The 12 plays in this collection present Canada’s North as a place of unresolvable tensions. The landscape is certainly harsh, but no less brutal is the “complex, crushed geography” of those who venture into this “white asylum,” as Gwendolyn MacEwen describes it in “Terror and Erebus,” her remarkable verse play about Franklin’s failed expedition.

This collection spans three decades of Canadian playwriting and charts the emergence of impressive Northern theatrical voices. Besides MacEwen’s play, the 1970s are represented by Herschel Hardin’s “Esker Mike & His Wife Agiluk” and Henry Beissel’s “Inuk and the Sun,” which evoke images of the North and of Inuit life created by southern writers. In Beissel’s case, the southern perspective is further complicated by the use of Japanese Bunraku puppetry techniques to portray the Inuit spirit world.

The plays from the 1980s include “Changes,”which visitors to Vancouver’s Expo 86 may have seen. Originally performed by the Tunooniq Theatre from Pond Inlet, it is a richly visual evocation of Inuit life before traders and missionaries arrived. As one of the elders says: “They stay and change our lives. My blood gets cold because I fear for the changes.”

Wendy Lill’s searing 1986 monologue, “The Occupation of Heather Rose,” flips the perspective once more. Here a southern-trained nurse, “attracted to the North – like a firefly to light,” returns to her familiar surroundings in the south, filled with anger and frustration, her wings decidedly burned during her Northern posting.

Half of the plays in this collection were written in the 1990s and most of them were originally staged in the North. They deserve broad exposure, especially Sharon Shorty’s poignant “Trickster Visits the Old Folks Home” and Patti Flather and Leonard Linklater’s wrenching drama about memory and forgiveness, “Sixty Below.”

Eve D’Aeth’s introductions to five of the plays are lucid, jargon-free, and engaging, in contrast with Sherrill Grace’s general introduction that made me feel as though examination questions would surely follow the footnotes and reading list. Fortunately, they don’t. That aside, this is a culturally important collection of powerful, entertaining plays that reveal the emergence of a distinct, Northern theatrical esthetic.