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Short plays - possibly like short stories, their undervalued counterpart in fict ion - do not carry much weight in the theatrical main stream. For every Overlaid, there are dozens of shallow dabblings in situation, emotion or character. This is one reason why they seem to find their niche more in high school drama festivals than on the professional main stages.
The high school stage seems to be the locus intended for the scripts collec ted in Six Canadian Plays. In his introduction, Ken Gass hopes that the collected texts "w ill provide exciting vehicles for the imagination of young actors". John Lazarus is right w hen he says that his first play, "Babel Rap," "reads very much like a kid's first play". Its situ ation - two builders working at the tower's top - is cute and entertaining, much along the line of Ro bert Frost's biblical short play "Masque of Reason". But the comic situation, as is the case with many of these plays, has little resonance beyond the valley of its saying. David Carley 's "Hedges", a "play for teenagers" that won the 1985 Creative Peacemaking Award, was developed with the assistance of (among others) "the many peace activists in Peterborough". It flo ats on a sustained belief that good hedges (and nature) make good neighbours unless and until this natural order is disturbed by harmoniously - challenged people, such as the store owner who en courages folks to be unneighbourly and supplies them with the wherewithal to become downright u ncivil toward each other and the innocent foliage. While "Hedges" at least provides a didacti c metaphor, Aviva Ravel's "Moon People" is content to let its two characters, mother and dau ghter, sit on a park bench and engage in a guilttripping discussion of why the mother did give up the daughter at birth (the daughter has just tracked the...