The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga

First published: 1970

First produced: 1967, at the Queen Elizabeth Playhouse, Vancouver, British Columbia

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: An unnamed city

Principal Characters:

• Rita Joe, a young American Indian woman
• Jaimie Paul, a young American Indian man
• David Joe, Rita’s father, an American Indian chief
• The Magistrate, who presides at Rita’s trial
• The Singer, who provides musical accompaniment to the play
• Mr. Homer, who runs a social service for Native Americans
• Miss Donahue, Rita’s former teacher and a witness for the prosecution

The Play

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe begins as a trial. Rita Joe is the defendant, alone and without representation, against a policeman, who acts as witness against her, and the Magistrate, who will decide her fate. As the Magistrate’s opening lines demonstrate, he is determined to be stern but fair. Rita Joe’s first words, however, undermine the Magistrate’s eloquent exposition: She was picked up by undercover policemen who offered her money and then arrested her for prostitution. The Magistrate continues his paean to justice while Rita Joe professes her innocence and the Singer offers up a haunting, melodic verse.

The futile exchange between Rita and the Magistrate continues, setting a pattern for the rest of act 1. As the trial goes on, however, the past begins to interrupt and inform the present at various intervals. Even the Magistrate is haunted by memories: Rita Joe reminds him of a young, poorly dressed girl he saw once standing all alone by the side of the road in the harsh Cariboo country. He would like to extend to her the sympathy that this recollection arouses in him, but his sense of duty finally overwhelms his humanity, and he reverts to being officious. The Magistrate becomes increasingly exasperated as he questions Rita about whether she understands the charges against her, whether she can provide witnesses in her favor, and whether she is a carrier of venereal disease.

For her part, Rita seems neither capable of nor interested in defending herself. There is not much she understands or trusts about the system in which she finds herself caught. Thus, she welcomes those figures from her past who intrude upon the action, disrupting her dialogue with the Magistrate and distracting her from the chronic fatigue, hunger, and sickness from which she suffers. Jaimie Paul, Eileen Joe, the Old Woman, and David Joe are American Indians and appear to Rita alone; white people such as the Priest, Mr. Homer, the Teacher, the Policeman, the School Board Clerk, and various Witnesses (who double as murderers) appear both in Rita’s dreams and in the trial.

Like Rita, Jaimie Paul succumbs to the lure of the city. Upon his arrival there, he is exuberant and optimistic: He rents a room, finds a job, and delights in how different life is away from the reserve. His hopes fade quickly, however, and he loses his job, starts to drink, and takes to hanging around with other unemployed young American Indian men. Still, he will not return home; he is proud, impatient, and in disagreement with David Joe about how best to run the reserve. David Joe is troubled and sees his people as caught between the old ways and the new. He urges patience and a return to the land, but neither Rita nor Jaimie will listen. Still, Rita is torn; she loves and misses her father and is disturbed by news from the Old Woman and Eileen Joe that he has been ill. With her sister, Rita reminisces about berry picking during the summer; with her father, Rita recalls their favorite story, about how a man once came out of the bush with an extraordinary offer for him. These moments lighten the drama, alternating with the darker, heavier moments provided by representatives of the white man’s world.

The Priest has known Rita from the time she was a child; however, he offers only inadequate, clichéd advice about resisting the allure of the sinful city. Miss Donohue, her former teacher, also reveals herself to have been singularly inappropriate for her job on the reserve; she reappears during the trial as a witness against Rita. The School Board Clerk further attests Rita’s lack of scholarly ambition when he says that she never replied to a letter in which he recommended she continue her education through correspondence courses; Rita counters by claiming that she never received his letter. Between the testimony from these upstanding citizens and that of another witness (a former employer who seduced Rita and then paid her for her compliance), Rita’s fate is sealed. The Magistrate sentences her to thirty days in prison.

Act 2 opens with Rita behind bars. The Priest comes to visit her in jail, but instead of providing comfort, he leaves Rita angry and defiant and cursing his idea of God. The Singer offers a haunting refrain which will be repeated at intervals throughout the rest of the play:

Sleepless hours, heavy nightsDream your dreams so prettyGod was gonna have a laughAn’ gave me a job in the city!

Once Rita serves her term, she links up with her embittered friend, Jaimie. Hungry and impoverished, they eventually end up at Mr. Homer’s center for Native Americans. Jaimie proudly refuses the food and clothing he is offered, and Rita reluctantly follows suit. Frustrated, Jaimie taunts and provokes Mr. Homer to the point where the charitable veneer of this socially responsible man drops away: He unjustly lashes out at Rita, calling her a slut and a whore. Rita and Jaimie attack him wildly and are once more brought before the Magistrate, who sentences Jaimie to thirty days. David Joe arrives in the city to find his daughter and take her back to the reserve with him, but out of loyalty to Jaimie she refuses to go. Rita lands in prison again, but not before a final verbal confrontation with the Magistrate in which the clash between their two cultures is clearly delineated.

The final scene is brief and brutal. Once out of prison, Rita and Jaimie plan to go out on the town, but voices from their past rise to a frenzied crescendo, and the Murderers close in around them. Jaimie is beaten and thrown in front of an oncoming train; Rita is raped and dies of her injuries. The play ends with their funeral: The young American Indians are defiant and the Singer’s song is exultant, but the final tone is poignant. Eileen Joe recalls that “when Rita Joe first come to the city—she told me . . . The cement made her feet hurt.”

Dramatic Devices

The set for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is minimal, consisting mainly of a circular ramp, which wraps the playing area from front to back and around the sides, and a Magistrate’s chair and desk, which dominate stage right and are enclosed within the confines of the ramp. A cyclorama backstage creates a sense of compression of stage into audience, thus eliminating the usual dramatic convention of a fourth wall between artifice and reality. It also serves to confuse the issue of who is on trial. Members of the audience are forced to become jurists, if not defendants. This encircling of both the stage and the theater as a whole symbolizes the vicious cycle which George Ryga suggests relations between whites and American Indians have become. It also symbolizes the American Indian belief in the cyclicity of time. Time is compressed in this play: Past and future frequently interrupt the present. Dialogue is composed in such a way that it reinforces this ideal of cyclic patterns. Characters appear and reappear in the private world of Rita’s memories, dreams, and fears, as well as in the public realm of the trial. Their voices combine, fuguelike, to illuminate her past, condemn her present, and foreshadow her future. Repetition is a key element in the structure of the play; some of the Singer’s verses are repeated over and over, as is the sound of the train whistle.

Language and music are the main devices by which the play’s themes are realized. Ryga attributes very different words to the white man and the American Indian; the Priest, for example, preaches humility and passivity in language borrowed from the Bible, and Miss Donohue teaches concepts so entrenched in white culture that they hold no meaning for Native American children. In contrast, the American Indians express themselves ungrammatically but figuratively. In particular, David Joe speaks carefully and thoughtfully in language that springs directly from his own experience. The play’s central image of the dragonfly comes from him: He recalls how he once saw the insect break its shell in order to free its wings and fly toward the sun. Such is the slow, painful metamorphosis Ryga suggests American Indians must face in order to regain their rights and recover their heritage. In his vision, Rita Joe and Jaimie Paul become martyrs to the cause of American Indian rights—a theme reflected in the title of the play. “Ecstasy” suggests the exalted passion of Christ, an innocent who also faced trial and death at the hands of those who feared him. In the light of Rita’s eventual rape and death, “ecstasy” becomes a brutally ironic pun.

Finally, the use of music—of an onstage Singer—is an unusual dramatic device. Ryga directs that her songs are to seem “almost accidental”; throughout the play they provide oblique, ironic commentary on the action. Still, the Singer is introduced in Ryga’s stage directions as having only a limited understanding of the ethnic dilemma her songs accompany. Like many concerned whites, she is earnest but misguided. Her very presence is ironic.

Critical Context

At the time it was first produced, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was widely discussed, first because there was not much in the way of Canadian drama and second because there was little in any art form that dealt so frankly with American Indian issues. The play was immediately controversial, because of both its thematic content and its deeply accusatory tone. George Ryga confronted his largely white audience with the harsh reality of the lives of American Indians who were living only blocks from the theater in which the play was being performed. His general condemnation of the organizations dealing with American Indian people also caused a storm. However, if his play rankled the white population, it also jolted many American Indians to face the issues that concerned them.

Ryga was an eclectic and prolific writer. Besides plays, he published poetry, novels, and radio and television dramas on a variety of subjects, but it is on his plays that his reputation rests. Ryga’s works include Ballad of a Stone-Picker (1966), a novel about prairie dirt farmers in the 1940’s and 1950’s; Nothing but a Man (pr., pb. 1966), a play about Federico García Lorca; Captives of the Faceless Drummer (pr. 1971), a drama based on the October, 1970, terrorist crisis in the province of Quebec; Paracelsus and the Hero (pb. 1974), a play about the sixteenth century Swiss physician and philosopher; and In the Shadow of the Vulture (pb. 1985), a novel about Mexican immigrant workers.

Similar themes and techniques run throughout his work. In socially conscious plays such as Indian (pr. 1962) and The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Ryga portrays the lives of the poor and the dispossessed and strongly criticizes social service organizations that preach conformity and patronize those who dwell on the margins of society. He was an innovative dramatist, mixing realism and lyricism, manipulating time, and using music to complement and counterpoint his themes. Ryga was particularly interested in reviving the oral, tale-telling aspect of drama, and to that end he included ballads and composed music for many of his plays. He also experimented freely with the audience-performer relationship, even inviting spectators to participate in the action, as in Grass and Wild Strawberries (pr. 1969). The Ecstasy of Rita Joe has also been produced in French and as a ballet, and it is considered a classic because it marked the beginning of modern, indigenous Canadian drama.

Sources for Further Study

Hoffman, James. The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga. Toronto, Ont.: ECW, 1995.

Innes, Christopher. Politics and the Playwright: George Ryga. Toronto, Ont.: Simon and Pierre, 1985.

Moore, Mavor. Four Canadian Playwrights: Robertson Davies, Gratien Gelinas, James Reaney, George Ryga. Toronto, Ont.: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973.

Parker, Brian. Introduction to The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays. Toronto, Ont.: New Press, 1971.

Sim, Sheila E. “Tragedy and Ritual in The Great Hunger and The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.” Canadian Drama 1 (Spring, 1975): 27-32.