An entirely new and original assessment of the work of playwright, actor, teacher, and critic Sharon Pollock and her integral contributions to Canada’s national theatre tradition.
Playwright, actor, director, teacher, mentor, theatre administrator, and critic, Sharon Pollock has played an integral role in the shaping of Canada’s national theatre tradition, and she continues to produce new works and to contribute to Canadian theatre as passionately as she has done over the past fifty years.
Pollock is nationally and internationally respected for her work and support of the theatre community. She has also played a major role in informing Canadians about the “dark side” of their history and current events.
This collection, comprised entirely of new and original assessments of her work and contribution to theatre, is both timely and long overdue. Includes a new play titled Sharon’s Tongue by the Playing with Pollock Collective
With Contributions By: Kathy K. Y. Chung, Donna Coates, Carmen Derksen, Sherrill Grace, Martin Morrow, Jeton Neziraj, Wes Pearce, Tanya Schaap, Shelley Scott, Jerry Wasserman, Jason Weins, and Cynthia Zimmerman
Donna Coates is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She has edited, with George Melnyk, Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature; with Sherrill Grace, Canada and the Theatre of War: Volumes One and Two; and she has written dozens of book chapters and articles on Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and American women’s war fictions and drama.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Donna Coates
Walsh and the (De-)Construction of Canadian Myth
Jerry Wasserman
Sharon Pollock and the Scene of the Crime
Shelley Scott
Ownership and Stewardship in Sharon Pollock’s Generations
Cynthia Zimmerman
"The art a seein’ the multiple realities": Fragmented Scenography in Sharon Pollocks Plays
Wes D. Pearce
Listening is Telling: Eddie Roberts’s Poetics of Repair in Sharon Pollock’s Fair Liberty’s Call
Carmen Derkson
Loss and Morning in Sharon Pollock’s < em>Fair Liberty’s Call
Kathy K.Y. Cheung
Questions of Collective Responsibility in Sharon Pollock’s Man Out of Joint
Tanya Schaap
Equal-Opportunity Torturers in Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End and Sharon Pollock’s Man Out of Joint
Donna Coates
Sharon Pollock and the Garry Theatre (1992-97)
Martin Morrow
Sharon Pollock in Kosovo
Jeton Neziraj
Biography and the Archive
Sherrill Grace
Sharon’s Tongue
Calgary Playing with Pollock Collective, Lindsay Burnes, Pamela Halstead, Grant Linneberg, and Laura Parken
Pollock on Plays
Contributors
Index
Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre (as are Pollock’s plays) is relevant for a wide range of readers and academic disciplines: theatre and drama studies, of course, but also literature, history, political science, women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. It might also inform the choices made by artistic directors and inspire productions.
—Anne Nothof, Western American Literature