Rosen was born in
Flin Flon, Manitoba, in 1938, and attended high school in
Edmonton, Alberta. She identified as an artist early, and had difficulty deciding whether to study as a pianist or to go into creative writing. With the help of a scholarship to the
Banff School of Fine Arts, she decided to pursue writing and eventually enrolled at
McGill to study
English literature in 1955. At McGill, Rosen became increasingly involved in theatre, helping to found the McGill University Players. After transferring to
UBC, she graduated with a
BA degree in
English and Theatre in 1959. Rosen's first full-length play,
The Elephant and the Jewish Question, was a "well-made" domestic drama staged by the Vancouver Little Theatre for the 1968
Dominion Drama Festival. Subsequently, she avoided the conventions of the "well made" form; her travel and extensive reading about theatre in Japan, Hong Kong,
Thailand, and
India led her to feel "cramped and dissatisfied…in traditional drama forms of the West" (application to the Canada Council, 1970). Rosen's second full-length play,
Crabdance, was greeted by
critics as a brilliant, controversial work. It remains Rosen's best-known play. It has received six professional stagings,
dramatizations by
CBC Radio and
CBC TV (never aired), an ACCESS video of the 1976
Citadel Theatre production, and two editions by in Print publications and
Talonbooks. Rosen's short plays
The Crusader and
Triangle,
Preparing, and
Green Lawn Rest Home, reveal a growing frustration with the production restrictions of a realism-oriented Canadian theatre establishment. Presented at a University of British Columbia International Critics' Conference in 1976, these
polemical plays are rhythmic, graphic, and allegorical.
Preparing "takes a solitary character, Jeannie, on a lifelong journey from adolescent rebellion to dowagerhood."
Prologue takes aim at the "ratings-oriented" policies of the
CBC, and snipes at audiences who want theatre to be "predictable" or "nice". Instead, her works explore fantasy, brinksmanship, and madness through
choral and movement elements that de-stabilize notions of identity, fragment time, and expose power structures within
families and
communities. Rosen's most ambitious work,
Leela Means to Play (1976), is a sprawling
epic that has never been professionally produced despite several workshops. It foregrounds serious Canadian social issues featuring the
judiciary, the
penal system,
Indian Reserves, and
psychiatric facilities. The size of the
cast, the fluid multi-location setting, and the complex social commentary combined with raw emotional undercurrents of the play might have scared producers seeking Canadian hit shows. A
master's thesis suggests that the time for
Leela Means to Play will "come around" in a future where
civil rights issues of the 1960s and 1970s excite more detailed attention, rather than seeming dated. Rosen's most recent play,
Now You See It (1996), is unproduced and unpublished but received a workshop by Necessary Angel theatre (1996). A description of the script can be found on the Canadian Literary Encyclopedia. ==References==