called Still Stands the House. Originally published in 1939, it remains in the Samuel French play catalogue to this day and still receives regular productions from community groups.
Reading it, it’s easy to see why. It’s a taut little psychological drama, eerily set in a remote farmhouse on a freezing winter night. While a blizzard lashes the house outside, there’s an emotional storm brewing inside, as the farmer, Bruce Warren, and his young wife Ruth contemplate selling the aging homestead and moving closer to town, only to be opposed by Bruce’s sister Hester. An unstable spinster whose mind is trapped in the past, Hester refuses to leave the family home and will literally kill to remain there.
"The characterization of the crazy sister in the play is very strong," says drama professor James Dugan, describing the work’s enduring appeal. "And the play has a kind of shock value – it ends with what is essentially a double homicide."
Dugan has been teaching the play for years as part of his Canadian drama course at the University of Calgary and this year, in honour of the Alberta centennial, he’s gone a step further and is directing it – along with a second Ringwood one-act, Pasque Flower – for the drama department’s mainstage season.
"I thought this was the perfect year to do these plays, to celebrate our heritage," says Dugan. And of all the prolific Ringwood’s many works, he considers these two one-acts, written early in her career, to be her best. "They’re very nicely written, finely chiselled little human interest events in the lives of Prairie farmers," he says.
They also pair well. Pasque Flower is a lighter piece than Still Stands the House, and has a happy ending. Its story, also set in a farmhouse, involves the tensions that arise when David, the younger brother of farmer Jake Hansen, arrives for a brief visit on his way to take up a medical practice in the Yukon. His presence revives old tensions between the brothers and threatens to rekindle David’s former romance with Jake’s unhappy young wife, Lisa.
When Ringwood wrote these plays, in the late 1930s while taking her master’s degree in drama at the University of North Carolina, she was drawing on her own background. Born in 1910, she spent her childhood and adolescence growing up on farms in Alberta and Montana, and knew both the joys and hardships of working the land – her parents’ farm failed in the late 1920s, interrupting her education and forcing her to work for a time as a bookkeeper.
She eventually went on to study at the universities of Alberta and North Carolina, and to become a protege of U of A drama instructor Haynes, who’d been given a grant to help guide fledgling community theatre groups in the province.
"I think it’s important to consider the fact that she was writing when there was hardly any community theatre, let alone professional," says Dugan. "So she didn’t even think about getting a professional production (of her plays)." A true trailblazer, she wasn’t writing for fame or fortune, but to give a dramatic voice to the Alberta and Prairie experience. She wrote folk plays about Stampede cowboys, Eyeopener editor Bob Edwards, the province’s Ukrainian settlers and the great Medicine Hat drought of 1921, to name a few of her subjects. A thick volume of 25 of her plays was published in 1982, two years before her death.
Many of her later works were commissioned pieces, and Dugan says most of them wouldn’t stand up to revival. But Still Stands the House and Pasque Flower remain worthwhile period plays, in part because they deal unselfconsciously with the Western Canadian identity.
"They depict life on the Canadian Prairies, especially the years during the Depression, and they’re quintessentially Canadian – they’re all about the landscape and its influence on people’s characters," says Dugan. "But she didn’t have any agenda to establish a Canadian identity, she just wrote from the heart." |
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