Patrick O’Neill Award (2012-2014)
Natalie Alvarez: nalvarez@brocku.ca
Honourable Mention 1:
Roberta Barker – barkerr@dal.ca
Kim Solga - k.solga@qmul.ac.uk
Honourable Mention 2:
Judith Rudakoff – rudakoff@yorku.ca
Natalie Alvarez for Latina/o: Canadian Theatre and Performance.
Playwrights Canada Press.
Honourable Mention: Roberta Barker and Kim Solga for New Canadian
Realisms: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Playwrights Canada Press.
Honourable Mention: Judith Rudakoff for TRANS(per)FORMING Nina
Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work. intellect.
The Patrick O’Neill Award “is given annually to the best edited collection published in either
English or French on a Canadian theatre and performance topic.” The award alternates each year
between essay anthologies and play anthologies with the committee tasked with reviewing the last two
years of published collections in the given category. This year’s category was edited essay
anthologies. The O’Neill Committee was comprised of Moira Day and Michelle MacArthur and chaired
by Robin Whittaker, who is regrettably not here tonight as he is at home in Fredericton writing his own
book and directing a new play. We thank Robin for his leadership and Kathleen Irwin for her additional
guidance through this process.
We reviewed several diverse, strong essay collections, leading us to earnestly and
enthusiastically employ the label “page-turner” on more than one occasion. It is a testament to the
high quality of submissions this year that we have chosen two honourable mentions in addition to the
winning collection. We’ll start with the honourable mentions, which are placed in no particular order.
Natalie Alvarez for Latina/o: Canadian Theatre and Performance. (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press,
2013).
We are pleased to award the 2013 Patrick O’Neill Award to Natalie Alvarez for Latina/o:
Canadian Theatre and Performance. Alvarez’s collection breaks new scholarly ground in the field, by
highlighting the often-overlooked Canadian perspective in hemispheric studies. Alvarez strives to
“initiate a cross-border dialogue between Canadian and US Latina/o theatre and performance studies
scholars in order to advance shared disciplinary discourses and cultural practices that imbricate our
seemingly discreet nation-states and to think more inclusively about the hemisphere” (1). Her
collection gets off to a strong start with an introduction, which seamlessly weaves together ideas from
multiple disciplines to lay the theoretical foundation for the essays. She thus provides readers with a
crucial, initial understanding of the complex socio-historical and political contexts in which Latina/o
theatre and performance in Canada is embedded. The essays themselves then expand these
beginnings into an impressive vista of literary, historical, social, political, and aesthetic analysis that
covers everything from canonical plays by Carmen Aguirre and Guillermo Verdecchia to lesser-known
Latina/o community-based work. In all aspects of the collection - from its organizational structure, to
the quality of essays collected, and the diversity of both contributors and subjects - Alvarez has done
an exceptional job at facilitating the dialogue she envisions. There is no doubt that the conversation
represented here and in its companion volume of plays will have a significant impact on Canadian
theatre and performance studies and hemispheric studies as well.
Our congratulations to the writers, editors, and publishers of all three of these outstanding volumes.
And a strong vote of appreciation as well to the other meritorious collections of essays published over
2012 to 2014 that time and space forbid us to mention. Thank you all for your superb contributions to
the field and for making the work of the O’Neill Committee both a joy and a challenge.
Honourable Mention:
Roberta Barker and Kim Solga for New Canadian Realisms: New Essays on Canadian Theatre.
(Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2012.)
Barker and Solga’s collection New Canadian Realisms: New Essays on Canadian Theatre,
whose companion volume was awarded the O’Neill prize last year for edited play collection, is our
second honourable mention. As they do with their play collection, here Barker and Solga push the
critical conversation about realisms forward, broadening the scope of plays and performances
considered to fall under the rubric and jogging the mind into new perceptions of an older genre. The
collection’s organizational structure provides a coherent framework for accessing the material, moving
from an examination of “the ways in which realist paradigms deriving from dominant European models
have shaped, and been reshaped in their turn” in the Canadian context (11), to a consideration of how
contemporary experimental theatres engage with realist European models (12), to a discussion of “the
political potential of realisms” (13), and finally to the impact of new conceptions of realisms beyond the
theatre (14). The essays themselves represent a range of performance practices, identities, and
perspectives; two of the essays, by Natalie Alvarez and Louis Patrick Leroux, shared the Richard Plant
Prize last year, reflecting the high quality of the collection overall.
Honourable Mention:
Judith Rudakoff for TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work. (Bristol /
Chicago: intellect, 2012).
The first honourable mention is Judith Rudakoff’s TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An
Unreasonable Body of Work. While many collections in Canadian theatre/performance are centred on
particular "issues”, Rudakoff’s collection asserts the importance of focusing scholarly attention on the
makers of those issues, and Nina Arsenault, a prolific “transgendered playwright-performer, columnist,
and sex worker” is certainly a worthy subject.
Rudakoff has solicited essays from an admirably wide range of perspectives: scholars from
various disciplines, porn producers and pimps, theatre artists, and Arsenault herself, whose agential
voice resonates throughout the collection. The result is, as Moira puts it, “brilliant, cerebral, and
unsettling,” with essays challenging “[our] perceptions and understanding of being, body and reality in
fresh new ways.” In addition to the essays—which themselves span from, in Rudakoff’s words,
“theoretical analyses to anecdotal chronicles to performance text” (7)—the collection includes the
script publication of Arsenault’s autobiographical solo show The Silicone Diaries and a series of
photographs documenting Arsenault at various points in her life and bodily transformations. She and
associate editor Paul Halferty have clearly achieved their goal of introducing Arsenault’s “body of work
to a multidisciplinary audience” (7) through this engaging and accessible collection that will appeal to
scholars and students from disciplines as diverse as Theatre and Performance Studies, Women and
Gender Studies, Sexuality and Queer Studies, Religion, and Philosophy.