still squeeze an’ cry, for everything is gone, and I am old man now . . . only hunger an’ hurt left now. . . .

Although the play is fundamentally realistic, its skillful compression of language, setting, and events produces powerful symbolic effects. The setting is a “flat, grey, stark non-country,” a “vast empty expanse” that is at once the Northern Albertan landscape and a spiritual wasteland, reminiscent of the elemental settings in Samuel Beckett or T. S. Eliot. This simultaneous realism and symbolism in setting is matched on the levels of language and event, where the cadences of Indian dialect or the harsh hammer blows with which the play ends resonate with poetic force. The fusion of realism and symbolism at key points of Indian anticipates the more ambitious, sustained, and experimental techniques of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Ryga’s more wide-ranging treatment of indigenous experience.

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe

The vibrant combination of dance, song, mime, recorded voices, and special lighting effects in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe signals Ryga’s departure from the basic naturalism of Indian. Ryga dramatizes both the inner and the outer experience of Rita Joe by making use of a variety of impressionistic, expressionistic, and symbolic techniques. Thus, on a forceful and realistic groundwork he builds a poetic structure in which Rita’s subjective experience and inevitable doom emerge in flashbacks, shadow plays, and interludes of music, mime, or dance.

The groundwork of the play is the basic tragedy of Rita’s life and death. Having left her father, the reserve, and her sexual innocence behind, Rita comes to the city, where she becomes trapped in a closing circle of poverty, theft, and prostitution—until she is raped and murdered by three white men. (The Three Murderers shadow Rita’s presence throughout the play until they emerge, clearly illuminated, to murder Rita and her lover Jamie at the end.) The play’s poetic structure, however, transforms this linear, deterministic plot into a mythical, often allegorical elaboration of Rita’s fate, whereby the murder of the Indian woman becomes the ecstasy and apotheosis of the martyr. The fusion of realism and symbolism is pure and lacks sentimentality. Appropriately, the play ends with the poignant words of Rita’s sister Eileen, which focus on the human being at the heart of the myth: “When Rita Joe first come to the city—she told me. . . . The cement made her feet hurt.”

The main action revolves around a recurring courtroom scene in which Rita stands accused—of vagrancy, prostitution, theft, and other crimes—before a sentimental and ineffectual Magistrate, symbol of white society’s superficial understanding of Indian experience. By administering lectures and jail sentences, the Magistrate rests the blame for Rita’s degradation and despair on Rita herself, evading whatever responsibility he might have both as a man and as an official representative of white society. He tries unsuccessfully to harmonize the image of a tiny Indian girl he once saw in the Cariboo country with the woman Rita, whom he accuses of carrying a venereal disease, a symbol of her permanent condemnation.

The courtroom scenes are touchstones of a present reality that Rita strives to evade via memories and fantasies. In these imaginative interludes, the people of her past and the materials of her oppressed spirit emerge. In one scene of dramatic counterpoint, her old dead father, David Joe, speaks beautifully of a dragonfly emerging from its shell while her lover, Jamie Paul, rails against the white oppressors and advocates violence against them. Torn by this conflict of generations, trapped between impossible alternatives of urban despair and powerlessness and an extinct pastoral majesty, Rita stands paralyzed and doomed. When she recalls scenes of warmth and inspiration, as when she and her sister Eileen comforted each other after a storm, the Three Murderers loom menacingly in the background. Memory, then, is fraught with pain and contains the seeds of her inevitable doom.

Other significant characters who appear out of Rita’s past are a Teacher, a Priest, a Policeman, and a welfare worker, Mr. Homer, all of whom, as representatives of white society, stand as accusers of Rita Joe. Throughout, Rita’s essential isolation is dramatized as she is torn violently from her memories by a court policeman or as she stands alone in a shaft of light, separated by a barrier of memory from her surroundings. Often, the dialogue assumes a contrapuntal rhythm as the characters talk across one another’s meanings, each alone in a fading world.

As the play progresses, it becomes more and more dominated by Rita’s imagination, which strains against the tragic inevitability of events. Increasingly, as she emerges from her memories and imaginings, the present reality assumes a more hallucinatory quality, shaped as it has become by Rita’s disorientation, fear, hunger, and exhaustion. At times the boundaries of time and space, of inner and outer reality, vanish completely. In a scene that approaches the nightmarish intensity of the Circe episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), all the testimonies of white authority—of Priest, Policeman, Teacher, Magistrate—fuse into one “nightmare babble” of perpetual condemnation. Out of this babble comes the searing cry of the Magistrate, a cry that is also the voice of Rita’s self-accusation, the bitter acknowledgment of her forced betrayal of sexual innocence and Indian heritage:Magistrate: Have you any boils on your back? Any discharge? When did you bathe last? The Three Murderers appear, and circle Rita. Magistrate: Answer me! Drunkenness! Shoplifting! Assault! Prostitution, prostitution, prostitution, prostitution!

In Indian, the Agent represents the audience’s point of view and dramatizes its violent discovery of Indian’s complex and painful reality. In The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the audience almost exclusively shares Rita’s point of view, which accounts for the play’s nonsequential, associative order, its blending of Rita’s spirit and memory with the nightmare-present from which she struggles in vain to escape. The play inhibits a complete identification with Rita, however, by insistently recalling the members of the audience to their own identity. Before the play begins, for example, the players make their entrances in a “workmanlike and untheatrical way” with the houselights up, thus enforcing a sense of common reality and frustrating the audience’s desire to escape into the suspension of disbelief that a darkened theater encourages.

Even when the lights are lowered and the play is long under way, the audience continues to be reminded of its status, sometimes rudely so. At one stunning moment, for example, Ryga calls for Jamie Paul to cross downstage and confront a member of the audience: “You know me? . . . You think I’m a dirty Indian, eh? Get outa my way!” At another equally uncomfortable moment, David Joe, Rita’s father, gestures angrily toward the audience exclaiming, “And tell her what? . . . Of the animals there . . . who sleep with sore stomachs because . . . they eat too much?”

Structural among the play’s alienating devices, however, is Rita’s alter ego, the Singer, “a white liberal folklorist” who weaves the scenes together with wistful songs that bespeak her “limited concern and understanding of an ethnic dilemma.” If the audience wishes to identify with Rita, it must simultaneously come to terms with the Singer, who sits, appropriately, off to the side and “turned away from the focus of the play.” The Singer, consequently, serves as an alter ego of the audience as well. Thus, between the poles of intimacy and alienation, between the life and final ecstasy of Rita Joe and the superficial and sentimental songs of the Singer, the audience must steer in this most demanding of Ryga’s plays.

Ploughmen of the Glacier

After The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Ryga wrote several plays on subjects ranging from psychedelic culture to urban terrorism, small-town politics, and the Titan Prometheus. As might be expected, these plays use a wide variety of techniques, blending realism with myth, song, or dance while experimenting with both fluid and static settings. Among the plays Ryga wrote after 1967, however, Ploughmen of the Glacier, an exploration of the myth of the Canadian West, was his most profound. In Ploughmen of the Glacier, Ryga is a virtuoso who masters continuously the development of his materials, creating a play that is rich in character, language, and symbolism.

In the stage directions, Ryga called for a “possibly surrealistic” mountainside setting in which “all is staged and designed to highlight the elemental loneliness of the protagonists.” Although the setting resembles that of Indian in its isolation and foreboding, the effect here is more dramatic as the Canadian Rockies loom unseen but felt in the background. The suggested mountainside functions in the play like the vast, mountainous range of the landscape painting: In both cases, the artist places human figures in the foreground of the vast scene to express human evanescence and isolation before nature’s permanence and sublimity. At times, however, the lust and spirit of Ryga’s characters succeed in dominating their surroundings.

The loneliness of the three protagonists is further reinforced by their distance from civilization. High on the mountain, the world below assumes a distant and obscure shape, formed only by the characters’ infrequent allusion to the Gold Rush, the town, or the business “bandits” from Ontario. Thus isolated, the mountainside is free to open into abodes of myth, though its bearded, coughing men, moving about in clouds of real dust and speaking their raucous frontier language, suggest a particular history and region.

The action is structured on the periodic meeting of Volcanic and Lowery—the natural, elemental man and the bookish man of culture—who disguise their suppressed affection for each other in zealous, occasionally violent, and often bitter arguments about the best way to live. Their spirited and voluble antagonism is interrupted, however, on the entrance of Poor Boy, who wanders up and down the mountain with a pair of leaky water buckets in a futile attempt to hoard water against the coming fire. (Wandering through the scene playing his harmonica, Poor Boy pauses to speak wistfully and discontinuously about a dimly remembered Western legend.) As the play’s Sisyphus, Poor Boy brings with him a whiff of the abyss that stops Volcanic and Lowery cold. From this prospect of madness and futility, Volcanic and Lowery avert their faces, infected by a doubt that leaves them spiritually exhausted though somehow closer as men. When Poor Boy leaves, however, they resume their argument. According to this rhythm of spirited argument, despair, and brief communion, the play progresses.

The play’s bleak existentialism is substantially countered throughout by its lusty language and humor. Responsible for the finest displays of both, Volcanic is also the Old West personified, a symbol of its tireless energy. As his name suggests, he is at once flowing lava and petrified rock—a living fossil from another time. Like the West itself, he combines the grandeur of the pioneering imagination with its ignorance and brutality (Volcanic once shot a man who trespassed unknowingly on his land), and like most grand personifications, he is slightly absurd: For all Volcanic’s dreams of wealth and talk of founding a city in his name, he, like Anse Bundren of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), is dominated by the homely and pressing need for a set of false teeth. Nevertheless, Volcanic’s vigorous speech achieves the force and resonance of poetry. When he rails against Lowery, he is at his best:You’re worn out by poverty . . . you depress me! . . . You’re like a preacher in a whorehouse. I want to dress up like a monkey to show the world I’m livin’. . . . I want to bleed myself . . . show God I can do without Him . . . that I can spill my life on the ground an’ still have more left in me than men like you! . . . I want to smell out a claim an’ go after it . . . all alone . . . just my body with a hammer an’ chisel against the whole goddamned mountain! To eat what nobody’s ever cooked for me . . . to stand on a cliff, pants aroun’ my ankles . . . an’ shake the sperm in me over the cliff into the valley . . . an’ laugh to see a gull scoop down an’ swallow it before it hits the ground . . . Hah! The seeds for children I could’ve had . . . eaten by a seagull!

An aged and failed editorialist and languid spokesman of civilization, Lowery is impelled periodically to climb the mountain to berate Volcanic and to assail him with issues from “down below”—from the society and culture of man that Lowery has increasingly come to doubt. Though he is attracted by Volcanic’s tireless optimism and arrogant independence, he is also dumbfounded and deeply annoyed by it. Unable to live like Volcanic but no longer at home in civilization, Lowery is the most isolated and pathetic of the play’s characters. Lacking the robust constitution of Volcanic or the single-minded purpose of Poor Boy, Lowery is alone between the frontier and society, living primarily with a painful memory of the beautiful woman with whom he declined to make love, so ashamed was he of his own nakedness.

The argument of Volcanic and Lowery continues until they die facing each other in their tracks. When they are finally still, Poor Boy comes on to deliver the eulogy for the dead whom he is already beginning to forget. As Poor Boy wanders off playing his harmonica, he will have yet another half-remembered tale to ponder as he carries his leaky water buckets up the mountain.