Click on the link above to see a clip from Jim Defelice's talk. In this clip he summarizes some production history of Sharon Pollock's plays.

Before his recent retirement, Jim Defelice taught for 34 years at the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta in the MFA Directing, BFA Acting and BA programs. He has directed more than 100 plays in both professional and academic theatre, including The Komagata Maru Incident at the Citadel Theatre in 1977, starring Sharon Pollock, as well as Doc for Studio Theatre at the Timms Centre in 1999. In July of 2005 he was inducted into the Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame for his contributions and dedication to the U of A department of drama and Edmonton's theatre arts.

The following are transcribed excerpts taken from Jim's talk at "Sharon Pollock: Portraits of the Female Artist", the symposium held during Pollock's visit to the U of A, which is where all three of this issue's articles were presented.

My focus will be, in a sense, a search for a Pollock style. I will be arguing that in the stage directions of Pollock's plays there are not only clues as to how to direct them, more so than 99% of the playwrights that you read, but also thematic changes and almost an evolution of structural choices.

. . . We'll look at the stage directions first, and then theme and character. The stage directions are more important than most directions that you read in a text. Some you would actually cross out but you'd better not cross out any of Sharon Pollock's directions because as an actor and a director herself, they are sometimes the soul or what we call the hook of the play.

I feel odd reading your words as you're at the same table, but I'll do this twice. This is from an interview with Rita Much from Fair Play, published in 1990. "You see, for me, the actors, directors and designers don't serve the playwright. They serve the document, which is what I call a text. A playwright who demands that his or her vision of the work be served risks losing the possibility of unknown factors of the work surfacing. The first production of a play is a journey of discovery, an exploration, because the playwright often doesn't know, hopefully, all that is there. Of course, the playwright's insight into the work shouldn't be disregarded. The playwright has had a longer association with the document than anyone else and so she ought to be able to use the document to direct others to it as a resource so the others can find the answers to all the questions that arise in the rehearsal period. The work is larger than the person who created it. All the playwright is, ultimately, is the means to an end." That's from 1990.

. . . A motif that we find very much in The Komagata Maru Incident is that the real sources of power are distant and faceless. These are some of the directions in The Komagata Maru Incident. Again, fluidity and flow are very, very key. "It is important that the scenes flow together without blackouts and without regard to time and setting. The play takes place in a brothel, which is the major playing area surrounded as an arc or a runway used by the characters of T.S. and Hopkinson for most of their scenes." There are other directions: "the characters never leave the stage." And in my productions we select very carefully those times when the characters do leave. "When not involved in the action they sit on benches placed on the extreme stage right and stage left. T.S. observes the audience entering, the other characters are frozen on the stage. The grill-like frame with the woman behind it is concealed by a sheet." In the Rice Theatre in 1977 the balcony was actually connected to the lower house and the audience ringed around the balcony on three sides. Some of the audience, in a sense, were behind the action, watchers from above. The actor playing T.S. could penetrate the audience area. As for the role of the Sihk woman - I certainly at that time tried to find an actress who was Sihk or even East Indian to play the role. Very hard to do that; now one actually could. In the program these are some of Sharon's notes: "The Komagata Maru Incident is not an re-enactment for the stage of an historical event. It is rather the playwright's impression of that event seen from the matrix of the stage and using expressionistic techniques. I am concerned with the racism I see in this country. I believe we are still suffering from residual effects of the imperialistic policies of the British Empire, in which the fable of racial superiority gave moral and ethical justification for oppressive and violent acts against the non-white races of the world. Until we face what we have done in the past we can never change the future." Those are notes from the 1977 program of The Komagata Maru Incident.

. . . Key issues for me are the sense of both the theme of the play and also the use of the space. Fluidity, as I understand it, is the theatricality of using the total space, the multiple perspectives, the levels. And again, when we move to Blood Relations with its double time period and its role-playing, to paraphrase a line from Mr. Big in Whiskey Six Cadenza, "I mastered the art of seeing the multiple realities of the universe and more than that, I have embraced them. Though they may be almost conflicting but equally true. Now how far is it, fifteen feet, or the abyss or nothing between us?" Some of Sharon's words from 1989: "I also have a greater awareness of structure now or how the angle of observations, which is how I define structure, gives fresh insight into the old stories; they are the old situations that I recognize." In another interview she says, "I think that I can write a story as long as I can find a way within the structure of the story to acknowledge my angle of observation." There's not time to talk about the structure of Blood Relations except the dream thesis of the play, 1892, and then the reality of the Sunday afternoon and evening in Fall River in 1902. But again, the stage direction: "Production note: action must be free-flowing. There can be no division of the script into scenes by blackout, movement of furniture or sets. There's no necessity to get people off and on again, with the exception of the Actress and Miss Lizzie and Emma in the final scene."

. . . As you know, in the story, it's Harry who brings in the axe, and then the boys are in the shed with the pigeons, and then the pigeons are killed by Mr. Borden. As the play progresses, the audience is almost made complicit by the structure of the play. We're put in the situation where the actress role-playing suddenly takes on the flesh and blood and the motivation and we as the audience become complicit in the play. We would almost, in a sense, have done the same thing in the circumstances - that's actually terrifying.

. . . There is the journey, the multiple levels of time, space, and fragmentation of character in a work as the work moves, in a sense, from the political to the personal, but the seeds of both are in the periods. The clues, the information in the directions are so important in terms of finding the style for the director to direct the play. The key words are fluidity as well as the multiple perspectives.

. . . Many hours I could go, but I just wanted to give you a sense of finding the style, looking at some of the themes and some of the ideas in the plays.

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