As a playwright Reaney has tended to be a fine lyric poet. In certain respects the qualities of his verse enhance the plays. Genres, however, are not interchangeable and too often his early attempts at drama point up the defects of his strengths. The mode of theatre itself has sometimes seemed inhospitable to Reaney's genius. The public forum aspect of all stage production is not easily reconciled with the singular inwardness of his idiom. Certainly the conventional act and scene arrangement he adopts for The Killdeer or The Easter Egg serves him badly. This structure requires the shaping of materials over a sustained period, a long-range control of action, tone and climax. Reaney's, however, is a short term art of quick insights and volatile moods. The Killdeer breaks up into a collection of fragments, some of them brilliant. However, the effectiveness of one frequently weakens the impact of another and all suffer from the linear framework in which they are set. In a word, Reaney's problem as a dramatist has been to arrive at a form to suit his matter. In Colours in the Dark he finds it.

The play comprises some forty brief scenes, each one a self-contained minidrama. Each has its caption and, in a sense, its message. In most things Reaney is the antithesis of Brecht; what, however, he creates in this play is an epic theatre to the buried consciousness. The technique perfectly accommodates his quest for universal significance in a swirl of particulars. At the outset, he suggests we regard his drama not only as a play but as a play-box; that is, a structure which contains a miscellany of memory-objects. Having jettisoned linear plot, he is free to illuminate directly the rich chaos of darkest Canada: a national psyche shaped (and warped) by geology, history, weather, anonymous ancestors, King Billy, Queen Elizabeth, the Bible, the Devil, Little Orphan Annie and much besides. The range and variety of episodes make for instant entertainment. Reaney advertises a new play every two minutes, and he keeps his word…. (pp. 141-42)

Reaney's creation is sui generis, a luminous structure that invites but eludes classification. It is lyric in subjective intensity of mood; dramatic in the articulation of large conflicts; epic in its breadth of statement. Whatever the mode, the artist's transfiguring eye lights the scene and wrings a design from ignorant chaos.

"Everything is something." Indeed it is, and everything in Colours in the Dark is the common stuff of "uniquely Canadian" experience. A rich thing, and our own. (p. 144)