This is a meditation, which is defined as a discourse of considered thoughts on a subject. Here are those thoughts, but I don’t claim to be able to form a pointed discourse in satisfactory paragraphs. So the following isn’t an essay, I guess, but notes, likely incomplete but at least considered, I hope.
Where to start? I start with conclusions which perhaps resemble an introduction, and contemplate if that’s all there is to say. It’s easy to get off track into a history of the theatre itself in the city, as influenced by the city’s history and reflected in contemporary reality even in contrast to the plays mentioned, but then I risk repeating myself. What I realize is, like it or not, that will happen. Stick with me if you wish. All I can do is present these notes on playwrights whose works I find speak of the city or against the city as well as reflect some, but never all, of its crisis points as seen in the plays (where many crises crystallized).
What is the Winnipeg play? Many years ago one of our senior playwrights, Bruce McManus, used the expression “singing the Winnipeg blues” to describe his plays. He denies it, believing Alf Silver, a founding—proper word, I think—city playwright in the Seventies, first used the phrase. It fits, no matter where it originated, for all “Winnipeg lit.” Our plays are ultimately about the urban experience of this Prairie city with its complex history encompassing paradoxes of North End/South End division and unity against Nature’s onslaught; its communities in constant change; its artistic vibrancy arising from our isolation and division. More, I’ve come to realize in reading and criticizing plays that there is even a kind of “anti-urban” play which reflects and challenges the central concerns of the “Winnipeg play.” Also, we can trace through our playwrights an historical brooding on our pre-city fort/prairie settlement at, of course, the Forks. There is the surreal and symbolic in some plays that reflect or mirror our history which, though about personal drama, have the playwrights writing them with the city underlying the stories presented. And, of course, there are the 1919 General Strike plays, a category we could regard as uniquely ours.
There’s more probably that I will miss. I can’t speak of today’s generation’s plays, though I will mention and consider a few. This meditation won’t pretend to cover everyone or everything. How could it? As I ponder, I write playwrights’ names, and realize I could name more. Others, I hope, will write about whom (or what) I might miss. But here is a beginning, for argument, for reflection. I will focus on certain, maybe key, playwrights and their work; I will note the expansion of what “community” means as that definition expanded in the playwriting one to include Indigenous, Filipino-Canadian, Métis, or Mennonite writers, as example; of course there are others.
I wrote, in an introduction to the 2004 collection of plays Breakout shrewdly edited by Brian Drader, by at the time young emerging Manitoba playwrights: “This generation is in line with its predecessors, I think, in writing about their Winnipeg with a new take. It is still a world of urban blues, political edge, new immigration remaking the streets, a certain surreal loneliness which our famous isolation as a winter Prairie city invites.” I also noted “the optimism and embrace of the contradictions in the life of this faded, yet pulsating city.” (9)
Singing the Winnipeg blues fits. We come down as that 2004 intro indicates to a tackling of the city, a rejection of it, and an uneasy compromise with it. Our playwrights and the city? No love lost, but not rejected as a possibility either; the divisions becoming a bridge–however hesitant one is to cross it.
Every city, any community, can pour forth a literature and other art, so it isn’t that this city is unique as a place to create a character in a certain environment. What matters is how continuously the city resonates as a force itself in telling the story of a play set in it. A community then. But what does that mean? The impetus in the Seventies–even before that at the Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) under John Hirsch–was against a British Canadian eastern theatre dominance towards the “provincial” outland. Winnipeg, and Manitoba, did what it has always done: create its own art, and make it the most important available. It did this with dance, choral music, theatre production, literature, and visual arts. Then slowly, and advancing rapidly, it did that in the last forty years or so with locally written plays. Now they are dominant.
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However, these musings emphasize the Winnipeg blues, and the singing of them, so how to define that before any discussion of the playwrights who I think encompass it? Recently the city came up with a new civic slogan, Made From What’s Real, to replace Heart of the Continent, or the much used One Great City. All of course are meant to be positive, but the underlying theme of a city in permanent decline might issue forth a feeling beyond the “gritty urban” cliche or a moan at the wishful thinking of the civic ideal to a sadder, but never hopeless, perhaps not easily defined, sense of the city’s blues. Made from what’s real indeed; probably not the “real” the city councils of today or yesterday thought of, but that makes our history. Closer is the comment by an elderly woman declaring after yet another incident on a city bus that this isn’t the Winnipeg she knew anymore. One theme that carries through the Winnipeg play is that it is never the Winnipeg we think we know or knew–that’s the blues as well.
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Where to start? With exceptions noted, I choose the late Seventies. Arbitrary perhaps, but it is the link to the theme and the time when playwriting seemed a possibility to pursue in Winnipeg. It’s necessary to mention Ann Henry’s Lulu Street from 1967, but the 1919 plays, of which Lulu Street probably remains the best, deserve a closer look as a group.
David King, who started writing in the early Seventies, may be the essential writer for the city in that decade. He has the quality and feel of the improviser, as most of his plays still prove. Satire and irony are often noted as the Canadian contributions to comedy and King is well within that tradition. Hence his jaundiced look at Western Canadian history in Visions of Lowest Fort Garry and its revision, which will be dealt with in a discussion of what I call “pre-city” plays. Manitoba history is where we come from and it can’t be ignored as King presents it in his early plays; it is the basis of our myth, as shown in his use of the society containing Indigenous, Métis, and Selkirk Settlers, among others. However much the Winnipeg of the Seventies is satirized, in one play, Finite Junction, a parody of classic TV police procedurals, the city resonates as a bitter critique. The investigation of the murder of an unidentified woman has the tone of grim humour with its skewed plot cliches, but the burning of the body by the lead detective at the play’s shocking conclusion could be seen as the city itself being destroyed, or perhaps in the fire transformed into another city, however undefined that may be.
Easier to take is the appearance at the time of Brad Leiman’s Love and Chicken Soup with its North End/South End city dynamic and atmosphere centring on a love story. It is the atmosphere of the city that is most strongly invoked, including its corner store and inevitable jokes about the dry cold.
Liam Taliesin (aka Bill Horrocks) is messier about the city, but the city blues stand out in his St. Peter’s Asylum and the unproduced The Timepiece. The patients in St. Peter’s taking over the mental asylum would seem to have little to do with the city, but the author’s own difficulty of staying here with its tensions is best expressed in the play before he left Winnipeg.
The Timepiece is about the forgotten and remembered love of two older people, its gentle nostalgia a coming to peace with the city the author left. However, it’s Alf Silver’s Thimblerig, originally produced in a longer version as Dud Shuffle, that set the mood of what I called in A Map of the Senses, a collection of Manitoba plays published in 2000, the social urban realism play, often called Prairie Realism. The play holds up as an early Seventies Winnipeg play, with its twenty-somethings representing different neighbourhoods of the city intermeshed as the mildest of Sixties counterculture experienced here grinds slowly to its muddled end. Bruce McManus was later to deal with the generation’s aging self in All Restaurant Fires Are Arson but that play deserves a separate look, as does the playwright.
In any case, the plays of King and Silver, and the others mentioned, set the tone for playwrights in dealing with the city’s change in the decades since.
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With Rick Chafe we find plays (considering his original work, not his several collaboration/adaptations) that are serious domestic comedies where compromise between characters—usually spouses or lovers—is essential. At first we might think his plays have not much to do with Winnipeg, even if most are set here. Yet in Chafe we encounter a playwright who sees the city as a burden in some manner. The alternative becomes Vancouver but, however much it beckons, he can’t leave here.
Two of his plays show this. In an early Fringe play, Zac and Speth, which today looks like a dystopian social comedy, Vancouver is the place to escape to from Winnipeg, yet his couple return here to witness the political end of Canada. The Winnipeg context seems a burden, but the return is ever present, and the play’s underlying point asks the question: Where else would one want to be except at Canada’s geographical centre, with Chafe’s couple at its emotional core?
Though a later play, Marriage: A Demolition in Two Acts might bid attention, with a kitchen’s endless makeover and two couples, younger and older, battling until compromise seems surrender, as symbolic of the city’s falling apart and partial civic and personal reconstruction, it is The Secret Mask that dominates as Chafe’s “Winnipeg blues” play, despite its setting in Vancouver. The Winnipeg of the mind might be a good alternative title. The story is ably described on the published play’s back cover (with a bit of modification): “George was a toddler when Ernie walked out on his family. Forty years later, George gets a call from a hospital in another city (Vancouver) to come get his father, whose speech and memory have been scrambled by a stroke. To make sense of a missing past, father and son must battle their way through mutual distrust, fractured memories, and a broken looking glass of language.” Along with this is the phone communication, or lack of, between George and his estranged son back in Winnipeg. The play is a reconciliation, a melding, and a return. For George, the son’s anger and anguish become his gathering in of a father, once lost and now found. The old father, Ernie, becomes himself–his aphasia slowly cured–and goes with his son, the “new father,” as Georgereturns to battle for his son in Winnipeg. By returning from an always wet Vancouver to the famous dry cold of the Prairie town, we see that they represent Winnipeg attempting to be made whole, or reintegrated; the city has the aphasia and is down, like Ernie, but not out, meeting George’s determination to move forward focused on healing the rift with his son. George left Winnipeg not just to find his father, but to find himself; the leaving only to return is the playwright’s acceptance of the city’s blues.
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A look at the “pre-city” plays leads us further into how the city became the Winnipeg of now. Any history does that, of course, but the number of playwrights who have tackled it indicates that the city’s growth out of Upper Fort Garry and its surroundings show its dramatic importance as echo and incipient start of the city’s divisions. Only some can be mentioned, but as I noted in the introduction of A Map of the Senses, I believe Alf Silver’s Clearances set the template for the “history revisited” play.
Most plays deal with the city’s history after its formal founding, but the Red River society as reflected in the “fort” or pre-city plays, I think now, started with David King’s Visions of Lowest Fort Garry in 1975, later revised as Freemen of the Plains. Perhaps Clearances could be considered template two. But what is meant is that the crisis surrounding the conflict between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the NorthWest Company, the two corporations of the world fur trade, which set a history for the Métis, Selkirk Settlers, Indigenous people, and anyone else shaping the complexity of the Red River Society, formed a prelude to the Winnipeg of today. Silver’s Clearances, with its engrossing debate between Cuthbert Grant and a newly arrived couple cleared from their Highland home by the Duchess of Sutherland, emphasizes the Métis leader’s belief in the freedom of his people on the plains while sympathizing with the displaced couple. The future, which we know, is that the large inexorable economic force of the powerful leads to the clearances of many people. King’s approach leads to the same conclusion, but his Red River society is a satiric frenzied wild one in which the Marx Brothers wouldn’t be out of place. Satire implies a broad critique of everyone while letting the good and bad wrestle in their confused humanity. Visions of Lowest Fort Garry implies all that in its title. The revised version, Freemen of the Plains, smoothes the satire somewhat but heightens the history of this place, some of which has been ignored. Did we know it was always a place for humour as well as the blues?
We move ahead from the early 1800s battles of the fur trading companies to the period just before the founding of Manitoba with Maureen Hunter’s Sarah Ballenden, in which a court case involving a suit for slander sets up, though it’s never stated, what came out of Fort Garry/Red River, namely the city’s racial, class, and geographic divisions (North/South). More recently we have Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade. Its described setting reads in part: “Eighteen hundred and something-something. Banks of the Reddish River…” and its three women protagonists, whose preference is to use contemporary slang while sitting “in a fort,” offer a different neat skewering take on Louis Riel and the too often ignored history of women in Red River society.
All these pre-city plays reflect place, but we should keep in mind how the Major in Sarah Ballenden responds when told to keep his “place.” He speaks of a big-city American visitor to Fort Garry who asks what is this place. “The Major replied: Place, sir? It’s space, sir.” (78)
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The importance of the writing of Indigenous/Métis playwrights in the period discussed cannot be underestimated for its effect in not only making it a clear strong voice for the essential community of this place but also in offering another view of the city built around the “muddy waters” of the Forks. Yet the city itself is both cautiously accepted and when necessary clear-sightedly rejected in their writing. In two plays by Doug Nepinak, both set in a semi-sized city, a discreet but important distance from Winnipeg, BBQ and the extraordinary Coo-Coosh, the “big” city is seen as a possibility for a full life, a widening of the world, but it also has its dark side. Nepinak is therefore open –deeply critical and humane. He shows compassion without any sentimentality of either anger or despair.
BBQ is set in a “semi-small” town; indeed, it resembles many middle-class family plays with a toxic underpinning, Prairie Realism with a mixed family, including an angry abusive white father and an enabling Indigenous mother. The “big” city beckons to one daughter, Sylvia, who finds in it a source of sexual and social liberation from the crushing family. The other, Melissa, sides with her father. He distrusts the city, and she gloats in his favouritism. The son, John Jr., sees the city as a place to exploit. He robs only “there” and not close to home. Challenged by his aunt Mary, who remarks that the people he burgles from have worked their whole lives for a few possessions, he dismisses the notion that the people in the city deserve any kind of economic sympathy. The underlying theme is that the big city casts its shadow as warning leading to both change and intransigence, not only in a family’s life but in the city itself, which they can’t ignore.
Coo-Coosh deserves more study (and revival in a production) than what I can offer. Its resonance of the tragedy of an Indigenous woman’s life is perhaps stronger today than when it was first produced in the 2010s, but I concentrate only on how the city affects its protagonist Maddy Owen. Her unfair, nasty nickname, Coo-Coosh (Saulteaux for pig), comes from her community’s view of her sexual openness and the alcoholism that comes with it, but Nepinak reveals her deep goodness and intelligence, which are cast aside by the familiar but closed world she inhabits. She makes her own way, but her flourishing in the wider community of the city also leads to a ramping up of her problems. BBQ offers a liberation for one character, but here it leads to death. The dark side of the city can kill, as Derek, the play’s narrator, notes when he remarks how others return from other places, the city, to the town like “elephants to their own graveyard.” (5) The community just outside the big city offers for some a settlement but for the Maddys of the world the city can destroy.
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The 1919 General Strike–inspired plays are particular to Winnipeg, and carry resonance in the broader artistic expression of the city far beyond the plays here considered. There are some plays before Ann Henry’s Lulu Street (1967), but it set the template for the rest which followed. What I wrote in a program about the play in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of MTC could stand for all the plays after it: “The plot of the play permeates with the politics of the time. From the strike was formed the unyielding idea of Winnipeg as North and South, dividing lines still there no matter how much progress we claim in uniting the city’s neighbourhoods into one place.” (4–5) Henry’s story involved a family in the midst of crisis. The template established, it is easy to consider Margaret Sweatman’s adaptation of her novel Fox, as well as Bill Harrar’s Bolshie Bash, Harry Rintoul’s 1919 (unproduced), and, perhaps above all, Strike! the musical by Danny Schur (book written with Rick Chafe) as variations on the theme of personal conflict within the North/South, working class versus city’s elite class paradigm. Rintoul’s 1919 is in many ways a mirror image of Lulu Street, but the outside view of visitors is crucial, with two vaudevillians from elsewhere staying at the house central to the play watching and commenting, one sympathetically, the other more detached and cynical, on the strike. The play’s sentimental edge is tempered by their presence, as is ours, since in a sense they represent a distant view, which is how we see it now no matter how deep the strike has seeped into our collective consciousness as citizens. Sweatman’s depiction is more pointedly class conscious, as is Harrar’s Bolshie Bash with its unsympathetic, satirically drawn, obtuse, comical, rich business owner, interestingly named Cecil McDowner.
Using L.B. Foote’s famous, insightful photos of Winnipeg circa the ’teens of the last century as visual commentary, symbolism, and social invective to counterpoint Cecil’s journey through, to him, the chaotic bewildering world of the strike as he goes from the North End to the South, the play still works as a topsy-turvy piece of theatre, since it uses to comic effect the myth of a “hero’s journey” through a series of adventures. However, it is Danny Schur’s musical Strike! that keeps the idea of the strike as an underlying political cause alive. I refer only to the play as produced in 2005 before it became the film Stand! (later adapted to a stint at Rainbow Stage). The musical play is, I think, closer to Schur’s initial impulse in writing the show. Schur takes as his hero a name forgotten except to historians, Mike Sokolowski, and places him at the centre of the story. Sokolowski was the only casualty of the strike, killed on June 21st, 1919. Though highly fictionalized, Sokolowski is made a reluctant but ultimately fierce hero of the strikers. Schur sets up an archetypal North End of the period with Ukrainian and Jewish immigrant families. A Romeo and Juliet story between the two families with Sokolowski’s initial, though theatrically, weak, anti-Semitism against his neighbours, contrasts with some empathy for the returning, almost (though not quite) entirely Anglo-Scots veterans who were against the strike. The show is clear about who are the good guys (working poor) and the bad guys (government and owners) and is given a kind of sweeping old-style attempt at an epic treatment. The treatment isn’t entirely a cliche. The blues of the city begins and ends (perhaps) with the economics of North/South, and Schur firmly shows it. Still, the show tries for the epic, though, in the end, it is not as sharply political as Harrar’s Marxist-inspired satire or even Ann Henry’s family-in-crisis drama.
Watching and listening, since its strength is finally in its pleasant, sometimes rough-hewn score, you sense that this is Schur’s work of a lifetime. Through it Schur revived interest in the strike and its consequences, which he clearly saw as reverberating today. In any case, it will probably be the one work which is the focus of whatever remains in memory of the strike, even more than Lulu Street. If we face what has changed in the city since, we are also reminded by Schur, and the other plays, what has not. Distinctly ours, these plays stand collectivity for some part, at least, of our continued identity as a city.
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After considering Harry Rintoul’s work through the lens of the city’s “blues,” it is difficult, though not impossible, to place his plays. An easy way would be to accept him as the city’s romantic playwright, if we use the definition of literary romanticism, with its emphasis on the primacy of personal inspiration, restlessness, and subjectivity. Rintoul’s strength as a playwright, though, is tempered by a sentimentality that too often invades a hardheaded or bucolic feel in his plays, leaving one to accept his work in fits and starts. In a way this satisfies his view of the city he lived in and rejected; couldn’t leave alone, yet finally did. The restlessness one sees in his plays is sometimes resolved, often not. The economic blues underpin much of the work. Rintoul ended up scared of living in the city and couldn’t reconcile with it. A good contrast would be Rick Chafe’s relation in his plays to Vancouver, which he finally rejects for Winnipeg in a kind of reconciliation. Rintoul didn’t reconcile but dismissed the urban for the rural.
The tensions of his key plays represent his city/rural dynamic. Fair, then, to call him an anti-city playwright. The aspect where most critical attention is paid is the individual search for sexual identity: most of his plays deal with gay or bisexual men. Fair enough, but I feel one can’t look at this defining of his plays without considering the tension of the city dynamic. In four plays, Brave Hearts, refugees, Jack of Hearts, and, most pointedly, The Convergence of Luke, the overall idea of city vs. rural, or “non-city,” reflects his view of his characters’ personal struggles with sexuality and its place in their lives. The idea embedded in these plays is that the urban gay experience is messy, difficult, a hindrance to love, while the “non-city,” or rural gay/bisexual life, offers some peace, a repose, a chance for love.
A look at his most celebrated play, Brave Hearts, may show how this works. The setting is a suburban backyard. Two men meet outside the house where a raucous, out-of-control party is taking place. G.W., a rancher, and Rafe, who comes outside almost as an exile from the party, hating its atmosphere, have a conversation leading perhaps to love. What is clear is that the house, any city house, where there is always a “party” going on, symbolizes the city’s harshness and petty cruelty, while the backyard is the calming wide space outside the city’s grip. The love burgeoning between them will last if they remain true to the rural/country life and reject the city. Rintoul went further with his own favourite play, Jack of Hearts, in which an idyll, bucolic or mildly troubled though it may be, takes Brave Hearts to a highly romantic conclusion in showing a gay couple and an Indigeneous woman living on a farm. Whatever their difficulties, and death, over the years, it all—kind of—works out. It’s where, one can’t avoid remarking, Rintoul’s heart was. Also important is that financially it works out. Two other plays, as noted above, refugees (written before Brave Hearts) and The Convergence of Luke (written after, published but unproduced, only workshopped), deal with the effect of the city’s destructive class divide on characters as much as their sexual identity signifies their personal relationships.
At first glance, refugees would seem to be the gritty city, ugly North End Winnipeg, distorted mirror image of Jack of Hearts, with a trio who are stuck in a cycle of poverty and the one openly gay character’s prostitution set against the abusive relationship of the couple he lives with until scores are settled. Sydney, the resilient gay character, hopes for happiness and escape from his current world with a client. His roommate, Tawe, derides yet accepts him. Here poverty rules and distorts everything, including the doomed relationship of angry Tawe with the woman, Patsy. Rintoul chose the rural, as we have seen, but he wasn’t done with the city, and The Convergence of Luke is his key city play, since it is about the rise and fall of those whose urban identity is as important as a sexual one; indeed, by this point, with the play set in the late Nineties, the gay/bisexual identities of its two characters are part of the fabric of the play, not an “issue” in it. The astute introduction by Sky Gilbert to the play in the collection Perfectly Abnormal: Seven Gay Plays remarks on its “ruthless realism” (9) and its class critique, as the play presents a classic story of tortured romance between a “bisexual hooker and his gay trick.” (9) In the end the prostitute, Luke, finds the love Sydney hoped for, but not with the trick, Grandon, whom he rejects. The threat of economic collapse hovers over the play; it eventually brings Grandon down. The romantic hope of Luke can’t abide with Grandon’s frazzled ironic pessimism.
What is most important is that Grandon represents the hardness of the city which Luke escapes with the help of his love, a professor, who leaves him everything in his will, including, significantly, a cottage outside the city. As Luke, liberated from the city, finally rejects Grandon, broken by the city, he stands on the shore of a lake where “the waves washed over me… [and] the water was cold.” (85) The urban is cleansed away. Though it comes after Jack of Hearts, the play is clearly about the city, which Rintoul as playwright couldn’t quite leave alone. It is a dark city of the Nineties, following in its own way Alf Silver’s Thimblerig of the Seventies and Bruce McManus’s All Restaurant Fires Are Arson of the early 2000s. The blues of Winnipeg haunt Rintoul’s work even as he makes a hopeful escape to the country’s peace.
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Many plays, of course, reflect the city’s social history, claiming attention as “issue” plays, historical examinations (often of a history now forgotten), or pointed “ethnic” or “community” (in as wide a definition as one would like) dramas marking their way into how the city has been, and is, presented. This happened here—our history, our place, or even our psychological landscape.
What I wrote years ago about some of these plays in the introduction to A Map of the Senses still stands, and in retrospect seems even more relevant regarding the city. Let’s consider some plays dealing with history other than the 1919 Strike. Tin Can Cathedral (Nick Mitchell), Queen of Queen Street (Maureen Hunter), and The Elmwood Visitation (Carolyn Gray) come to mind. In a way, they fit the Winnipeg template as well as any other play mentioned. In Queen of Queen Street we have a slice of one of the city’s famously eccentric “characters,” Bertha Rand, cat lady in extremis. What remains important is that her conflict with authorities defined the city in an odd way. Her “digging in” might have reflected a class struggle, though Bertha lived in the South End, but the resonance of class hovers in the play. Maybe she is, in an odd, darkly comic way, singing Winnipeg blues, up to a point, anyway.
A more general theme is that of women and men digging in, seen in many city plays, but with many characters teetering on the edge. The Elmwood Visitation’s published book blurb presents it well: “In 1923 a visitation occurred. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the world’s most famous medium, Margery Crandon, both came to call on the Elmwood home of Thomas Glendenning…(most notably for the play) who was a Spirit Photographer. What happened the night they joined hands around the seance circle would haunt them the rest of their lives.”The play’s take on this odd story in the city’s history echoes Winnipeg’s once important place in North America, but the year 1923 indicates also its place after the 1919 Strike. The “Chicago of the North” was in decline, though still with the aftertaste of empire and bids for attention. The newly rich of Sweatman’s Fox might have been clients at the Elmwood home, or the Helmers of Bruce McManus’s shrewd Winnipeg-set adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House might have tried an evening there. Solid, linked in their minds to the great world, yet isolated, the once growing middle and new upper class of Winnipeg were slowly fading as the city’s North/South divide grew and the opening of the Suez Canal doomed its once powerful economic place to the periphery.
Tin Can Cathedral is also best described by its book blurb: “Based on a true story of the first independent Ukrainian church in North America…a struggle to give the fractured Eastern Orthodox community a renewed sense of purpose and identity.”It is an essential North End story, with echoes of the 1919 Strike and the personal and political meshed. It leads in a way to Danny Schur’s world of the North End Ukrainian presence in our history.
Other plays that create the city fabric come to mind. Dennis Trochim’s Better Looking Boys was a witty look at the city’s urban gay life, as were his other plays, including I Do, Do You?, his most serious but still comic play in its account of up-and-down relationships, most of them a world away from Rintoul’s view of urban gay life. Darker, and more pointedly indicting Winnipeg’s ugly side, were William Harrar’s InQuest, which shows the Winnipeg police disintegrating after the killing of Indigenous leader J.J. Harper. As I noted in the introduction to A Map of the Senses: “The play quietly lays out the racism and police sloppiness which brought the tragedy on in character-filled detail.” (33)It is more stringent and less impassioned than the work of some other playwrights of the period including, for example, Yvette Nolan.
Nolan’s Fringe play Blade is more politically charged. It takes a topic of the time, from the city’s headlines, so to speak, involving society’s rush to judgment of a killer’s victim, and reflects Winnipeg’s darkest urban social world in the harshest of terms. Nolan’s clear passion for justice and the ambiguity of ever receiving it is seen in many of her plays, but it begins here in Winnipeg’s streets.
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Primrose Madayag Knazan’s recent play Precipice bridges two cultural identities which have helped define the city, Filipino and Jewish. Knazan’s earlier plays, especially Two Browns Don’t Make a White, see Winnipeg as a kind of new Philippines, where members of the second generation like herself find identity and place, confronting its good and bad sides, the acceptance along with the racism. In looking at her work we see the city divisions are here in another sense, not the old North/South, and not just the new “ethnic” joining it, but a more amorphous definition, what Knazan calls the “coming-from-parts neighbourhood.” You are still judged by where you are from, but that has shifted, for example, to the south and north sides of Portage; it isn’t all the West End, or Maples, or any other defined neighbourhood of an ethnic group. Now the culture takes on the individual. This leads to Precipice, in which a Filipina’s marriage to a Jewish man leads her to a Jewish identity. It could happen anywhere, but the protagonist’s accepting Judaism frees her to bridge the Winnipeg particularity. There is joy in Precipice, but also the knowledge that one is marking a line of who you were in this city and who you are for the better in both cultures.
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The city’s blues are challenged all the time, of course, and no more so than by Ian Ross, who established a community, Indigenous/Métis, in our theatre along with Doug Nepinak, though it is Ross who took on the city foursquare. His most noted play remains Farewel, set on a First Nation reserve—and reflects on the city, which always hovers in the background—but two of his plays, Heart of a Distant Tribe and The Gap, are truly “Winnipeg” plays. Heart of…, especially, an underrated crucial play from the mid-Nineties, establishes the city as an Indigenous place within the community mix, however we define that. It is not only important as an inquiry into “Indian” life—the word used by characters in the play—in the city but as a view of class in Winnipeg while it shows in outline the future, the new cultural breathing of our core taking shape.
In Heart of… there is an almost magical feeling, an innocent, gentler world in some ways, much less topsy-turvy than the Farewel First Nation. The Indigenous community is at first glance like any other in the city’s history, yet with the “distant tribe” echoing from the resonance of time in its characters unlike every other in the city’s past. There is a simplicity, a directness in the play which quietly says: Here is the first community of our place. It shows Ross as optimistic if sharply critical – the racism is there, as is the underlying sense of people seen as a class seeking acceptance. Robin, its vibrant protagonist, could be in any city but isn’t; she’s lived here all her life. She remarks to her frustrated boyfriend, Moses, who is reluctantly here but wants to be elsewhere: “When I walk down the street I know I will see another native person…and that makes me feel safe.” (447) Moses realizes that home can be a someone, like Robin, and not a place. They both hear the whisper of the spirits of their people at the end of the play. Ross is hopeful, and wary, with a gently detached humour, but the anger is there too, and the city gives it shape.
This is seen in The Gap, a later play than Farewel, but with echoes of Heart of a Distant Tribe. In the guise of a romantic comedy, using the 1997 flood as its starting point and its link for the couple, though it doesn’t seem that way at the start of the play, The Gap proposes that our prejudices are if not inevitable at least understandable. That prejudice is in part the city’s split into neighourhoods, though the couple – Dawn, white middle class, and Evan, Indigenous/Métis lower working class – live on the same side of the now engorged river. But place may seem everything. There is a cultural misunderstanding, as the phrase today goes, which Ross treats with gentle humour and graceful seriousness, but the exchange swirling around whether Evan ate Dawn’s dog finally comes down to place, the where they live dominant.
Dawn: I’m not typical. I can’t believe you think that about me.
Evan: Why not? Look at what you think about me….. You guys over on that side of the river with all the nice stuff and we’re stuck on this side with all the shit.
Dawn: I live on this side of the river too, you know.
Evan: Well, maybe you should live on the other side. (77)
So if there is a gap—the differences in race, class, expectations are present—there is still unity in the city, the various Winnipegs. If Evan can look at it the way Robin does in Heart of… and if Dawn can get away from what is finally a vague belief of false superiority, then unity is possible. The rumbling anger of class and race remains but the flood of positive emotions may—in Ross it’s never certain they will—win out for the individual or the couple or a people of whatever race. The play’s final exchange shows this and links to the city.
Evan: You don’t love me.
Dawn: No, Evan, I….
Evan: What?
Dawn: I can’t say it. How I feel about you.
Evan: Because you don’t know?
Dawn: Because…if I let you in…into all of me…I’ll be flooded.
Evan: Some floods can be good. (109)
* * *
We finally move to the light and the dark of the city where some floods can be good—where a single act of mercy exists beside the nastiest of actions. The same side of the river spoken of in The Gap, where the perceived state of the South side rubs against the North side ethos, is seen in Deb Patterson’s semi-documentary Sargent & Victor & Me (contribution from neighbourhood residents acknowledged). Though the final draft dates from 2010 and the particular streets may vary, the play’s primary action about the city’s swirling change in the midst of clear decline stands. “This flat grey city,” as Jilly, the “Me” protagonist of the piece tells us, connects with her physical struggle with MS to see the decline of the city as witnessed in one neighbourhood where there are “no villains, except the police.” (22) In a series of monologues from the neighbourhood’s residents, long-time and more recent, we are shown how its decline and, as ever with the shifting of neighbourhoods, its incipient gentrification takes place. South End kind of people, including Jilly’s brother, are changing the area, while the North End extends its reach, as the older residents see it, to the West End. However, as Primrose Knazan noted, this is the North of Portage West, hence worthy of South side disdain or at least vague “concern” for its perceived decline as a middle class place. No one is clearly right or wrong – the well-meaning Lutheran pastor’s liberal sympathies may appeal more than an elderly woman’s despair over her perception of increasingly unsafe streets – but no solution, if one is needed, is offered. It is a Winnipeg blues place.
What makes the play, or document, if you like, is the encounter between Jilly and a young Indigenous woman, Theresa (Alexis in the draft of the play), who is new in the neighbourhood. She isn’t an angel and is forthright about her complicated past, which begins with her marginalized existence. Jilly falls, a victim of her condition, and slips in a crack in the church parking lot, unable to get up. Theresa happens to be there, and helps her rise. Maybe it’s no big deal, just a lucky happenstance that she is there to assist. It would be as easy to leave or ignore the situation. What is important is, if we recall many of our city plays, that often there is a single act of mercy or kindness which suddenly blossoms. Does much change in Sargent & Victor & Me? No, but that single act stops the decline of the neighbourhood for a moment.
* * *
When we come to the work of Bruce McManus we are in some ways at the heart of Winnipeg playwriting. A bold statement; it’s one the playwright would reject. There was an idea at one point, although perhaps it is no longer true, of the city as an entity that sings the blues, even if tempered with some hope and humour, and McManus, in his plays from the early Eighties to the early 2000s, shows himself to be our quintessential urban writer. His plays reflect, challenge, rage at, or even ruefully, resignedly accept, the Winnipeg he shows in his work. Hopeful, pragmatic, realistic are adjectives that come to mind, along with tough, bracingly cynical, and infused with an uncertain (but rumbling deeply underneath the surface) kind of religious belief. In other words, the city itself is manifested as a paradox of the spiritual and materialistic.
A way into McManus’s work might be found in Doug Arrell’s essential essay on Manitoba drama, “Miraculous Comings and Goings: A Century of Manitoba Drama.” Arrell notes that McManus wrote plays for the Prairie Theatre Exchange audience concentrating on “liberal disillusionment…for its declining faith in traditional left-wing political and social ideals.” (95) Further, that he was “preoccupied with the failure of the liberal dream… [his] disillusionment turned to bitterness; he increasingly felt out of sync with his audience.…” (95) Where we see this best, along with the idea of faith, is in two plays that reflect the Winnipeg urban ethos at its most complex, Selkirk Avenue, from the early Nineties, and All Restaurant Fires Are Arson a decade later.
Throughout his work, McManus sees Winnipeg as a city without a centre, a city of neighbourhoods, in which he witnesses the slow but inevitable end of the old working class. His choice is clear in choosing the North End as idea and failed ideal. The two plays considered here also pull in other Winnipeg plays as companion, complement, or challenge. His other plays, including The Coast and Caffe, and his adaptation of A Doll’s House are also important in offering a vision of the city as declining and disappearing in some manner. The characters of Selkirk Avenue and All Restaurant Fires Are Arson, empathetically conceived in Selkirk Avenue and more equivocally presented in All Restaurant Fires…, reflect where the playwright, as artist and citizen, following what Arrell remarked on, was as the years passed. His plays couldn’t be from anywhere else but this city. City of neighbourhoods perhaps, but with a shattered central urban ethos.
In The Coast, from the early Eighties, its protagonist, Oreste, manages a hotel on the skids filled with World War II vets and older railway union workers, all heroes to him. The hotel is a lost cause. Looking back from today we can see how the loss of these rundown hotels, now seemingly complete, helped fuel the homeless crisis. Oreste could go to Vancouver, as his pregnant girlfriend will eventually, but he lingers. The hotel’s closing is in its way the city’s closing of how it dealt with a hidden lower class.
A city of neighbourhoods which sees the last of the poor (mainly) white class: this is the subtext that flows into McManus’s portrayal of the immigrant “other” experience and the Indigenous presence in Selkirk Avenue. The play’s protagonist, Harold, a photographer by trade, is representative of the old left, but he is also a small landlord, hence petty bourgeois, but that’s the circumstance of the North End. We see Harold as witness and participant from the Thirties, with a Jewish refugee family, the Fifties/Sixties with a Polish family, and into the Eighties with an Indigenous mother and grown son. There is also his complicated relationship with his neighbour, Mary Lobchuk, the street’s self-appointed nanny. Harold and Mary never quite come together, even if a fitful love keeps them close. They can’t come together, in a sense, like the city itself in its divisions. Their principles won’t match; love won’t conquer all.
Mary: I will miss the horses.
Harold: I won’t miss the manure. I have to sweep this street every morning.
Mary: I’d better go.
Harold: Stay.
Mary: I see horses, you see manure. (53)
She sees creation and its beauty but isn’t blind to the injustice the South End inflicts on the North End, which Harold then relates. Harold, ever practical, a materialist, wonders who cleans up, but he feels love for Mary’s spiritual joy in the world. Harold as photographer documents the changes in the street. It is a farewell then, not a surprise for a memory play—which in an odd sense is what the actual Selkirk Avenue itself is. As an elderly Harold prepares to leave the street, he knows that Selkirk Avenue wraps itself around not only him but everyone. “Harold: The river flows no matter what. Sometimes I think this street ran on anger and sometimes I think it ran on hope. Sometimes I think anger and hope are the same thing.” (92) His final imagining of the street as the end of a journey of people from many parts of the world and our North as the decades wore on implies Winnipeg’s whole complex history.
But with McManus there is more, because his play from 2008, All Restaurant Fires Are Arson, is not only an abrupt final farewell to any hope in the city, but with its protagonist, Tom, a goodbye to the shattered urban space of Winnipeg itself. Tom, a late-middle-aged cop with PTSD, says the things Harold never would say or even think about people or the city. He is the final working out of Arrell’s remark about McManus’s perceived liberal disillusionment with the audience and city. How he expresses himself—and for that matter, how all the characters in the world of All Restaurant Fires… express themselves—leads one to an insight regarding the city blues.
Beyond Prairie Realism or even Prairie Gothic, strikingly seen in Carolyn Gray’s bitterly comic North Main Gothic, we have with All Restaurant Fires… the language and style, not to mention plot, of film noir. Other plays lead us there. Perhaps we can call it Prairie neo-noir. This isn’t a fanciful notion if we go by noted film critic Peter Rainer’s definition of noir as “about being trapped.” (421) It is a “genre of decline”: “an infernal pageant of sex, money and death.” (421) Maybe modify that into the infernal pageant of fading hopes, social/economic dislocation, and neighbourhood tensions, and noir fits. The city of blues as neo-noir, “made from what’s real,” as our new city slogan goes, is seen in Daniel Thau-Eleff’s Remember the Night, Silver’s Thimblerig, David King’s Finite Junction, Gray’s North Main Gothic, and, perhaps most especially, Brian Drader’s Liar. Liar, in fact, is a pageant of sex, money and death (in an intimate way, granted) as well as a Winnipeg blues play. These plays also fit film critic Anthony Lane’s remark that noir “always count(s) on suckers and sex.” (82)
In All Restaurant Fires… the young, loose, middle-class characters of the Sixties are now well into middle age. In any case, Tom, a cop on permanent disability, finds himself in the centre of it all. Once idealistic, now haunted by nightmares, he comes to the conclusion that “some people deserve a good beating.” (59) When his old school friend qua rival, now a somewhat wayward priest, mourning the odd death of a lover, suddenly appears, and another somewhat sinister cop keeps showing up to berate him about his on-leave status, Tom descends even further. We can see the city in him, once concerned and attempting to do good, now tired beyond rest, but living while death haunts his generation. Old friends seem to die before their time; everyone around Tom seems to disappear. There is mystery to this, or is it just happenstance? The language of noir is there:
Tom: I wished we’d all die and get it over with.
Ron (the priest): What?
Tom: Let them die.
Ron: Who?
Tom: My classmates. My cohorts. My peers.
Ron: Not Cindy.
Tom: No. She was nice.
Ron: Don’t be an asshole all your life. What’s left of it. (19)
McManus never solves whatever mystery there is, except to move the caustic, ironic world of Prairie Realism, of which he is the master, into Winnipeg noir.
Daniel Thau-Eleff’s Remember the Night invokes the feeling of noir at once. Fred, the unfortunate, conflicted, rather pathetic protagonist, lies bleeding out at the play’s start—the flashback style of the play is classic noir—from a sword attack. He invokes the city: “It is a city of multiple personalities. People have been coming for thousands of years and most of them have continued on their way. Because some of us stay here. Because we love it.”(3) The plot, which swings from black comedy to violent melodrama, involves Fred with a sex worker who doesn’t turn out to be a femme fatale; a pair of hired assassins (sort of, anyway) who speak a kind of pseudo-intellectual mush (a parody of movie tough guy lingo); his dementia-suffering mother in a home; an even older woman in the home, Mrs. Himmelstein, who mysteriously anchors the play’s outcome; and, above all, a nameless, murderous cop. His character is simply named Cop and echoes the Cop who floats ominously throughout McManus’s All Restaurant Fires…. Indeed, the Cop, who wields swords and, like Fred, is killed by one, could be the lunatic extension of not only McManus’s Cop, but a final vision of how many Winnipeg playwrights view, fairly or not, the police. Fred’s depression begins with his confusion over his identity—Jewish father, Gentile mother and therefore not “really” Jewish—but it is his loneliness, which one could take to represent the isolation of the city from the greater world around it, and his attempts to overcome it which doom him. He becomes the city: “All that promise in the world and nothing to show for it.”(55) As he dies, he remarks: “I am Winnipeg and Winnipeg is me.” (55) Still, Mrs. Himmelstein, reassuring his mother, will go on a search for Fred—and perhaps find the city. As she puts it at the play’s maybe hopeful end: “The only thing for me is to go downstream. I’m going to find him on the landlocked island. At the place where the two rivers meet.”(58) Most likely she is being ironic—who wants to look for poor Fred, perhaps especially if he is Winnipeg? The prostitute, Cyndi, who avoided the Cop’s murderous wrath, does get out from the dark bitter “island between two rivers,” but we are still led to Winnipeg as noir.
One of the places Mrs. Himmelstein might have looked was in the small tunnel system under some Winnipeg streets. Few remember them, but this forgotten underground is the primary setting for Carolyn Gray’s North Main Gothic, a night city and the most pointed and angry play in the noir group. A stumbling femme fatale, a fake sex worker who is an aspiring CBC documentarian, crazy loser guys, lookalike bartenders of decrepit hotel bars, and oppressive, darkly absurd provincial civil servants inhabit this swirling nightmare. In this tunnel a low poverty row version of gambling feeds addictions. Stella Dupree, who seems eternally ensconced as a gambling addict, is pursued by a well-meaning “self-made,” as he boasts continually, Hydro medium bigwig, Ian, as well as by a hooded stranger who turns out to be a ludicrous civil servant. Here the Winnipeg noir stew of social dislocation looms. The echoes of sex, money, and death hover in a place the city wishes to forget, and the province cares only about when the Stellas and her friends spend money on gambling. Gray is bold in taking the play into an almost Greek-like mythic direction as old as theatre itself when it turns out that Ian is Stella’s abandoned son. Bolder still is Stella’s rejection of him – parent and child discovery doesn’t overcome the North End manic despair. Ian returns to the city’s upper world; Stella remains, rigidly unsentimental, moved only by fellow North Enders, not by a son from another place. No one is really sympathetic in the play, Stella least of all, perhaps, but this noir place of extremes—Gray is right to call it Gothic—festers in the city’s heart.
Or perhaps it is its dividing line. Would it be recognized by the characters in Brian Drader’s Liar, perhaps the key Winnipeg noir play under consideration here? Not likely, because we are back with South End sensibility, the slightly younger versions of the people in All Restaurant Fires…. Here we have solid middle class Ben and Sherri. They appear comfortable and secure, a model of a contemporary liberal couple, but appearances can be deceiving. Haunted by the disappearance of their small son some years before, they face another emotional blow when Sherri’s estranged brother, Jeremy, falls to his death. Accident? Something else? We are led through the maze of the story by Mark, the liar of the title, a version of an homme fatale—feckless, quietly ruthless, and oddly insinuating; in short, a seducer of the emotions. He knew Jeremy slightly, and was present at his death. Jeremy, whom Mark correctly referred to as “stoner boy,” (33) carelessly walked on a rooftop’s edge, believing Mark would save him from falling. Mark’s warning, that he isn’t saviour material, may be the only truth he tells. His seduction of Sherri and Ben through becoming what they wish to see leads almost to their unravelling, not to mention some financial loss when Mark is finished with them and disappears. What is left? The city itself is about to fall; it teeters on the ledge like careless Jeremy, and Mark becomes what we – or rather Sherri and Ben – want the city to be: nice, reassuring, not the darkness of noir. He isn’t, but still we want not what might be “real” or “one great city,” but the elusive Winnipeg which never was. Drader’s play is quiet on the surface, like a good neighbourhood should be, but volatile underneath, like a real city—this city—is.
* * *
There is no conclusion, as these remain notes toward a meditation. They remain incomplete, perhaps a touch historical. What is the view of the city in more recent plays? It will take a few years to realize that; it always does. A casual look shows that social justice remains important though its definition may vary from years, even a few years, ago. The idea of who tells the story seems vital. Yet the city as place and space—and idea—remains.
With two short plays by Ellen Peterson, we might come to a view of the messiness of the city’s place in the plays of Winnipeg blues. In Stories Houses Tell, Peterson presents longtime Winnipeg columnist and city historian Lillian Gibbons at 89 years of age as she sails up the Amazon on a final journey of life (she was to die there). The journey may be an attempt to escape the city, but that’s impossible. Floating down the Amazon, she notes: “In Winnipeg the rivers seem to meet without any fuss. The Assiniboine gives over to the Red without a fight. Seamless. But the city never came together so easily. It is an unlikely place for a city.”(2) She goes on marking her life and career as it comes to an end with the city she knew ending, or changing—it’s hard to tell. “When I walk down the streets in Winnipeg now, all I can see is what’s no longer there. In Winnipeg the streets are paved with ghosts…. the jackhammers and the wrecking balls are everywhere. Tick tock. The theatre will go. They tear everything down.” (2, 4)
No nostalgia invades this vision of the city burgeoning out of the fort into its divided nature and its weave of rising and declining neighbourhoods. Yet in the play there is an urgency and a sadness about where we are now. There is a yearning, not only here but in all these plays, a yearning for something unachieved. The old about to die; the younger moving on. Perhaps in the playwrights discussed here there is a coming to terms with death and, in that, some acceptance of the city as elusively gone or maybe just ever changing. Gibbons is sure of only one thing: “Someone else will walk down Broadway and see what isn’t there.” (7)
Or perhaps walk down another street, any street in the city, and see what’s there or not. Peterson’s other short play, The Intersection, takes that walk. We follow a man and a woman as they revisit various spots where they lived or that they knew. It is a reminiscence but, again, not nostalgia. The woman’s realization of dawn breaking—though it could happen in any city, Winnipeg is her city. The man coming to a conclusion when he in a way shakes away the past and the people that, like it or not, “Winnipeg is everyone I miss.” (7) It is the city stuck in the middle—if we ever decide what that “middle” is, socially, psychologically, even spiritually. Maybe that’s the meditation. Maybe that’s our blues.
Works Cited
Arrell, Doug. “Miraculous Comings Together: A Century of Manitoba Drama.” Prairie Fire, Vol. 20 No. 4 pages 91-96.
Chafe, Rick. The Secret Mask. Playwrights Canada Press, 2013.
Drader, Brian. Liar. Scirocco Drama, 2004.
Drader, Brian, ed. Breakout. Scirocco Drama, 2004.
Gilbert, Sky, ed. Perfectly Abnormal: Seven Gay Plays. Playwrights Canada Press, 2006.
Gray, Carolyn. The Elmwood Visitation. Scirocco Drama, 2007.
Hunter, Maureen. Sarah Ballenden. Scirocco Drama, 2017.
Koncan, Frances. Women of the Fur Trade. Playwrights Canada Press, 2022.
Lane, Anthony. Nobody’s Perfect.Vintage Books, 2001.
McManus, Bruce. All Restaurant Fires Are Arson. Scirocco Drama, 2008
McManus, Bruce. Selkirk Avenue. NuAge Editions, 1998.
Mitchell, Nick. Tin Can Cathedral. International Readers’ Theatre, 1996.
Nepinak, Doug. Coo-Coosh. Production draft, 2005.
Patterson, Deb. Sargent & Victor & Me. Final draft, 2010.
Peterson, Ellen. Stories Houses Tell. Production text, 2020, Prairie Theatre Exchange.
Peterson, Ellen. Intersection. Production draft, 2019, Prairie Theatre Exchange.
Rainer, Peter. Rainer on Film. Santa Monica Press, 2013.
Rintoul, Harry. The Convergence of Luke. Workshop draft, 1994.
Ross, Ian. The Gap. Scirocco Drama, 2011.
Ross, Ian. Heart of a Distant Tribe, in A Map of the Senses. Scirocco Drama, 2000.
Runnells, Rory. Essay on Lulu Street by Ann Henry. RMTC program, 2019.
Runnells, Rory. “Twenty Years On: A Personal Introduction,” in A Map of the Senses. Scirocco Drama, 2000.
Thau-Eleff, Daniel. Remember the Night. Production draft, 2008.
Playwrights
Rick Chafe
Brian Drader
Carolyn Gray
William Harrar
Ann Henry
Maureen Hunter
David King
Primrose Madayag Knazan
Frances Koncan
Brad Leiman
Bruce McManus
Nick Mitchell
Doug Nepinak
Yvette Nolan
Deb Patterson
Ellen Peterson
Harry Rintoul
Ian Ross
Danny Schur
Alf Silver
Margaret Sweatman
Daniel Thau-Eleff
Liam Taliesin
Dennis Trochim
Rory Runnells is a Winnipeg writer. He was Executive Director of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights for 34 years. He reviews for the Winnipeg Free Press and is the drama editor for Prairie Fire.