Michael Cook is the Newfoundland playwright best known outside his own province and a major contributor to the rise of regional theater in Canada during the 1970s. His work is characterized by a theatricalist approach, strong political commitment, and dialogue both poetic and earthy. In all these respects, his work resembles that of George Ryga; their friendship is based, in part, on common causes. Cook's dialogue is based on Newfoundland speech; his selective exaggeration takes the dialect's strengths (cadence, inversion, directness, and vivid metaphor) and heightens them. An immigrant, he chose to settle in Newfoundland because of what the island offers him as a writer: he says of the Newfoundland fishermen that their "expression is essentially artistic, a satanic struggle to impose order upon experience rendered frequently chaotic by a blind and savage nature."

Born in London, England, to Anglo-Irish parents, Cook first became involved in theater after...