Mythologizing the Wilderness:

An Introduction To Linda Griffiths

After a long and difficult gestation involving, collectively and individually, Maria Campbell (Metis author and activist), Linda Griffiths (actor and writer), and Paul Thompson (theatre director and founder of the iconic Theatre Passe Muraille), The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation rises in 1989 like a phoenix from its combustion of creative egos and cultural sensitivities. Ultimately containing the play Jessica—written by both women, initially acted by Griffiths and directed by Thompson—a searing and sensitive exploration of its artistic process, and a play about the play, The Book of Jessica dramatizes Griffiths’s brave streak through the gauntlet of personal and political revelation. This journey—riveting and raw, intelligent and passionate, realistic and fantastic—informs her best work.

Linda Griffiths creates drama that articulates, whether with painful effort or blinding clarity and usually with excoriating humour, the existence of a wilderness in all of us and the desire to explore it, the dangers hidden within it, the necessity of knowing it without destroying it, of harnessing its power and understanding how to use it. In a note prefacing her play Chronic (2003), Griffiths says, “Only in nature, inner and outer, is there some balance. Only in the inner forest is there light.” Yet her work is neither therapeutic nor particularly consoling. It is disturbing, unnerving. It wakes you up. And keeps you awake with what she identifies in The Book of Jessica as “the theatre gods.” Often referred to as her fabulist instinct and contextualized by her own production company, Duchess Productions, as “a dance between the personal, the political, and the fantastic,” this non-naturalistic impulse (harnessed to real story) is her particular connection to the unknown, the unseen; it is her larger spiritual home. In The Book of Jessica, that wavering need—complicated by Catholic guilt and Celtic history—clashes with Metis Maria’s own mixed-race background, deconstructing and re-constructing both women through an urgent poetry that remains unique in Canadian drama.

In his introduction to Chronic—an “ecodrama” that joins the twentieth-century idea of “illness as metaphor” with twenty-first-century cyber technology to explore various “pathologies” of modern life—Jerry Wasserman declares accurately that Griffiths’s “central figure is almost always a woman engaged in a struggle for power.” As well, “Almost every play features some kind of alien invasion or visitation.” And Griffiths’s women, he goes on, either wrestle with or channel the power of that other dimension. The eponymous Jessica in the 1981 play confronts the fierce animal spirits of her people. Perpetual flower child, Margaret Trudeau (Maggie and Pierre 1979)—ferocious and funny—paces the cage of modern feminism, political imperatives, and counter-culture fantasies. Wallis Simpson in The Duchess (1998) cavorts with a chorus of aristocrats and dancing jewels. The pregnant she and her impregnating he in The Darling Family (1991) wind themselves tight as tops in their neurotic Never Never Land. The hilarious Game of Inches invokes baseball fantasies to spotlight the complications of real-life relationships. Poet Gwendolyn MacEwen meets with her dark invaders in Alien Creature (1999).

Allowing the other dimension always involves risk. The tourists in O.D. on Paradise (1982) watch their fragile self-images crack under the solar microscope of a Caribbean getaway. The Darling Family, ingeniously subtitled A Duet for Three, relentlessly examines the forces that come into play when their big event occurs. Indeed, the piece is an experiment in minimalism and anonymity appropriate for underlying tragedy as startling in its effect as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark. Petra in Chronic must confront her virus, animate and insistent; Gwendolyn MacEwen in Alien Creature must deal with the creative-destructive power of her poetry through the mask of magic. The comically deadbeat, youthfully inept filmmakers in Brother Andre’s Heart (1993), animated by their addiction to Star Trek: The Next Generation and characters from The Clan of the Cave Bear, flesh out their fantasy lives with a heart heist (based on an actual news story) of the holy relic from Montreal’s famous basilica, only to realize that genuine sainthood involves genuine work.

These are all versions of Griffiths’s “theatre gods,” that other dimension that can be identified with the wilderness inside major (often female) characters, as a spiritual quest, theatrically undertaken.

How do Griffiths’s theatre gods operate?

The Book of Jessica embraces a process that is relentlessly vulnerable, refusing to censor difficult emotions. Rather than being uncomfortably confessional, it encourages us all to explore the deep wells of our fears and desires, our shame. From the unpredictable “sibyls” of improvisation comes the play Jessica, filled and fraught with theatre gods from Maria’s Metis heritage and her own harrowing story. Coyote, Bear, Unicorn (representing the mythic and mongrel powers of white culture), Wolverine, and Crow—actors in evocative animal masks—guiding spirits and dangerous tricksters, battle through image transits and the music of transformation to change her life. Arousing all the senses, full of urban tragedy, spirit rivalries, and sharp comedy, Jessica makes its theatrical mark—one that, with stunning variety in form and subject—distinguishes all of Griffiths’s work.

How are Griffiths’s plays classic?

In her own words: her characters are huge and carry on a mythological struggle. She complains in The Book of Jessica that “we can’t even do the Greeks or Shakespeare anymore because we don’t believe in anything.” Myth-making is one response to our fundamental need for significance. In that sense, the figures in Griffiths’s drama strive for something larger than themselves, but they must look inward for it (“only in the inner forest is there light”). In this sense, they are contemporary and relevant, but because their stories stretch beyond ordinary life, they are also classic. Accomplished and popular, historical and mythic, dramatically innovative, Griffiths’s plays Maggie and Pierre and The Duchess exemplify the classic in her work.

Based on the unlikely May/September union of Canada’s dapper, game-changing Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair, wide-eyed flower child from Vancouver (the two rather longingly compared to Jack and Jackie as the Canadian version of Camelot), Maggie and Pierre, subtitled A Fantasy of Love, Politics and the Media, is brilliantly theatrical, cantering through the enigmatic and tempestuous marriage of the first Canadian couple, who are benignly but quizzically and sometimes angrily interrogated by the journalist Henry. Written by Griffiths with Thompson, played with superb theatricality, this one-woman extravaganza engaged all of Canada (including Maria Campbell) in its dynamic conversation.

Griffiths is a wide-eyed Margaret clutching her rose, the porcelain-perfect face (a variation on the Virgin Mary milkiness that so angers Maria in The Book of Jessica), ready to soar into ecstasy the moment she jumps off that cliff. Is the vitality she so rivetingly embodies sabotaged by a naively false notion of complete freedom? She is the idealistic poet of lifestyles eager to hitch her wagon to his visionary statesman but all too often mired in the mud of hypocritical political manoeuvrings. Griffiths’s Pierre is savvy and full of sass. Calculatingly, both emperor and clown, drugged on love, he rides the success train like a pro. But he also breaks.

Griffiths takes Trudeau-inspired political slogans of the day along with Margaret’s counter-culture enthusiasms and works them into the doll-house crucible of Maggie and Pierre. The torrent of current events—revolving around the Quebec situation and the larger Canadian identity, along with their transforming impact on these figures—is distilled into the fragmented voice of each character in a kind of overheard consciousness, his quick scattershot and her inner editor, eventually developed as the highly effective technique of “thoughtspeak” in Griffiths’s richly layered and exuberantly relevant take on the Victorian “woman question,” Age of Arousal (2007). Wit, humour, and lightning-quick transitions pace Maggie and Pierre like a fine racehorse. This kind of precision is progressively defined and refined in Griffiths’s drama until by Age of Arousal it has crescendoed into a profoundly satisfying rhythmic orchestration.

As Maggie and Pierre progresses, Pierre is overcome by the psychic struggle between his personal and political life. He must deal decisively with the October crisis and a bored, depressed Maggie about to fly the coop. Henry feels betrayed by a pm who has plunged a country with an inferiority complex into a worse inferiority complex. The big fight happens to a backdrop of Reason over Passion, acrimony equally distributed. Pierre urges Maggie to stay and fulfill their immortal destiny. She flees to her life of sex and drugs and rock and roll, a disco doll encaged in her own frantic narcissism. By the 1979 federal election, she admits to being “the woman who gave freedom a bad name.” Falling on his knees, confessing to Henry that, locked in his own gender, he doesn’t know how to respond to her, Pierre embodies the tragedy of the oppressor who can never be free.

Seared by his involvement with them, Henry has the last word. He’s “the guy who can’t stop watching” and has nothing to offer except “two small giant figures… like you hold in the palm of your hand.” Here is the large mythological struggle lit by an inner wilderness that characterizes Griffiths’s major work.

Comparing Griffiths as Margaret Trudeau with her portrayal in 1997 as Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, is to appreciate the range of her theatrical imagination. Many trace elements of Maggie and Pierre can be found in The Duchess. Both women leap into the rarefied atmosphere of powerful men at a time when power was considered decidedly unfeminine. Maggie and Pierre are divided along the fault lines of reason and passion. Wallis is told that her intelligence is unreliable because her reason is connected to passion.

Playing Simpson, Griffiths is satiny smooth, sleek, and sly, cavorting pantherlike with Noël Coward and the English nobility, romancing her besotted but feckless Prince Charming, Edward viii, into the fairy tale they both seem to need. But she is also the wild woman breaking out and letting go, a dominatrix snarling at his weakness, fingers ready to claw at the billowing, bejewelled elegance of her gilded cage. As director Layne Coleman suggests, she is the scream at the heart of the century, her bleeding ulcers erupting like the chaos of war through the veneer of the “civilized” world. This murderous Black Queen swinging her bloody axe tantalizes her audience: “I’m a witch, a Fascist. It was my fault, the whole century.” In an earlier version of this play, Wallis raves, “They want to murder me.” Who? The royal family, “The whole horse-faced, jug-eared lot of them.” Typically, Griffiths’s ebullient humour carries its cargo of human striving and failure, poignantly and passionately female.

The play flashes quickly back to how she got here from there. As several critics have noted, Wallis is transported—much like Jessica—to past events in her life by a chorus of spirits unique to her story: members of the British aristocracy and the jewels she wore (actors mincing like “runway models”). Glitteringly deceitful, this fabulist element of the play is variously sinister, consoling, devious, and hilarious, casting Wallis’s blunt American pedigree into fairy-tale context, adroitly mixing high and low cultures: “Once upon a time there was a poor southern girl, with hair as black as ebony, lips red as blood, skin as white as snow, and a face like a plank.” With that ever-vigilant theatre opportunist Noël Coward ironically stirring the pot, these elements combine to bubble up an alternately dynamic and deadly concoction of farce and tragedy in a myth of ancient Britain with roots stretching all the way back to legendary Albion.

Griffiths’s writing sizzles, as angry as it is funny. Triumphantly self-aware, Wallis wants to “wake them all up. From graves and palaces, wars and revolutions.” Jauntily the chorus chants doom. “Once upon a time there was a Prince… a prince of hearts, he dined on tarts…” Mother Goose fantasies of royal recklessness darken to graver predictions such as popular uprising and war. In a few deft strokes, Griffiths creates the tensions that stretch the royal family on its rickety rack of monarchial absolutism. Edward, heir to the throne, will be the peoples’ king, wanting, increasingly, to know the real England in Stonehenge and Druid circles and periwinkles in the wood. His royal parents, fiercely opposed to this failure of nerve consider him “terminally high-strung.” Queen Mary elaborates on “the constitutional advantages” for Edward of “an intact English Rose,” while they all discreetly slaver over Wallis’s reputed expertise in Fang Chung, the erotic arts of China.

Through the banter and the frolic and the kinky sex, Wallis and Edward ultimately see a new world in each other. She rouses and arouses him, shakes him out like Lady Macbeth with a whip in the bedchamber, riding him into modern monarchy, and enjoying enough royal privilege along the way to cause her to confess to Coward that she has become “Wallis in Wonderland.”

The Duchess is shot through with the seductions of style. Naked ambition wrapped in classic femme-fatale glamour, Wallis exudes jazzy glitter. As in Age of Arousal, where a “lightening of the (colour) palette,” “a sprinkling of sparkle,” or a shiny fabric can suggest “a whisper of modernity” about the Victorian proto-feminists of that aptly labelled erotic opera, Griffiths understands the theatrical currency of the visual. It is style that the royals finally recognize as Wallis’s popularizing force. By comparison they are seen as “plodders.” In the Fascist Germany that becomes the couple’s desperate refuge, even Hitler—working on an Impressionist painting that Wallis recognizes as a map of the world—acknowledges the power of “beauty, blood, and style.” When he discovers Wallis is wearing fake jewellery, he summarily dismisses them. Later in the Bahamas, bereft in their final refuge, Edward demands she make him an elegant home where they can “invite the world to dinner.”

When Edward tells Wallis he will abdicate to be with her, she sees only disaster, guilt, and blame. With him gone, the kingdom will disintegrate. Is her power empty, her ferocity rootless, an enchanting tale? Becoming the irate voice of the crowd at Edward’s impending abdication, furious at being denied their new king, the fabulous jewels turn against her. The Black Queen is also the woman who starts wars. At Edward’s abdication, cursed by the archbishop and cast out by Queen Mary, Wallis relegates royalty to the fairy-tale realm and prepares to enter the void of Nazi Germany. Hitler plans to conquer England but she knows that is impossible because “everyone in that country is a character in a tale already told.”

As Wallis’s physical pain increases, so does her fantasy life. At first beguilingly vacuous, it becomes malevolent. A brief respite against encroaching darkness, the Bahamian party spirals down to Edward’s irreversible cancer and the ultimate selling of her irresistible, treacherous jewels, the auctioning off of her royal English fairy tale. He dies, leaving her to understand that she is stuck in the murderous twentieth century and love has come too late.

Once again, Griffiths hitches the tough political business of the world—Hitler’s dreadful force—to a magical mystery tour that is driven by her theatre gods and rooted in a female wilderness. The playwright has characterized Wallis as her Hedda Gabler, both women trapped in a world too small for them, disastrously thwarted in their ambitious, narcissistic all-consuming drive to create themselves. What one might call the exaggerated expressionism of The Duchess can be seen as an appropriate depiction of a woman who has not fully incorporated the wilderness within. What Griffiths explores in both these plays is the combustible mix of male and female as public persona, of love and politics played out in the civic arena, the bedroom, the palace, and the Parliament.

Consistently, Griffiths dramatizes the powerful mythic pulse driving her people while celebrating the human spirit—both wild and weak, fearless and flawed—that animates the myth. In doing so, she elevates Canadian drama to an imaginative level also occupied by such playwrights as George Ryga, Sharon Pollock, Judith Thompson, and Daniel MacIvor. Playwrights who understand, in the current artistic climate of stereotyping and small vision, theatre’s particular potential to outstrip the one-dimensionality of docudrama, sitcoms, and television’s relentless reality shows. These playwrights use the unique resources of theatre to dramatize the psychology, history, and mythology embedded in the human stories it can most vividly tell. In her work for the theatre, Linda Griffiths examines, fearlessly, the individual detail of particular story while courageously and creatively imagining the larger picture.

—Patricia Keeney

Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist, arts critic, and professor of English and Creative Writing at York University.