The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

around your house." Thus, Standjofski
cunningly superimposes the Stations of the
Cross on the cycle's first segment, "Rabbit";
other segments consist of monologue, pantomime
or dance, often with text projected
on the set. In both plays, Standjofski's
careful craft and diligent workshopping
result in intellectually and emotionally layered
scripts that come daringly close to pretentiousness
but never teeter off the edge. If
Standjofski can keep up this balancing act,
his future should be extremely bright.
In four short scenes, Jeanne-Mance
Delisle's A Live Bird in its Jaws presents a
triangular relationship. The compulsive
writer Hélène, "a sensual, attractive
woman," has an unfaithful bisexual lover,
Xavier, who is the father of her absent
eight-year-old son. Xavier has a twin
brother, Adrien, who is also his long-time
partner in incest. Hélène has written a
weird expressionistic performance based on
Xavier's reminiscences about the mother he
seemingly adored and the domineering
father who died in a mysterious house fire.
Adrien arrives to take part in the performance,
but first he seduces Xavier and,
more roughly, Hélène as well. At last, the
performance begins: with the twins costumed
as fighting cocks and Hélène as a
gypsy mother, the play reaches a violent climax
as the arsonist's identity is revealed. At
the end, Hélène dons the gown of a "glass
princess" and proclaims: "I reclaim my
body and my soul, condemned to hope for
love! . .. Better to run through life with
dreams impaled and held aloft!"
In Delisle's original text, Un oiseau vivant
dans le gueule, the French language itself
suits both the ritualism and the passion of a
play that seesaws constantly between poetry
and profanity, two great obstacles to successful
translation. Yves Saint-Pierre's version,
polished by workshopping with
actors, conveys both in good idiomatic
English; but the play is flattened by the very
act of translation, the characters reduced to
empty stereotypes. A Live Bird never soars
above its thick layer of overdone Freudian
imagery (shafts, lances, snakes, lone trees,
chimneys, and so on rear their heads on
every page). It would take a truly brilliant
staging to send an audience home "wringing
wet and exhausted" as a note demands.
This English edition is more than competent,
but not sufficient to convey Delisle's
promise as a playwright, and is further
marred by typos—particularly at the
beginning of Scene Two when Xavier is
given a stage direction as one of his lines—
and by Guy Rodgers's brief but pretentious
introduction. Many other stage directions
from the French have disappeared altogether,
and the author's original preface is
also sorely missed.
Individual Native Voices
Lynda Shorten
Without Reserve: Stories from Urban Natives.
NeWest Press, pa. n.p.
Daniel David Moses
The White Line: Poems. Fifth House, pa. $10.95
Reviewed by Mava Jo Powell
An egalitarian concern for the rights of all
members of underprivileged minority
groups has been a predominating sociopolitical
line of thought in Canadian culture
during the last decade. In the case of First
Nations peoples, this corrective dialogue
acknowledges long standing neglect, prejudice,
and abuse. Yet, by its very nature,
sociopolitical attention is distanced because
it focuses on people as members of a group.
Therefore it remains silent about the lives
of many urban Natives who have neither
band nor Treaty status; above all, it renders
indistinct the Native as individual.
However, the literary text can transcend the
impersonality of political discussion. In the
two texts under review, the uniqueness of
poignant, individual voices is intimately