Love and War Western Style

Love and romance are different in the west. These three radio plays are imaginative, clever, subversive, funny, and available for the first time since their original broadcast.

Love and War Western Style presents three radio plays commissioned by the CBC in the early 1990s. Snappy dialogue, whip-quick storytelling, and vivacious humour come together in these clever deconstructions of familiar romantic vehicles—the western, the Hollywood musical, the romance novel—featuring imaginary cowboys, wishes that go awry, and tough, unstoppable, feisty women.

In Don’t Fence Me In, Mitch Carter and his imaginary horse Boscoe face down the evil Dan Kinkaid in little one-horse towns called Gunshot, or Abaloney, or Mesquite, dreaming up great adventures —until Mitch’s old friend Effie comes a-knockin’. In Boscoe’s opinion, Mitch never should have opened that door.

The Pretzel Maker, originally broadcast live from a tea dance at the Palliser Hotel, shows the unintended consequences that occur when Cornelia the Wish Therapist reads the leaves at the bottom of the obsessively shy Eric’s teacup. Unstoppable metamorphosis and a relentless desire for revenge are triggered while Cornelia struggles to get a grip.

Love and War Western Style follows the course of true love in the west, and it’s a bumpy ride. Leo and Vinnie are a match made in heaven, if only he’d stop running her over with the tractor. Beryl spurns all her suitors and takes up chicken farming, but tricky Clyde has no intentions of staying spurned. And the wooing of Hallie Bedford makes Machiavelli look like a grade schooler.

A pleasure to read and a joy to perform, Love and War Western Style follows in the rich Canadian radio tradition of Stuart MacLean, Thomas King, and W.O. Mitchell.

Rose Scollard is an award-winning Calgary playwright who loves to explore themes from unexpected perspectives. She is the co-founder of Maenad Productions, Western Canada’s first woman-centered theatre and author of Tango Noir. She also, together with husband David, created Calgary literary press Frontenac House.

Western radio humour at its slapstick best. In these radio plays, the men are feckless but don’t know it. The women know it but can’t help it. The horses can talk. The gags pop like cheerful balloons. A lot of laughs in them there hills.

—Fred Stenson, author of Who by Fire