Anton Wagner:"The Powers
of
Darkness, The Powers of Light: Evil, the Divine, Love and Reincarnation
in
Patricia Joudry's Dramas."
Born
in Spirit River, Alberta,
in 1921, Patricia Joudry emerged as one of the most important Canadian
dramatists for radio, television and stage in the 1940s and '50s, when
she was
produced in Canada,
the U.S. and
England.
Because of the lack of professional production opportunities in Canada,
Joudry moved to London in
1957, where she began a spiritual journey she would pursue until her
death in Powell River,
B.C. in 2000. Joudry believed that she
was transmitting plays directly from the Spirit World. She described
the
beginnings of this spiritual exploration in her 1977 autobiography Spirit
River to Angel's Roost: Religions I Have Loved and Left and in My
Life
as Patricia Joudry, completed a year before her death. In 1996,
Joudry
dramatized her novel The Continuing City as The Continuing City: A
Drama in Three Acts and Five Incarnations. This presentation
will draw on these and other unpublished writings in the Patricia
Joudry Papers,
University of Calgary Archives, to summarize Joudry's spiritual beliefs
about
evil, divinity, love and reincarnation and how these beliefs are
verbally and
physically dramatized on stage in The Continuing City and other
dramas
such as The Conjurer (1982) and O Listen (1983).