Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
In two very different versions of a story of rum-running along the British Columbia-Alberta border in the Crowsnest Pass in the early 1920s, Sharon Pollock and John Murrell replay history as tragedy. Murrell's libretto for the opera Filumena captures the passion and pathos of the exceptional true-life story of Filumena, who at the age of twenty-two was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Canada. In the context of an Italian community compromised by bigotry and ambition, Filumena is rehabilitated and written back into history as a woman who resists a transplanted patriarchal authority. Pollock's play Whiskey Six Cadenza dramatizes the story as the consequence of personal choices complicated by socio-political forces: the doomed heroine is the evitable casualty of misguided loyalty to a powerful patriarch. Both works also engage in an interrogation of the conflict between colonial power structures and individual resistance within an immigrant community and "dramatically emphasize the contradictions of how the personal can be implicated in the way we negotiate traditions, customs, and belief."
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:4 (Fall 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.