In my opinion, [The Ecstasy of Rita Joe] establishes Ryga as the most exciting talent writing for the stage in Canada today….

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe has been more widely seen and heard than many new Canadian plays and … is closely related to his published work, especially his novels Hungry Hills (1963) and Ballad of a Stonepicker (1966)…. (p. 155)

If Ryga rejects romantic and physical love, he does not conclude that meaningful human relationships are impossible. On the contrary, he frequently shows a bond between individuals which he clearly believes to be more exalted than love in the usual sense. Ordinarily this is a relationship in a family (between brother and brother in "Indian", father and daughter in Rita Joe, boy and aunt in Hungry Hills). Occasionally, as in the father's grief over the loss of his horse in Hungry Hills and in the comic episode of Timothy and his ox in Ballad of a Stonepicker, the relationship may be between man and animal…. But in the world Ryga writes about there is little enough even of this second kind of love. It comes fleetingly, in moments of crisis, or in flashes of understanding, but is never indulged and often not even acknowledged….

If Ryga's characters are partly tormented by their need for love in a world that denies it or corrupts its expression, many of them are even more profoundly troubled by existential longings…. (p. 158)

The sense of spiritual homelessness is common in Ryga's work and many of his characters define themselves by their relationship to a country they have lost or one they never find.

In his early work, this country seems to represent the lost time of youth, innocence, and happiness that is replaced by the cares of maturity and responsibility. The crisis is often a moment of choice which is precipitated by outside factors but which is faced by the protagonist with full awareness…. (p. 159)

[In Ballad of a Stonepicker] the protagonist no longer recognizes the crucial moment of decision and is caught instead in a process which he does not understand. The impression of passive suffering rather than deliberate action is conveyed further by the structure of the novel itself. Reminiscent of the ballad form, it consists of a number of apparently random memories told by an anonymous narrator. The central character is essentially faceless, a symbol of the inarticulate victim…. (p. 160)

But if Ryga is suggesting that suffering is only partially explicable in terms of our own choices, and that many men are victims of a Fate they cannot control or comprehend, he does not seem to deny the possibility of meaning altogether…. Whether or not [the] twisted visions [of the narrator in Ballad of a Stonepicker] are the only visions possible is not made clear in the novel. Ryga himself seems temperamentally caught between the romanticism of hope and the romanticism of despair. But the intensity of his writing (in this novel at least) suggests that, although the stonepicker has lost his way, a way does nevertheless exist…. (pp. 160-61)

In structure, [The Ecstasy of Rita Joe] closely resembles Ballad of a Stonepicker or Arthur Miller's After the Fall, being a dramatization of memories and a search for identity…. (p. 161)

Ryga has that very rare gift for writing dialogue that has the sound of ordinary speech but the resonance of poetry. If he can master the technical and structural demands of the stage, we may yet have a Canadian play worthy to be mentioned in discussions of contemporary drama. (p. 162)