by SHERRILL GRACE
Department of English

Judging from the contemporary Canadian theatre scene, autobiographical plays are enjoying great popularity. From Guillermo Verdecchia to Michel Tremblay, from Linda Griffiths to Sharon Pollock, from Sally Clark (with her play about Artemisia Gentileschi) to Joy Coghill (with hers about Emily Carr), the challenge of writing or performing one's own or someone else's life story is fascinating because what an audience ultimately watches on stage both is and is not true to life. By its very nature the theatre transforms experience into art - and a highly collaborative art at that! What we see on stage is not true life but what the playwright selects and shapes and what the performers discover through the craft of acting. Nevertheless, when we recognize an autobiographical subject in a play, we immediately expect historical truth. We expect to find things out, to learn what really happened. But the better the theatre art, the more our expectations will be complicated, our curiosity provoked, and our desire for easy answers forestalled. Life and art are just not that simple. In Song of This Place, which is the best of several plays inspired by Emily Carr, Joy Coghill approaches her subject in a unique way. Yes, she portrays key events in Carr's life, but she also raises interesting questions about why one artist would want to write a play about the life of another artist and about how the art of theatre can capture the essence of a painter's life and recreate that life on stage.

Anyone familiar with Carr's story will realize that Coghill has read the biographies and autobiographies, that she has discussed Carr with experts, and that she has studied Carr's paintings. But this background work is the tip of the iceberg.

To write the play and then to perform the role of Frieda (which she did at the 1987 premiere), Coghill had to face certain aspects of herself and her own life story, and it was this honesty that enabled her to wrestle the play and the indomitable spirit of Emily Carr into a creative form. Although she is reticent about her autobiography, the play demonstrates that to create her "Millie" she had to let go of reservations and personal control in order to locate that private place within herself where she could discover Carr's significance for her. Song of This Place tells us less about Carr's forests and canvasses than it does about the autobiographical self-as-artist. To reach that autobiographical place is, in the words of Emily Carr, to

pull "into visibility what every soul has a right to keep private." In many ways, Song of This Place is Joy Coghill's self-portrait as Emily Carr. She has dared to ask if theatre can match painting and if her professional dedication and art (whether as actor or writer) can match Carr's. Her answer is yes, not because this play is better than that painting but because both arts demand a life of continuous artistic performance and a profound belief in one's art and one's self.