About the Plays:

George Ryga's biographer, James Hoffman, compiled this anthology of sixteen plays.

The published version of George Ryga's hit play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is widely available as a best-seller. Yet the work of one of Canada's best known playwrights, canonized by critics and studied by students world-wide, remains largely absent from the Canadian stage; Ryga's very reputation as a dramatist is an anomaly. George Ryga: The Other Plays, then, is a challenge, even a provocation, to examine George Ryga in light of the other plays that constitute his substantial dramatic oeuvre. How was it that one of Canada's pioneering playwrights became an outsider to the very theatre he had been instrumental in creating?

As a self-proclaimed figure of exile, as an "artist in resistance," George Ryga criticized issues of Canadian culture in numerous instances — particularly its colonized nature, even turning on the very theatre that had earlier nourished him. Employing disruptive elements such as flashbacks / forwards, poetic speeches, songs, sound motifs and changes of setting and weather, George Ryga gives his plays a sense of restless movement, even a loss of control. His characters may be physically and spiritually trapped by their colonial uncertainties, but they have great capacity to envision a different tomorrow. It was a vision of tomorrow that, with the sole exception of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the theatre of Ryga's day had no wish to share.

This collection includes:
• Indian (1964) A searing accusation of racist attitudes and practise against native Indians. (Cast: 3 men)
• Nothing but a Man Originally written in 1965 as a television script.
• Just an Ordinary Person (1968) This play, one of Ryga's shortest, is also his most soul-searching. (Cast: 2 men)
• Grass and Wild Strawberries (1968) A genuine 'happening' that boldly embraced the zeitgeist of Vancouver's volatile street scene and B.C.'s back-to-the-land hippie movement.
• Compressions (1969) A sustained, passionate debate about broad societal questions then current at the height of the counterculture revolution (the famous Woodstock festival took place that August). (Cast: 2 women, 3 men)
• Captives of the Faceless Drummer (1971) A dialectic of urban violence and its logical extension into the future. Closely parallels the events of the October Crisis in 1970, dramatizing conflicting ideologies. Frightening, gentle and passionate. (Cast: 2 women, 5 men)
• Sunrise on Sarah (1972) addresses, in a psychological context, the same metathematic of rootlessness and exile from an effectively constructed self that haunts all of Ryga's work.
• A Portrait of Angelica (1973) A "ballad play" set in a small Mexican town and examining the interaction of locals with Canadian tourists. A portrait of a culture which, unlike our own, has endured "a thousand hurricanes."
• Ploughmen of the Glacier (1976) Conversations between an aged prospector and a retired newspaperman bring about an examination of the myth of men who made the West. (Cast: 3 men)
• Seven Hours to Sundown (1976) A play about the nature of power in a small communities - designed to be adapted for specific audiences. (Cast: 2 women, 4 men)
• Jeremiah's Place (1978) A play for young audiences. Has a familiar Ryga theme: the anguish over the loss of a homestead, especially as family relationships are seriously disrupted and questions are raised about the best use of the land. (Cast: 2 women, 3 men)
• Laddie Boy (1978) is a short sketch of what Ryga called "failed human beings," the inevitable consequence of living in a "decaying social order." (Cast: 1 woman, 2 men)
• Promethus Bound (1978) A modernized version of the Aeschylus myth portrays the individual warring with what he sees as evil in society. (Cast: 3 women, 4 men)
• A Letter to My Son (1981) An old Ukrainian-Canadian farmer confronts modern bureaucracy in the person of a young social worker, between whose visits he composes a letter to his son, a school teacher alienated from his "peasant" father. (Cast: 2 women, 3 men)
• One More Road (1985) consists of the ruminations of two elderly men. (Cast: 2 men)
• Paracelsus (1986) The epic tale of the Swiss medic and alchemist who, during the Renaissance, attacked the quackery and greed of an unenlightened medical establishment. A sub-plot examines 20th century medicine and its ethical dilemmas. (Cast: 1 woman, 3 men)

What people say:

"Hoffman provides an effective and multifaceted description for the student seeking a quick understanding of Ryga's stature as a playwright." — Canadian Literature

"More than any other writer, George Ryga was responsible for first bringing the contemporary age to the Canadian stage." — John Juliani, actor and director

"George Ryga had taken the human experience, which in this case is Canadian only by accident of destiny, distilled it through his fine sense of compassion and given it to us ... as an act of communion in which our own participation is inescapable." — CBC

About the Playwright:

George Ryga was one of Canada's most important playwrights, with a broad international reputation. Born in Deep Creek, Alberta, of poor immigrant parents in a rural Ukrainian community, Ryga had to leave school after the sixth grade. Largely self-taught, he showed early promise when he won a writing scholarship to the Banff School of the Arts. He published his first book of poems in his late teens and earned a living first with hard labour and later in radio broadcasting.

In 1967, Ryga soared to national fame with The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which has since evolved into a modern classic. A self-proclaimed "artist in resistance," Ryga took the role of a fierce and fearless social commentator in most of his plays, and his work is renowned for its vivid and thrilling theatricality.

George Ryga died of stomach cancer in Summerland, BC, in 1987 and will always be remembered and cherished as one of Canada's most prolific and powerful writers. His memory was publicly honoured at the BC Book Prizes ceremony in 1993.

About the Editor:

James Hoffman is a Professor of Theatre at the University College of the Cariboo, located in Kamloops, BC, and the editor of the scholarly journal Textual Studies in Canada. His research interests include Canadian theatre studies, post-colonial theory, and the history and culture of theatre in BC.