When James Hoffman set out to write his PhD dissertation, he went looking for a subject no one had claimed. "I looked around, and I realized, my gosh, no one's done any major work in the academic world on George Ryga," he told me. A retired theatre professor today, Hoffman would write the definitive biography of Ryga, The Ecstasy of Resistance. But first, he would have to meet the man himself. Studying at New York University, he would cross the continent to Summerland, unsure of how it might turn out. "I've interviewed a lot of people," he says, "and it's a mixed bag. You never know."
Fortunately for James, George was a gracious host. "He took me in his house and fed me and gave me meals," Hoffman recalls. Throughout the 1980s, Hoffman would travel back and forth to Summerland, sheets of questions in one hand, and a "trusty tape recorder" in the other. At one point, George even pulled out his guitar and played. "I already felt a warmth," Hoffman says. "He was generous, and even funny."
That warmth would outlast even George himself. After Ryga's passing in 1987, Hoffman kept on working to uncover his entire story. He interviewed George's wife, Norma, in a series of early-morning phone calls from Victoria. An early riser, Norma's schedule would require James to call at 5:30 a.m. "I wondered if I could do that," he laughs, "but it worked." Hoffman spoke with the Ryga children along with directors, actors, and everyone he could that knew Ryga. “They were happy to talk, and very appreciative that somebody was doing something,” he says. “Because, my gosh, this needs to be done. He was important.”
Aside from Ryga's family and colleagues, Hoffman is our most reliable guide to the man whose name the Ryga Festival carries. This past week, he offered me some of his time to speak about George.
He offered one story that says almost everything. While researching the book, he wrote letters to those who had taught Ryga, asking what he'd been like. One was esteemed playwright and instructor E.P. Conkle. He wrote back to Hoffman that the best student he'd ever had at the University of Iowa was Tennessee Williams, and the best student he'd had in Banff was George Ryga. “I’ve got a couple of letters like that,” Hoffman says, “from his instructors, saying he was extraordinary.”
For a young man from Deep Creek, Alberta, that’s a remarkable place to land. Ryga grew up with almost no formal schooling, in a Ukrainian farming community where money was scarce and life was hard. His father, Hoffman says, sank into what Ryga called “a black despair” when the farm failed, and his mother spoke no English. But something in George refused to stay put. “He had something in him that just drove him,” Hoffman told me, “quietly, but it drove him.” When a door opened, George didn’t just peer through it. “Rather than just kind of take a look and go away, he really opened the door and went in. And in a big way.”
The door that mattered most opened at Banff. Ryga won a scholarship there, and returned for a second summer that he later described as make-or-break. That summer he worked under Jerome Lawrence, an American playwright who pushed him "from seven o’clock in the morning to midnight,” to "write, write, write." But Lawrence gave him more than discipline. He gave him a challenge that would shape everything after.|
Lawrence had noticed that for all its power, Ryga's writing ran dark. The same black despair that had gripped his father had taken root in Ryga's work. As Hoffman tells it, Lawrence told George that the great writers throughout history had taken suffering and transformed it. “They took that suffering, that outrage, that hurt, and found nobility in it. They found strength in it.” George rose to the challenge. His first book, Hungry Hills, was based on his hard years on the farm, and Ryga sent Lawrence a copy. Inside, he’d written a dedication Hoffman still remembers:
Thank you for showing me the way to find nobility in suffering.
This gift, the ability to turn hardship into something profound, became Ryga's signature, and he had seen plenty of hardship firsthand. Perhaps most notably, he saw it in the plight of the Indigenous labourers that he worked the farm alongside. Hoffman recalls Ryga writing of one young man with a withered arm who asked, bitterly, why a Creator who made all people equal had made him unable to work or walk properly. That experience runs through George's work, most visibly in Indian, his first real hit. It would be revisited in the play that made him famous.
The Ecstasy of Rita Joe premiered in 1967, Canada's centennial year. It put an Indigenous woman at the centre of the national stage, something almost unheard of at the time. Hoffman describes the protagonist, Rita Joe, as a complex figure. She is hemmed in on every side, by the legal system, by the street, by family, and by a world that offers her no way through. “She’s dealing with some very complicated issues, and doesn’t resolve them at all,” he told me. But she is not silent. “She screams out. And protests.”
Her fate in the play is a brutal one, but Hoffman is quick to point out that the darkness isn't the whole of it. There are moments of what he calls "unforgettable beauty." Scenes where Rita Joe and her sister pick berries with their father, "laughing like the old days," and where she protects her sister from a storm. “It’s beautiful,” he says.
The play was a landmark. It was chosen to open the National Arts Centre in Ottawa two years later, was adapted into a ballet by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and travelled to the United States. “To portray First Nations people playing lead roles,” Hoffman says, “that alone is something.”
For anyone wanting to discover Ryga now though, Hoffman suggests Indian, the short, one-act play that made his name. “It leads you down the garden path,” he says, “and then hits you between the eyes when you’re not looking.”
For Ryga, Indian would be a gateway both to career success, and to his permanent place in the world. In the early 1960s, he and Norma would take a holiday to the Okanagan. Instantly falling for Summerland's orchards, beautiful weather and spot near the lake, they made an offer on the first available home they found. According to James, they made a lowball offer, expecting weeks of haggling. It was accepted on the spot. George reached into his pocket, pulled out the $1,200 cheque he’d just earned from Indian airing on CBC, and handed it over as the down payment. “It was a little paradise,” Hoffman says. From Summerland, George could both write and farm, and when neighbours needed help pruning, he was always there to lend a hand. “I felt that he had a really good balance there,” Hoffman says, “of work and life.”
I asked Hoffman what he hopes people carry with them when they come to the festival. His answer circled back to the question George spent his life asking. “Give a thought to what does it all mean,” he said. “George was doing that a lot.” He pointed me to a lesser-known play, Just an Ordinary Person, in which a poet reading his work onstage is confronted by an audience member. The heckler climbs up on stage and demands to know what any of it is for. What does it mean? Who does it help? Why is he doing it? The poem the poet reads is Ryga’s own. It’s George, staging his own deepest self-doubt in public, and refusing to look away from the question.
That was Ryga. A man who took the hardest parts of where he came from and, as his old teacher urged him, found nobility in them. Keeping that legacy alive has been James Hoffman’s work for decades, through letters, early morning phone calls, and warm, welcoming conversations. This September, he'll bring it full circle, speaking at the festival named for the man he spent so long getting to know. He’s looking forward, too, to seeing old friends and collaborators of Ryga’s, and members of the family he came to know so well.
We'll see you there.