About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Ploughmen of the Glacier is a full-length comedy by George Ryga. Conversations between a rugged prospector and refined journalist crack open the myth of the Old West. The play is loosely based on the life of Volcanic Brown, the prospector who discovered and named Copper Mountain, near Princeton, B.C.

Ploughmen of the Glacier is derived from the legend of Volcanic Brown's inadvertent discovery of a copper mine, while prospecting for gold in Hedley, B.C. A strong wild play about a tough old prospector and mining promoter, Volcanic Brown, and an acerbic old newspaper publisher and journalist, Robert Lowery, who confront each other in examining the myth of the men who made the West. They rant and argue about their dreams, their struggling, and their dying while the mountain they live and work on stands waiting to destroy them. The play's third and minor character, Poor Boy, is sometimes eliminated for performance as a two-hander.

Ploughmen of the Glacier was specially commissioned by the Okanagan Mainline Regional Arts Council and first performed in 1976 by Western Canada Theatre Company (WCT) as the centre-piece for a unique arts and culture celebration called Okanagan Image that brought people together in Kamloops. It drew good audiences in a tour of the Okanagan and transferred to the David Y. H. Lui Theatre (which later became the legendary Richards on Richards nightclub) in Vancouver.

Cast: 3 male

What people say:

"George Ryga is Canadian theatre's version of a folk poet with a social conscience – a kind of radicalized Robert Service. In ... Ploughmen of the Glacier ... Ryga turns his hand for the first time to comedy, but it is no surprise to find his social concern is never very far away. Simply, he recreates an image from B.C's turn-of-the-century past to highlight problems close to the heart of what he considers to be B.C's current crisis of identity and direction." — Vancouver Sun

About the Playwright:

George Ryga (1932-1987) was one of Canada's most important playwrights, with a broad international reputation. 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. "More than any other writer," said theatre director John Juliani, "George Ryga was responsible for first bringing the contemporary age to the Canadian stage." He will always be remembered and cherished as one of Canada's most prolific and powerful writers.