These new stage and screen offerings play around with all the stylistic nuances REVIEWING BOOKS usually has more to do with words than with numbers, but a gathering of recently published Canadian dramas brings up arithmetic: how to divide 1,500 words among 24 plays? Granted, that number includes only four individually published plays, along with an anthology of five screenplays and a collection of 15 stage plays being published for the second time. Still, the diversity of published dramas newly available to readers is worth noting. Of the four stand-alone plays, the three from English Canada are grounded in contemporary realism, while the lone play from Quebec takes grand liberties with language and lives. Serpent in the Night Sky (Playwrights Canada, 103 pages, $10.95 paper), a first play by the Regina writer Dianne Warren, presents a motley assortment of on-the-edge characters. Teenagers Duff and joy are about to wed after a courtship lasting approximately a day and involving a $50 fee. He brings her home to his family: a mother who has gone on permanent walkabout, a sister who denies her advanced pregnancy, and a brother-in-law with matching streaks of cowardice and cruelty. The couple would like the so-called Preacher to marry them, but he has his eyes firmly set on heaven - he`s desperate to entrap the cosmic serpent that gobbles up the moon. Will joy be able to wean Duff from his family`s clutches? Warren serves up her characters without sympathy, through dialogue that is biting and to the point. The play`s high-wire tensions are contained in a claustrophobic and rough-edged world, with only Preacher`s obsession an odd reach beyond the forces of earthy realism. I Had a job I Liked. Once. (Fifth House, 90 pages, $10.95 paper) is also a first stage play by a Saskatchewan writer - Guy Vanderhaeghe, who is best known for his fiction. The play begins as a fairly traditional police interrogation: an elderly, by-the-book investigator named Finestad is under pressure to elicit a confess ion from a teenage boy, Les. The town prosecutor is out for blood because of a supposed attack on his teenage daughter earlier that night. Although the scenario and its players seem somewhat recognizable - worn-out cop with heart of gold wins over rebellious blue-jeaned boy - Vanderhaeghe depicts the two in an interesting dance of challenge and acceptance. Fleshing out their relationship is a series of flashbacks that shade in the events leading to the "crime." They reveal that this is not a straightforward case of indecent assault, and provide fodder for an unexpected portioning out of innocence and guilt. Vanderhaeghe pays close attention to power imbalances, to the unfair hand dealt the poor in rigidly stratified small towns. But one side of this story is left unexplored: the girl Tracey is included only in the flashbacks, her evidence never presented. Although we are given no reason to doubt Les`s version, the seeming objectivity of the flashbacks may gloss over a blind spot in a play that probes blind spots. Still, no single verdict is reached, and the exploration of how the intricate powerlines of a small town trip up Les and Finestad makes this a satisfying investigation into rights - and wrongs. Elliott Hayes`s Homeward Bound (Playwrights Canada, 114 pages, $10.95 paper) takes life - and death - a lot less seriously. First presented at the Stratford Festival, this play depicts a family that admits to running off the rails only under duress and in finely turned words. These are characters who briskly solve crossword puzzles while misunderstanding one another. A middle-class mother and dad have invited over their grown-up son and daughter, along with their significant others - both men. Their livingroom is the setting for sibling rivalry and parental mortality. A surprise pregnancy, an alcoholic`s first confession, a debate over the relative merits of suicide and murder as the solution for incurable illness ... a more than usually eventful evening for the Beacham family. As the after-dinner brandy gives way to champagne, the family fabric unravels. This is a play of short attention spans: no one has the ability to concentrate on a particular disaster for very long. Their pretences slip only briefly before screens of words are erected once again. Haynes handles the conventions of a comedy of manners with skill, including the brittle repartee that passes for communication ("If you are going to take your parents` deaths personally, you are going to be very unhappy"). The genre`s gameplaying, although here tinged a little more blackly than in most such plays, becomes frustrating because the characters remain trapped in their bad manners; they cannot overcome their inability to make sustained connections, even with matters of life and death. Do the middle classes, even the upper middle classes, deserve no more? The Queens (Coach House, 96 pages, $12.95 paper), by Normand Chaurette, translated by the highly accomplished Linda Gaboriau, was published on the heels of the play`s Englishlanguage premiere last fall at Toronto`s Canadian Stage Company. This is a family on an entirely different scale. The play gathers together five royal women from the houses of York and Lancaster in England. The year is 1483, and London is being smothered in snow. King Edward lies dying upstairs, while the future king, Richard III of Shakespearian fame, works behind the scenes to ensure that brother George will meet his unnatural death in the cellars and the boy princes will not be long for this world. But in Chaurette`s languagedriven play, it is the women who commandeer the stage for one day. Legends come to life and become uncontrollable, sometimes terrifying figures of passion. These women battle for power on the periphery, veering between denunciation and blatant flattery of the other queens. Each has an arsenal of injustices and a battery of words. The appalling interdependence of the five is brilliantly displayed in the "Elevation," a weekly ritual in which the queens preen and praise each other. But today, the world whirls too far for this game; the queens` universe is destroyed breath by breath. Chaurette collapses time in this heightened world of white-hot silences and spills of speech. His use of language, presented on the page with poetic breaks and minimal stage directions, is intoxicating, alternately creating and destroying conflicting geographies of desire and loss: Everything has disappeared All that remains of what the kings erected Is the dungeon in our tower Which appears like the mast Of an old ship Adrift in the middle of a circle There is no more land No more water no more horizon... Back to the here and now, with Best Canadian Screenplays (Quarry, 440 pages, $23.95 paper), edited by Douglas Bowie and Tom Shoebridge, a striking ensemble of Canadian films receiving their printed premiere. This first-ever Canadian-screenplay anthology is a valuable resource in a field where very few individual scripts, particularly by Canadian writers, are published. These five are all good reads, as well as significant markers in Canadian film. The anthology spans 20 years, from William Fruet`s Goin` Down the Road (1969) to Denys Arcand`s Jesus de Montreal (1989), and includes Mon Oncle Antoine, by Clement Perron; The Grey Fox, by John Hunter; and My American Cousin, by Sandy Wilson. All are original screenplays, rather than adaptations from another medium. The early choices are almost self-evident classics, but even the later screenplays are likely to spring to mind in a "top 10 Canadian films" run-off. The editors are to be commended for including more recent work, as well as translations of the two Quebecois films. All the screenplays are pre-production, enabling readers to contrast the writer`s vision with the completed film. They are also award winners, which goes some distance to justify the "best" of the title; this is a fine beginning in recording Canadian film. For The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review (University of Toronto, 768 pages, $27.50 paper), the editor Alan Filewod chose a selection from the dozens of dramas published in that journal since its first issue. The anthology begins with Michael Cook`s The Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance (1974) and concludes with Marie Brassard and Robert Lepage`s Polygraph (1991). Among the other playwrights included are such significant figures as George F. Walker, Betty Lambert, Banuta Rubess, and Rene-Daniel Dubois. The plays range widely in style and subject matter, from the stand-and deliver Depression documentation of Ten Lost Years to Sky Gilbert`s hilarious rewriting of family values in Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home. In his introduction, Filewod addresses the challenges of anthologizing play texts and Canadian Theatre Review`s ongoing attempts to stretch the boundaries of the published Canadian plays canon. As with Best Canadian Screenplays, the historic parameters of the project translate to some imbalances: only four of the 18 individuals on the contents page are women. There are also two collectives, including the group that created perhaps the single most important feminist play in English Canada, This is For You, Anna. It is delightful to have this wonderful play and others, out of print for too many years, once again available. This collection provides a good alternative reading of the past two decades in Canadian theatre, and is a timely addition to previous anthologies, which cover mainly plays from the 1970s. The CTR Anthology will prove a boon to anyone interested in the diversity of contemporary Canadian drama. Another new publication takes a different tack in recording the vitality of Canadian theatre. The work of 350 professional theatre companies is documented in Canada on Stage: 1986, 1988 (Poet Communications Centre, 609 pages, $40 cloth), edited by Harry Lane. This invaluable research tool records professional theatre productions across the country, with exhaustively detailed lists of plays and personnel: the index alone covers 100 pages. Not all the plays recorded here are Canadian, but adding up productions is yet another indicator of the variety of plays publishers have to draw from - and the subsequent balancing act required of reviewers.