New approaches to plays and performances are setting the stage for a much transformed theatre scene THE PARTICULAR NATURE of contemporary dramatic writing in Canada, which increasingly incorporates performance as an element of textuality, has resulted in the paradox that the plays that are published are not always representative of the work of the theatres from which they come. The recent releases under review here reverse this tendency and defy the conventions of stage realism and literary value that have played so important a role to date. For this these presses are to be commended, because dramatic publishing in Canada still tends to regard the text as a result - rather than a documentation - of performance. These eight titles offer a glimpse into the pluralism of Canadian drama: two are from Alberta, two from Winnipeg, and four from Toronto (including two by Native Writers). Their thematic diversity makes regionalist generalizations difficult, but it is interesting to note the regional differences present in their respective approaches to theatrical production. The most conventional approach is that of the emotionally resonant, workshop-tested, well-made play, represented here by Don Hannah`s In the Lobster Capital of the World (Playwrights Canada, 138 pages, $9.95 paper). Bearing the dramaturgical imprint of Tarragon Theatre, where it was premiered in 1988, it narrates the story of a gay thirty-something gallery owner who returns to his family home in New Brunswick, there to reconcile with his past, his widowed mother, his whacked-out brother, the woman who has always loved him, and his young lover who pops in from Toronto. Hannah`s writing is filled with the kind of confessional intensity that we see so often (done so well) on the Tarragon stage. Perhaps too often: this is one more in a crowded genre of Canadian plays about sensitive (mostly male) artists learning to be honest with themselves. Hannah`s play occupies the traditional centre among Playwrights Canada`s three current releases. Playwrights Canada - the official imprint of the Playwright`s Union of Canada must represent regional diversity, but it must recognize theatrical pluralism as well. Its other two releases are refreshing antidotes to overly familiar realism. Frank Moher and Gerald Reid`s Sliding for Home (Playwrights Canada, 118 pages, $9.95 paper) is a play that may seem inexplicable to any audience outside of Edmonton, transformed into "Edgmonton" in this ebullient musical about a 1940s sports fan who strives to bring professional baseball to the prairies. Its ensemble style, veering between parody and melodrama, reflects the unique methods of Gerry Potter`s Workshop West (which commissioned the play); and while difficult to read, it comes across as one hell of a show for a cold Alberta night, when the summer evenings it evokes so well seem far off. The press`s third release is the most welcome, because it does the most to challenge the textual confines of the canon. The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine (Playwrights Canada, 72 pages, $9.95 paper) is a clown show with a difference by Robert Morgan, Martha Ross, and Leah Cherniak, who comprise Columbus Theatre in Toronto. The publication of this play is a timely acknowledgement of the remarkable phenomenon of Jacques Lecoq-inspired physical clowning in Canadian theatre. The clown turns that stretch a 70-page text into 180 minutes of performance are impossible to replicate on the page, but the text as it stands is a remarkable dissection of rage and marital politics. This textuality may in fact work against the play, because readers unfamiliar with the clown style may overlook its primacy. Playwrights Canada`s most energetic challenger these days is Blizzard, a cottage press operating out of Winnipeg that has in three years redefined the canon of prairie theatre. Whereas Playwrights Canada publishes texts that have had significant productions (that is, they come out of important theatres), Blizzard validates authors whose works have had local success, if that. Its three releases, representing the three prairie provinces, indicate the stylistic diversity that has overturned traditional conceptions of prairie drama. Carol Shields`s Arrivals and Departures (Blizzard, 100 pages, $10.95 paper) has been unproduced since its premiere at the University of Manitoba in 1984, and its release now is an affirmation of a distinct theatrical voice. Its flow of impressionistic vignettes depicts chance encounters in an airport; there is little in the way of traditional plot, but much in the way of narrative, startling character miniatures, and a delightful theatricality that constantly undermines its own con, ventions. Connie Gault`s The Soft Eclipse (Blizzard, 78 pages, $9.95 paper), produced at Regina`s Globe Theatre in 1989, is a gentle but subtly unsettling play that will challenge audiences expecting dramatic revelation and plotting; its exploration of the interior lives of women in a small prairie town offers a touch of lyricism rare on our stages. For its Alberta representative Blizzard offers a play by Frank Moher, who, although not often produced outside of his home province, must be considered a writer of major stature. Prairie Report (Blizzard, 101 pages, $10.95 paper) is conventional storytelling theatre at its best, the theatrical equivalent of a good read. Based on Moher`s experiences as a journalist with Alberta Report, the play provides an engaging dissection of regionalism in its story of a right-wing news magazine coping with a takeover bid by an even more right-wing Toronto magnate. Moher`s lengthy preface, in which he recalls how he came to be involved with a magazine whose politics were anti, thetical to his own, is a valuable and highly entertaining explication of the intersection of regionalism and right-wing populism in Alberta. The final two plays are to my mind the most welcome, because they show clearly the importance of small publishers in supporting the renaissance of Native playwriting that has had considerable effect on recent Canadian theatre. Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor both write primarily for Native audiences, and have not sought the break into the mainstream that has catapulted Tomson Highway to celebrity status. Like Highway, Moses and Taylor use traditional Native narrative techniques to transform the premises of stage realism with which their plays begin. Moses` Coyote City (Williams-Wallace, 103 pages, $7.95 paper), produced in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts in 1988, opens with a young woman receiving a mysterious phone call from her recently deceased lover, who claims to be in the Silver Dollar Tavern in Toronto. Her trip to the city, where she is followed by her mother, sister, and a recovered-alcoholic-turned-Christian-preacher, is a voyage into two overlapping but conflicting worlds: the world of alcoholic despair that is the result of cultural genocide, and the transformational realm of Coyote, the Trickster of traditional Native spirituality. Like Highway, Moses uses drama to explore the contradictions of contemporary Native life; in contrast, Taylor`s pair of one-act lesson-plays, Education Is Our Right and Toronto at Dreamer`s Rock (Fifth House, 139 pages, $10.95 paper), show why an increasing number of Native theatres employ drama as a vehicle of social action. These plays are highly effective polemics. In Toronto at Dreamer`s Rock, a Native youth who despises his heritage meets two temporally displaced teenagers, one from the past, who represents traditional life, and the other from a future in which racism and want have disappeared - along with cultural identity. The encounter renews the young man with a sense of his people, and leaves him with the determination to make a difference. In Education Is Our Right, Taylor borrows from Charles Dickens`s A Christmas Carol to confront the federal minister of Indian and Northern Affairs (renamed Ebenezer Cadieux) with the spirits of Education Past, Present, and Future. They challenge him with the results of his decision to rescind federal funding for Native post-secondary education - a move the play predicts will result in increased poverty. Both of these plays were recently produced by De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre on Manitoulin Island, a company that has proved seminal in the development of a powerful Native voice in Canadian theatre. The publication of Native writers like Moses and Taylor is an important advance in Canadian drama, not only because it acknowledges the role that theatre plays in contemporary Native cultural reclamation, but because their textual strategies of subverted realism remind us that theatrical style expresses cultural power: the act of challenging conventions is also a challenge to the social norms that ordain them. The presence of Native transformations, Toronto clowns, and prairie ensembles in these eight titles constitutes a welcome reconsideration of cultural priorities traditionally reinforced by plays canonized for perceived literary value, rather than their theatrical and social significance.