James Reaney, Colours in the Dark
I read this play late in my fourth-year undergrad experience.
I was taking a course in contemporary Canadian drama. (This was the same year that
Unidentified Human Remains and the True
Nature of Love was produced at the Kaasa Theatre and later at the Roxy; it
was also the same year that I first saw Goodnight,
Desdemona... produced — see above.) Although I didn't know it at the time, Colours in the Dark was the play I had
been waiting my whole undergrad career to read.
Reading contemporary Canadian plays was an eye-opening experience
for me at this point. Of course I had read Shakespeare in high school and in
first- and second-year university. And of course I had read modern plays in
high school English, too: Twelve Angry
Men, The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman. You know,
standard-issue drama that every "well-educated person" should have
read. But reading Romeo and Juliet and
Tennessee Williams is very different from reading the plays of Sharon Pollock
and David Fennario. Most importantly, they write the drama of Canada, of places
I have seen and lived in; and I could stage the plays in my mind (for that, I'm
grateful for several years of receiving comp tickets to the Citadel and the Kaasa
in my teens). Reading Blood Relations
and Balconville and Leaving Home and The Donnellys excited my literary imagination in ways that previous
drama units had not. (It probably didn't hurt that I was dating someone who
lived and breathed the theatre, too.)
At the same time, I was immersed in my early study of
Modernist poetry, which I would pursue further through my master's work. Colours in the Dark, for whatever reason,
pulled Canadian drama, Modernist poetry, and my sense of place together in a
dazzling way. I love this script: it's surreal and dreamy and very much of its
moment — and quite Canadian. It contains stage directions that are literally
impossible to enact. But I would certainly like to see a director try!
You're not likely going to read this play, but if you did, I
hope you would have as eye-opening an experience of the drama of place and time as I
did.
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