by Deborah Rankin
Speaking with Bruce Smith, author of Blessed Are They, I am impressed by his articulate understanding of the complex interaction between faith and life—a rare attribute today when faith is either officially denied as irrelevant, or appears pre-packaged as a comprehensive religio-political solution.
Smith describes himself as a “deist” rather than “religious.” Despite a secular upbringing, the young Smith had a great interest in religion, which led him to study the Bible with Korean missionaries, the Book of Mormon with the Mormons, and, at one point, to engage in a dialogue with the Jehovah's Witnesses. His mother was later to join the United Church in order to engage in “good works”. Today, he is married to a Catholic and raising his daughters as Catholics.
His play is set—quite literally—in the United Church (St. James United on Ste-Catherine.) I asked him why he chose the United Church to tell this particular story, rather than the Catholic Church or some other. Many little mainline Protestant churches struggle to replenish dwindling congregations, raise money, and maintain a visible presence, whereas so many of the newly faithful gravitate towards evangelical super-churches. Blessed Are They depicts a sparsely-attended Alcoholics Anonymous group in the basement of a small rural church, and explores the meaning of faith amongst a diverse group of characters. Here, we witness the tension that exists between the personal experience of privately held faith, and religious expression that is, necessarily, both public and communal.
At the heart of the group's interactions is a conflict between a minister whose faith is riddled with doubt and a new 'Born Again' member of the AA group and church. The play's conceit turns on this familiar theme, reflecting the larger institution's dilemma: if the new congregant doesn't show up, the church will die.
Bruce Smith is no stranger to the theme of faith in his work. He is probably best known for writing the CBC mini-series about Tommy Douglas during which "a lot came up" about the interface between faith and politics. He is currently working on a screenplay about the life and times of John A. MacDonald, that underscores the Church vs. State debate between Scottish Presbyterians and the High Anglicans and Catholics of that era.
"It’s amazing how the conversation has switched since the 1930s." Smith describes how different the context is between Canada and the U.S. The Religious Left that founded the old CCF is dead as a political force, while the social challenges that were so central to the concerns of people of faith in Depression-era Prairie Canada have been replaced by the thorny moral questions raised by the Religious Right south of the border.
He aims to bridge the sectarian and ideological divide. Blessed Are They is an opportunity for audience members, with or without any particular faith heritage or belief system, to "eavesdrop" on a dialogue within a particular denominational community in the hopes of creating a "mutual conversation."
I am intrigued. Why open up this hot topic for possibly more divisive debate? "Because it touches upon the universal theme of the role that faith plays in one's life," he says. “Each of the characters is dealing with that question, approaching it from a different standpoint. Some have profound faith, others have none, some are ambivalent.”
The play avoids positive or negative value judgments about the status of the characters’ religious convictions, or lack thereof. "Some people see 'faith in action' as a powerful force for good in the world, while others see it as prone to misuse because it is so nebulous. All the characters are feeling that faith isn't in its proper place in their world and are looking for change."
He wasn't exactly "in love" with all of his characters when he began the script but, with time, he felt the need to "love all the characters" by embracing their different points of view. He acknowledges the difficulty in loving all people, the core value of the Christian creed.
Blessed Are They invites people to step out of their own sectarian experience and participate in an exploration of faith. Bruce’s goal is to create a link between "going to the theatre" and "going to church." Is he worried about possible criticisms after the fact, or prior objections to holding a theatre event in a church? "No, because it’s genuine," he says, referring to his own creative conviction. He relishes feedback.
It’s a concept I like to call “theatre as church for the unchurched,” and I find it fresh and transformative. But, don't take my word for it. I’m not an advocate of blind faith. See the show for yourself. Then decide. To believe, or not to believe.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Why Theatre?
By Guy Sprung
Global warming of the soul and spiritual globalization have unleashed societal tropical storms which are eroding our cultural dykes with a flood of individuation. Our artistic landscapes are inundated, the collective social fabric reduced to flotsam and the low rent artistic housing of theatre is being devastated.
Tongue-in-cheek weather metaphors aside, Theatre in both Canada and Québec has hit the proverbial brick wall. (See also Matt Radz’s lovely rant on the ‘state-of-the-art—not’ of theatre today, below). Serious existential soul-searching is going on in theatres across the country: Why theatre? What theatre? Who for?
The flagship Shaw and Stratford Festivals are both being forced to retrench future seasons and expenditures. Large regional reps like Vancouver Playhouse and Canadian Stage are looking for new Artistic Directors amid rumours of identity crises and serious financial troubles. Here in town, judging from the bare-as-bones season programmed by new Artistic Director Roy Surette, even our Anglo cultural icon, Centaur Theatre, has hit tough financial times.
Whereas 30 years ago theatre in Québec and Canada was a necessary, energetic, influential part of the national dialogue—the most popular and arguably the most prestigious of Canadian art forms—today we have to face the reality that it has become increasingly marginal and irrelevant. The Montreal Gazette does not even bother with a theatre critic any more. Poor, overburdened Pat Donnelly, the “Cultural Critic,” has to cover the entire Arts scene in Montréal squished in between the pizza recipes and wire-service downloads.
Attendance is down, ticket prices are ridiculous. At Shaw and Stratford, tickets are $100 a pop for regular performances where the audience is 99% white and average over 60 years of age. If it continues like this, within the next decade all large theatres across the country will have to strip the fixed seating out of the auditorium to make way for wholesale wheelchair access.
Artistic fraud is rampant as far as I am concerned. Theatre professionals are so good at designing sets and seducing the public with mellifluous soundscapes and visual eye-candy. Meaning, words, craft, writers’ intentions, ideas, politics are irrelevant.
Simple case in point: Iwanow, by Anton Chekhov, performed by the Volksbühne theatre company of Berlin, at the Monument-National as part of this year’s FTA. Pat Donnelly was caught genuflecting unthinkingly to this mediocre Euro-Trash. “Buy your ticket now” she wrote in her Blog. “This is an impressive production featuring a dozen German actors with serious skills… It is Chekhov deeply understood, modernized, the wit sharpened, the observations distilled.”
What on earth was Pat thinking? (When is the last time she bothered to put a local show in the Gazette’s ‘Best Bet’ column?) I went to the Volksbühne’s ‘meet the artists’ public encounter. The lead actors proudly declaimed that in their work on Iwanow, “psychology had been banished from the rehearsal hall.” Exactly! So was Chekhov. This is a company and a production that didn’t even bother to spend two fucking seconds trying to understand what Chekhov had written. The actors dressed in clown-esque costumes popped in and out of a wall of fog on the stage like the wooden figures in a mechanical medieval glockenspiel. Cute, sure, but bullshit, unthinking, meretricious, empty pomposity. OK so it is easy to dump on the Germans from out of town. But the recent production of Quixote here by one of our new local Indie companies was equally pretentious and Denis Marleau’s NAC-funded recent adaptation of Chekhov’s Le Moine noir was vacuous and deadly. Or the production of Anthony and Cleopatra at the TNM or… etc. No wonder theatre has become irrelevant. We are getting away with murder to our craft.
Institutions such as The Canada Council Theatre Section and the National Theatre School once had a tradition of being driven by artists. No more. The bureaucrats have taken over. Theatres that were founded by artists are controlled by Boards of Directors composed of failed management consultants and tight-fisted entrepreneurs posing as corporate philanthropists. It is the sacrifices, the poor pay and demanding working conditions of the working artists that have built every theatre in this country. Why can’t Canadian Actor’s Equity—which represents the Actors, Directors and Stage Managers of English Theatre—demand representation on all selection committees choosing new Artistic Directors? Union des artistes here in Québec should do the same for the French artists. Both should lobby the Canada Council and all provincial Arts Councils across the country to require of all theatres receiving financial support from us tax-payers, that they have artistic representation on Boards and selections committees, as a fundamental cultural governance policy. Instead, our cultural institutions have, in effect, been privatized so that the lawyers and business people on the Boards of Directors who donate a fraction of the time and finances that artists and the tax-payers do, unilaterally determine the fate of our theatres. Just as the privatization of the public water-supply system in Walkerton Ontario led in 2000 to the deadly poisoning of the public, so too has the quasi-privatization of the cultural “industry” in Canada led to the deadly poisoning of theatre art.
The grant-giving bureaucracies at all levels of government are loaded down with gutless, unimaginative lifers whose first priority is saving their own jobs. The status quo is never questioned. There are at least 100 smaller, newer theatre companies vying to get long-term funding from the Canada Council. This past jury (March 2008) was able to add only four new companies to the pantheon of those companies lucky enough to get operational funding. (Conflict of interest alert: Infinitheatre was one of the hundred companies vying for this operational financing.)
Was the Canada Council founded to maintain the status quo, or was it founded to promote the creation of new artistic ventures? Serious new policy initiatives have got to be implemented to make sure the next generation—the younger generation of theatre builders—gets their hands on venues and financing so they have the opportunity to create theatre, to exercise their creativity. They will be the ones developing the new writers, exploring new subject matters and most importantly, building new audiences.
Take a look at the demographics of Montréal. Over 30% of the citizens of the Ville de Montréal are visible minorities! (In Toronto, it is over 50%!) Linguistically, over one third of Montréal citizens are Allophones! Not the demographics of today’s Montréal theatre audience. Any wonder theatre is irrelevant? Theatre is a live communication between stage and audience. We have to put subject matter and plays and artists on the stage that represent and reflect the world we live in. We better start doing it soon.
Global warming of the soul and spiritual globalization have unleashed societal tropical storms which are eroding our cultural dykes with a flood of individuation. Our artistic landscapes are inundated, the collective social fabric reduced to flotsam and the low rent artistic housing of theatre is being devastated.
Tongue-in-cheek weather metaphors aside, Theatre in both Canada and Québec has hit the proverbial brick wall. (See also Matt Radz’s lovely rant on the ‘state-of-the-art—not’ of theatre today, below). Serious existential soul-searching is going on in theatres across the country: Why theatre? What theatre? Who for?
The flagship Shaw and Stratford Festivals are both being forced to retrench future seasons and expenditures. Large regional reps like Vancouver Playhouse and Canadian Stage are looking for new Artistic Directors amid rumours of identity crises and serious financial troubles. Here in town, judging from the bare-as-bones season programmed by new Artistic Director Roy Surette, even our Anglo cultural icon, Centaur Theatre, has hit tough financial times.
Whereas 30 years ago theatre in Québec and Canada was a necessary, energetic, influential part of the national dialogue—the most popular and arguably the most prestigious of Canadian art forms—today we have to face the reality that it has become increasingly marginal and irrelevant. The Montreal Gazette does not even bother with a theatre critic any more. Poor, overburdened Pat Donnelly, the “Cultural Critic,” has to cover the entire Arts scene in Montréal squished in between the pizza recipes and wire-service downloads.
Attendance is down, ticket prices are ridiculous. At Shaw and Stratford, tickets are $100 a pop for regular performances where the audience is 99% white and average over 60 years of age. If it continues like this, within the next decade all large theatres across the country will have to strip the fixed seating out of the auditorium to make way for wholesale wheelchair access.
Artistic fraud is rampant as far as I am concerned. Theatre professionals are so good at designing sets and seducing the public with mellifluous soundscapes and visual eye-candy. Meaning, words, craft, writers’ intentions, ideas, politics are irrelevant.
Simple case in point: Iwanow, by Anton Chekhov, performed by the Volksbühne theatre company of Berlin, at the Monument-National as part of this year’s FTA. Pat Donnelly was caught genuflecting unthinkingly to this mediocre Euro-Trash. “Buy your ticket now” she wrote in her Blog. “This is an impressive production featuring a dozen German actors with serious skills… It is Chekhov deeply understood, modernized, the wit sharpened, the observations distilled.”
What on earth was Pat thinking? (When is the last time she bothered to put a local show in the Gazette’s ‘Best Bet’ column?) I went to the Volksbühne’s ‘meet the artists’ public encounter. The lead actors proudly declaimed that in their work on Iwanow, “psychology had been banished from the rehearsal hall.” Exactly! So was Chekhov. This is a company and a production that didn’t even bother to spend two fucking seconds trying to understand what Chekhov had written. The actors dressed in clown-esque costumes popped in and out of a wall of fog on the stage like the wooden figures in a mechanical medieval glockenspiel. Cute, sure, but bullshit, unthinking, meretricious, empty pomposity. OK so it is easy to dump on the Germans from out of town. But the recent production of Quixote here by one of our new local Indie companies was equally pretentious and Denis Marleau’s NAC-funded recent adaptation of Chekhov’s Le Moine noir was vacuous and deadly. Or the production of Anthony and Cleopatra at the TNM or… etc. No wonder theatre has become irrelevant. We are getting away with murder to our craft.
Institutions such as The Canada Council Theatre Section and the National Theatre School once had a tradition of being driven by artists. No more. The bureaucrats have taken over. Theatres that were founded by artists are controlled by Boards of Directors composed of failed management consultants and tight-fisted entrepreneurs posing as corporate philanthropists. It is the sacrifices, the poor pay and demanding working conditions of the working artists that have built every theatre in this country. Why can’t Canadian Actor’s Equity—which represents the Actors, Directors and Stage Managers of English Theatre—demand representation on all selection committees choosing new Artistic Directors? Union des artistes here in Québec should do the same for the French artists. Both should lobby the Canada Council and all provincial Arts Councils across the country to require of all theatres receiving financial support from us tax-payers, that they have artistic representation on Boards and selections committees, as a fundamental cultural governance policy. Instead, our cultural institutions have, in effect, been privatized so that the lawyers and business people on the Boards of Directors who donate a fraction of the time and finances that artists and the tax-payers do, unilaterally determine the fate of our theatres. Just as the privatization of the public water-supply system in Walkerton Ontario led in 2000 to the deadly poisoning of the public, so too has the quasi-privatization of the cultural “industry” in Canada led to the deadly poisoning of theatre art.
The grant-giving bureaucracies at all levels of government are loaded down with gutless, unimaginative lifers whose first priority is saving their own jobs. The status quo is never questioned. There are at least 100 smaller, newer theatre companies vying to get long-term funding from the Canada Council. This past jury (March 2008) was able to add only four new companies to the pantheon of those companies lucky enough to get operational funding. (Conflict of interest alert: Infinitheatre was one of the hundred companies vying for this operational financing.)
Was the Canada Council founded to maintain the status quo, or was it founded to promote the creation of new artistic ventures? Serious new policy initiatives have got to be implemented to make sure the next generation—the younger generation of theatre builders—gets their hands on venues and financing so they have the opportunity to create theatre, to exercise their creativity. They will be the ones developing the new writers, exploring new subject matters and most importantly, building new audiences.
Take a look at the demographics of Montréal. Over 30% of the citizens of the Ville de Montréal are visible minorities! (In Toronto, it is over 50%!) Linguistically, over one third of Montréal citizens are Allophones! Not the demographics of today’s Montréal theatre audience. Any wonder theatre is irrelevant? Theatre is a live communication between stage and audience. We have to put subject matter and plays and artists on the stage that represent and reflect the world we live in. We better start doing it soon.
But what did you really think?
by Matt Radz
Theatre? Theatre? Let's see... theatre. Ah yes, of course I remember now. Half a dozen years spent on what felt like a death-watch for the mainstream, with the only diversion being shows that might as well have been billed "Firetrap Theatre Presents a Folding Chairs Production of Unsufferable Pretentions, Part VI," is not something easily forgotten.
A Transforming Experience, truly. Already a devout sceptic on assuming the role of "The Gazette Theatre Critic" at the turn of the century, I emerged from the six-season idyll in the aisle seat even more pious, an unrepentant non-believer in theatre's right to exist just because seeking applause on a nightly basis is such a noble calling.
Not that I ever doubted Theatre's magic, when it's right. No other form of public entertainment comes even close in beguiling charm or visceral impact. But such magic happens almost never. In my case, less than a dozen times in a lifetime of playgoing that began at age seven.
For this I blame stage practitioners and the hermetic world they have erected around themselves, the defensive walls they have put up to keep out us ordinary churls. As if going to a play required some special skill or secret knowledge.
One of the most striking aspects of the local anglo scene is that the audience is so small its members are on a first-name basis. The theatre I saw is under occupation—by academics and at least three levels of culture bureaucrats, a cozy little world of insiders, that includes the coterie of part-time critics typecast in the role of Happy Cheerleaders. The funding has become an ungodly mix of government and corporate largesse.
F
or all the impact that the art of Aeschylus, Chekhov, Ibsen and Tremblay has in this part of the microchip world... let me put it this way: During half a dozen seasons of professional playgoing as The Gazette's readers' proxy, there were precious few evenings, in either language, that would make me care a whit for the "struggle," the "journey," the "sacrifice," that our theatricians regularly claim for themselves in the program notes.
Go talk dedication with a Maple Leaf Chicken Plucker. Now that's a struggle. The wages are probably comparable, but no one claps (or jeers) after you've lopped off head number 1,000 that week. (A real head, not a stage prop.)
Art Armstrong, a Montréal poet, a much younger and angrier man than I, graciously shared some of the aesthetic pain. Too often, over post-performance cocktails, he'd ask the same penetrating question—WHY?
"Why?" as in "Why do they bother?" for the most part. But also "Why do we need an amateurish stab at another stale piece of Broadway musical crap? " Or "Why does a director bowlderize Shakespeare or Ibsen with a gimmicky reading so shallow, it shocks only with the clumsiness of its overreaching stagecraft?" What's the motivation here? To get attention? To nail down The Next Big Job?
And then there were the truly vile nights. Witnessing eccentric efforts that pushed us to wonder whatever happened to theatre as "the vehicle for the ascent of man"? Those tedious hours when the Shavian ideal was scaled down to look like a rusty tricycle with a bunch of petulant egos squabbling over who gets to ride it first.
Not to say theatre is child's play and doesn't take itself seriously. Au contraire. With How We Put It On workshops, meet-the-cast sessions, director's gyms, to say nothing of the endless drone of college lectures, there is no shortage of hot air off stage. Theatre biz is so busy being important, it too often forgets its work is Play. (Which is not to be confused with Stupid and/or Naked.)
Mainstream outfits, the Centaurs, the Bronfman/Segals, the Jean-Duceppes, the Soulpeppers now have Mammon do their programming, with results so predictably bland you might think that Mediocrity, not Greed, is the most powerful force at work in the Universe. (In this, theatre is no exception. Everywhere we look, mediocrity makes out like a bandit.)
If theatre people wonder why their toil goes so universally unnoticed, it's because they keep talking only to each other in a jargon increasingly arcane and stylized.
"What's any of this have to do with us?" was another of Armstrong's after-show FAQs.
One more yardstick: For this we missed Jeopardy? Coronation Street? Was the stage experience sufficiently satisfying to abandon the high-definition home hearth? Too many times, the answer was "Oh, my god," or just a shrug.
So yeah, of course I still remember theatre. Stanislavsky said that he hated "the theatre" in theatre. It wasn't long into the first season that I knew exactly what he meant. So no, I haven't had the urge to see theatre, lately. I've seen enough. Like everybody else I'm staying away until it gets more interesting.
"Only people who go to theatre, go to theatre, but everybody goes to the movies," is how Daniel MacIvor put it in explaining his move into filmmaking. MacIvor is one of the dozen and more outstanding Canadian playwrights whose work has been confined to the bookshelf by the colonial mindset of a cultural establishment that favours classics and mainstream American or British hits.
Canada already has a magnificent National Theatre, but it's gathering dust on the bookshelf. One of the great revelations, and pleasures, of the Gazette gig, was discovering and reading the scandalously obscure work of the likes of MacIvor, George F. Walker, Anne Chislett, Kent Stetson, Sharon Pollock, Vittorio Rossi, John Mighton, Jason Sherman, Morris Panych, Claudia Dey etc. ... etc. and revisiting neglected giants like Voeden, Ryga, Reaney, French, Freeman and Fennario.
With tenured mediocrity in the driver's seat, our playwrights have been thrust into the same tragic melodrama—call it Lack of Opportunity—as our most talented stage performers, directors and technicians. While we subsidize the writing of plays in this country, we do not yet support the showing of them. Anyone embarking on a career in the theatre soon learns the true meaning of "sporadic."
Forget past glories. Theatre must re-invent itself on a nightly basis, or perish. In fact, "theatre was never what it used to be," as noted by one of the geezer thesps in Slings and Arrows, Showcase Network's terrific spoof of Stratford.
Dramatic art has been on the brink of extinction for at least 3,000 years, so it's bound to hold on to beat the system for just one more performance, grants or no grants. The intangible personal rewards and, even more important, theatre's eternal potential, will see to that.
The greatest theatrical experience in your life is the one yet to happen. Who knows? It might be tonight, despite the prohibitive odds stacked against it.
Theatre? Theatre? Let's see... theatre. Ah yes, of course I remember now. Half a dozen years spent on what felt like a death-watch for the mainstream, with the only diversion being shows that might as well have been billed "Firetrap Theatre Presents a Folding Chairs Production of Unsufferable Pretentions, Part VI," is not something easily forgotten.
A Transforming Experience, truly. Already a devout sceptic on assuming the role of "The Gazette Theatre Critic" at the turn of the century, I emerged from the six-season idyll in the aisle seat even more pious, an unrepentant non-believer in theatre's right to exist just because seeking applause on a nightly basis is such a noble calling.
Not that I ever doubted Theatre's magic, when it's right. No other form of public entertainment comes even close in beguiling charm or visceral impact. But such magic happens almost never. In my case, less than a dozen times in a lifetime of playgoing that began at age seven.
For this I blame stage practitioners and the hermetic world they have erected around themselves, the defensive walls they have put up to keep out us ordinary churls. As if going to a play required some special skill or secret knowledge.
One of the most striking aspects of the local anglo scene is that the audience is so small its members are on a first-name basis. The theatre I saw is under occupation—by academics and at least three levels of culture bureaucrats, a cozy little world of insiders, that includes the coterie of part-time critics typecast in the role of Happy Cheerleaders. The funding has become an ungodly mix of government and corporate largesse.
F
or all the impact that the art of Aeschylus, Chekhov, Ibsen and Tremblay has in this part of the microchip world... let me put it this way: During half a dozen seasons of professional playgoing as The Gazette's readers' proxy, there were precious few evenings, in either language, that would make me care a whit for the "struggle," the "journey," the "sacrifice," that our theatricians regularly claim for themselves in the program notes.
Go talk dedication with a Maple Leaf Chicken Plucker. Now that's a struggle. The wages are probably comparable, but no one claps (or jeers) after you've lopped off head number 1,000 that week. (A real head, not a stage prop.)
Art Armstrong, a Montréal poet, a much younger and angrier man than I, graciously shared some of the aesthetic pain. Too often, over post-performance cocktails, he'd ask the same penetrating question—WHY?
"Why?" as in "Why do they bother?" for the most part. But also "Why do we need an amateurish stab at another stale piece of Broadway musical crap? " Or "Why does a director bowlderize Shakespeare or Ibsen with a gimmicky reading so shallow, it shocks only with the clumsiness of its overreaching stagecraft?" What's the motivation here? To get attention? To nail down The Next Big Job?
And then there were the truly vile nights. Witnessing eccentric efforts that pushed us to wonder whatever happened to theatre as "the vehicle for the ascent of man"? Those tedious hours when the Shavian ideal was scaled down to look like a rusty tricycle with a bunch of petulant egos squabbling over who gets to ride it first.
Not to say theatre is child's play and doesn't take itself seriously. Au contraire. With How We Put It On workshops, meet-the-cast sessions, director's gyms, to say nothing of the endless drone of college lectures, there is no shortage of hot air off stage. Theatre biz is so busy being important, it too often forgets its work is Play. (Which is not to be confused with Stupid and/or Naked.)
Mainstream outfits, the Centaurs, the Bronfman/Segals, the Jean-Duceppes, the Soulpeppers now have Mammon do their programming, with results so predictably bland you might think that Mediocrity, not Greed, is the most powerful force at work in the Universe. (In this, theatre is no exception. Everywhere we look, mediocrity makes out like a bandit.)
If theatre people wonder why their toil goes so universally unnoticed, it's because they keep talking only to each other in a jargon increasingly arcane and stylized.
"What's any of this have to do with us?" was another of Armstrong's after-show FAQs.
One more yardstick: For this we missed Jeopardy? Coronation Street? Was the stage experience sufficiently satisfying to abandon the high-definition home hearth? Too many times, the answer was "Oh, my god," or just a shrug.
So yeah, of course I still remember theatre. Stanislavsky said that he hated "the theatre" in theatre. It wasn't long into the first season that I knew exactly what he meant. So no, I haven't had the urge to see theatre, lately. I've seen enough. Like everybody else I'm staying away until it gets more interesting.
"Only people who go to theatre, go to theatre, but everybody goes to the movies," is how Daniel MacIvor put it in explaining his move into filmmaking. MacIvor is one of the dozen and more outstanding Canadian playwrights whose work has been confined to the bookshelf by the colonial mindset of a cultural establishment that favours classics and mainstream American or British hits.
Canada already has a magnificent National Theatre, but it's gathering dust on the bookshelf. One of the great revelations, and pleasures, of the Gazette gig, was discovering and reading the scandalously obscure work of the likes of MacIvor, George F. Walker, Anne Chislett, Kent Stetson, Sharon Pollock, Vittorio Rossi, John Mighton, Jason Sherman, Morris Panych, Claudia Dey etc. ... etc. and revisiting neglected giants like Voeden, Ryga, Reaney, French, Freeman and Fennario.
With tenured mediocrity in the driver's seat, our playwrights have been thrust into the same tragic melodrama—call it Lack of Opportunity—as our most talented stage performers, directors and technicians. While we subsidize the writing of plays in this country, we do not yet support the showing of them. Anyone embarking on a career in the theatre soon learns the true meaning of "sporadic."
Forget past glories. Theatre must re-invent itself on a nightly basis, or perish. In fact, "theatre was never what it used to be," as noted by one of the geezer thesps in Slings and Arrows, Showcase Network's terrific spoof of Stratford.
Dramatic art has been on the brink of extinction for at least 3,000 years, so it's bound to hold on to beat the system for just one more performance, grants or no grants. The intangible personal rewards and, even more important, theatre's eternal potential, will see to that.
The greatest theatrical experience in your life is the one yet to happen. Who knows? It might be tonight, despite the prohibitive odds stacked against it.
Multiple Role Play
Carolyn Guillet, Editor of L’it Magazine, interviews Montréal playwright Carolyn Guillet, Writer of Infinitheatre’s upcoming production of Plucked, Hammered and Strung along with the star of the show, Actor Carolyn Guillet.
INTERVIEWER: You were saying the central metaphor of your play is mud?
WRITER: Mud? Yes, mud. People talk about living in a fog? Well, I’ve always been a bit extreme, and I live in mud. Movement is difficult. Sight is problematic.
ACTOR: Yeah, and imagine, it’s so visualistic: The stage is set: I bathe my fingers in mud, and then I play the piano.
INTERVIEWER: Hmmm. Interesting. Could you elaborate on how this play came about?
WRITER: A single moment, at the end of September, three years ago: I’m standing on the edge of a deep dark pit in the ground, I have mud on my knees and on my dress, I have gathered mud into my hands, I throw the mud onto a coffin that has been laid into the hole in the ground. We are burying my father. The cemetery is on the side of a hill in the middle of the nowhere countryside in Ontario, and would have been beautiful, except for the fact that my first major play—this was Seventeen [Anonymous] Women—is having its first public preview this very night at the Bain St.Michel and I’m going to miss it. Because my father has bad timing.
INTERVIEWER: And the central theme becomes “obsessive love”?
WRITER: Let’s just say I have a bit of trouble distinguishing myself from the different men in my life. Well-meaning friends call it “co-dependency issues.” But I don’t see how it could be that at all. I don’t depend on my lovers. I become my lovers. I fail to distinguish between them and me.
ACTOR: Mmmmm… Luscious…—
WRITER: —I’ll be lying there with some man, for example, and start to stroke some body part, his… forearm, for instance, only to realize that it’s me that I’m caressing. It’s my forearm. I am just confused. Is that co-dependency? These days I have to be careful not to go out with a guy who has some terminal disease, because experience tells me that I’ll start taking on all his symptoms. For instance, I went out with a guy who was a severe mutant hemophiliac and… when he would bleed, I would bleed. Which one of us was the mutant? “Symbiotic Sympathy Symptom Syndrome,” I used to call it. You could also call it a bit of an issue with “boundaries.”
ACTOR: Love confounds all, it’s so moving: I mean, check out the lyrics to one of the songs in the play, “I’m Your World.” It’s fabulous; she starts off wanting to “be” the arms that embrace the lover, then she wants to “be” the lover’s legs, wrapping around her. Or is it vice versa? You can’t even tell! From there it gets better. She wants to be his earth! His sky!
WRITER: Plucked isn’t actually about my hemophiliac lover, even though he was the first man I ever loved, the first man I ever made love with, and the first man I almost married. He isn’t even in the play. I should have put him in there, seeing as it’s a piece about the first time making love, and first and only love. I probably should have married him. He has a PhD from MIT—
ACTOR: —and lives in this fabulous house in Rosedale, right across the street—
WRITER: —from my old piano teacher.
ACTOR: The piano teacher is in the play—
WRITER: But the men are imaginary. One thing I’m really good at is inventing lovers.
INTERVIEWER: No relationship to real people, living or dead?
WRITER: Well that’s just it. The problem: I steal things. And then I lie. I pilfer stories. And I make things up. Then I mix it all up, so you can’t distinguish, one from the other. Lying and Stealing: Both are a crime. What is the solution? My Stage Manager will have to deal with it for me. There will be a list at the door of the people who are barred from entering, forbidden to set foot in the theatre. My mother, my ex husband, both my ex husbands actually, my best friend, my first teacher, my former boss, a colleague, make that three colleagues… I don’t want to think how long the list is. It would be fine if it were all lies. If nothing were recognizable. But that’s not what I do. I use the truth, twisting it, just enough, to make it… entirely believable.
Let me give you an example: I’ve created this marvelous persona, this guy named Samuel. If my children were to meet him, they would surely confuse him with their own father. And yet, he does these shocking things. Imagine the questions they would ask? “Did Daddy really do that to you?” Oh, what a scene. I despise drama in my life. I really do.
INTERVIEWER: What about the relationship between you, personally, and your characters? Any resemblance?
WRITER: Family members tend to make all kinds of assumptions, based on my plays, about certain experiences I have had, literally, in my life. It’s embarrassing. With Plucked I am certain there will be the same confusion. People will ask about my failed career as a concert pianist. Or my unusual religious convictions. Although I would think, surely, the audience will understand that the scene about being made love to while playing the piano is a pure flight of fancy. Even my mother wouldn’t suspect that of me. And she thinks I’m pretty depraved.
ACTOR: But it’s, like, super fun to incarnate all that on stage.
INTERVIEWER: You’re excited about playing the role?
ACTOR: Oh, yes, I am, I really am. At first, I was feeling a little overly-exposed, I thought the character was a little too close to the real me, you know? The only thing I really can’t play is myself. But as the work developed, the characters evolved, and I got all these different parts to play with, like different hats in a costume box, and now I feel much better.
INTERVIEWER: I thought this was a show about just one woman?
ACTOR Oh, it is, it is, only every time I sit down to play the piano, or sing a song, I pop up again, and, I’m someone else, you see. A variation. Someone who has never been in love before. Someone who has never made love before. It’s exhilarating. I fall in love over and over again. I discover the pleasures of sex over and over again. As if for the first time. I relive the grief of the loss of my father. Innumerable times. The madness of it is brilliant.
INTERVIEWER: Would you say this is a dark piece?
WRITER: Yes.
ACTOR: —No!
WRITER: —It’s illuminating.
ACTOR: —It’s dazzling, it sparkles…
WRITER: —With wit…
ACTOR: Not “dark.” “Deep,” maybe.
WRITER: “Visceral” is the better word.
ACTOR: Suffering is my most sacred muse.
WRITER: But if the Actor plays “dark”—
ACTOR: —I’ll ruin the play. I’ve gotta play the opposite.
WRITER: Humour is imperative.
ACTOR: Plucked is funny.
WRITER: It is playful. It is hopeful.
INTERVIEWER: In what way is it “hopeful”?
ACTOR: She gets the guy in the end?
WRITER: She buries her father.
INTERVIEWER: That’s “hopeful”?
WRITER: You didn’t know my father.
[Pause.]
INTERVIEWER: So what, exactly, is the significance of this father figure?
ACTOR: You can’t trust her! She twists everything. That fable about the genesis of the play? I happen to know how it actually began. She fell in love. Poopsie Woopsie! She wanted to write a love story. And sing love songs. Sooo Cute! Yes, the hermit Writer, herself, possessed with stage lust. The affair turned sour, naturally. But she couldn’t let go of the work, so Plucked became the means to an end: How to get over a misguided affair.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t answer my question, but is there any truth to this claim?
WRITER: You know, there’s something I really don’t like about Actors. A certain… lack of… humility? All that let-it-all-hang-out-there kind of blasé look-at-me-and-my-dirty-underwear-too lack of dignity. Devoid of self-respect. There is much to be said for maintaining invisibility and anonymity.
ACTOR: Yes, well, that self-deprecation of yours really is a bit of an act, wouldn’t you say? ‘Fess up. You’re right about one thing, though. Imagine, an Actor who doesn’t want to take up too much space! That’s theatrical!
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your Director. She’s pretty hot, I hear?
ACTOR: Yeah, fuck, the fabulous Arianna Bardesono, this passionate insanely brain-bursting franco-Italian wildwoman—
WRITER: —Currently leading cycling tours through the Alps—
ACTOR: —Gathering inspiration for the play.
INTERVIEWER: I hear the number five has some significance? Something about five different lovers?
WRITER: I’m not good at math. And I don’t know how to explain the significance of five. And this play is not unfolding as I intended. I actually didn’t want to write this material. I got writer’s block, at one point, maybe because I was too close to my subject, so I tried to write the show for Leni Parker, because she plays the piano—
ACTOR: —Leni’s just soooo brilliant.
WRITER: I guess the theatre couldn’t afford her, eh?
ACTOR: Hey, wait a sec! I was second choice?
WRITER: Leni said being alone on stage was her worst nightmare. Paralyzing. Impossible. Imagine having to play all five roles: writer, performer, singer, pianist, librettist, composer…
ACTOR: One, two, three… that’s six, not five.
WRITER: There’s nowhere to hide.
ACTOR: So we’ve asked the Designer to give us a bit of a disguise. Colour our hair a different shade, you know. From blonde to brunette. That’ll fool people.
WRITER: And I can continue to live my anonymous, solitary life.
ACTOR: Boring.
WRITER: I’ll bury you, next.
ACTOR: Suicide?
WRITER: Homicide.
ACTOR: Buried alive.
WRITER: Death by mud.
ACTOR: Mmmmmm.
INTERVIEWER: Dramatic!
INTERVIEWER: You were saying the central metaphor of your play is mud?
WRITER: Mud? Yes, mud. People talk about living in a fog? Well, I’ve always been a bit extreme, and I live in mud. Movement is difficult. Sight is problematic.
ACTOR: Yeah, and imagine, it’s so visualistic: The stage is set: I bathe my fingers in mud, and then I play the piano.
INTERVIEWER: Hmmm. Interesting. Could you elaborate on how this play came about?
WRITER: A single moment, at the end of September, three years ago: I’m standing on the edge of a deep dark pit in the ground, I have mud on my knees and on my dress, I have gathered mud into my hands, I throw the mud onto a coffin that has been laid into the hole in the ground. We are burying my father. The cemetery is on the side of a hill in the middle of the nowhere countryside in Ontario, and would have been beautiful, except for the fact that my first major play—this was Seventeen [Anonymous] Women—is having its first public preview this very night at the Bain St.Michel and I’m going to miss it. Because my father has bad timing.
So I’m stuck. In this moment of mud. Plucked begins as a grievance; I am stuck in resentment towards my Dad for choosing this particular moment to die. Stealing my limelight. Buried in mud, six feet under, and he’s still overshadowing me. I race to Montréal, I miss the first act, I arrive covered in mud. In revenge, I find myself killing him off, repeatedly, a kind of ritualistic king-killing, you know, the patriarch within kind of thing. I think my new play is about this festering animosity…ACTOR: C’mon! Never ask a writer what her play is about, she hasn’t a clue! It’s, like, so obvious, at the very first reading, that what she’s actually written is a love song, a love story. It’s a requiem!
INTERVIEWER: And the central theme becomes “obsessive love”?
WRITER: Let’s just say I have a bit of trouble distinguishing myself from the different men in my life. Well-meaning friends call it “co-dependency issues.” But I don’t see how it could be that at all. I don’t depend on my lovers. I become my lovers. I fail to distinguish between them and me.
ACTOR: Mmmmm… Luscious…—
WRITER: —I’ll be lying there with some man, for example, and start to stroke some body part, his… forearm, for instance, only to realize that it’s me that I’m caressing. It’s my forearm. I am just confused. Is that co-dependency? These days I have to be careful not to go out with a guy who has some terminal disease, because experience tells me that I’ll start taking on all his symptoms. For instance, I went out with a guy who was a severe mutant hemophiliac and… when he would bleed, I would bleed. Which one of us was the mutant? “Symbiotic Sympathy Symptom Syndrome,” I used to call it. You could also call it a bit of an issue with “boundaries.”
ACTOR: Love confounds all, it’s so moving: I mean, check out the lyrics to one of the songs in the play, “I’m Your World.” It’s fabulous; she starts off wanting to “be” the arms that embrace the lover, then she wants to “be” the lover’s legs, wrapping around her. Or is it vice versa? You can’t even tell! From there it gets better. She wants to be his earth! His sky!
WRITER: Plucked isn’t actually about my hemophiliac lover, even though he was the first man I ever loved, the first man I ever made love with, and the first man I almost married. He isn’t even in the play. I should have put him in there, seeing as it’s a piece about the first time making love, and first and only love. I probably should have married him. He has a PhD from MIT—
ACTOR: —and lives in this fabulous house in Rosedale, right across the street—
WRITER: —from my old piano teacher.
ACTOR: The piano teacher is in the play—
WRITER: But the men are imaginary. One thing I’m really good at is inventing lovers.
INTERVIEWER: No relationship to real people, living or dead?
WRITER: Well that’s just it. The problem: I steal things. And then I lie. I pilfer stories. And I make things up. Then I mix it all up, so you can’t distinguish, one from the other. Lying and Stealing: Both are a crime. What is the solution? My Stage Manager will have to deal with it for me. There will be a list at the door of the people who are barred from entering, forbidden to set foot in the theatre. My mother, my ex husband, both my ex husbands actually, my best friend, my first teacher, my former boss, a colleague, make that three colleagues… I don’t want to think how long the list is. It would be fine if it were all lies. If nothing were recognizable. But that’s not what I do. I use the truth, twisting it, just enough, to make it… entirely believable.
Let me give you an example: I’ve created this marvelous persona, this guy named Samuel. If my children were to meet him, they would surely confuse him with their own father. And yet, he does these shocking things. Imagine the questions they would ask? “Did Daddy really do that to you?” Oh, what a scene. I despise drama in my life. I really do.
INTERVIEWER: What about the relationship between you, personally, and your characters? Any resemblance?
WRITER: Family members tend to make all kinds of assumptions, based on my plays, about certain experiences I have had, literally, in my life. It’s embarrassing. With Plucked I am certain there will be the same confusion. People will ask about my failed career as a concert pianist. Or my unusual religious convictions. Although I would think, surely, the audience will understand that the scene about being made love to while playing the piano is a pure flight of fancy. Even my mother wouldn’t suspect that of me. And she thinks I’m pretty depraved.
ACTOR: But it’s, like, super fun to incarnate all that on stage.
INTERVIEWER: You’re excited about playing the role?
ACTOR: Oh, yes, I am, I really am. At first, I was feeling a little overly-exposed, I thought the character was a little too close to the real me, you know? The only thing I really can’t play is myself. But as the work developed, the characters evolved, and I got all these different parts to play with, like different hats in a costume box, and now I feel much better.
INTERVIEWER: I thought this was a show about just one woman?
ACTOR Oh, it is, it is, only every time I sit down to play the piano, or sing a song, I pop up again, and, I’m someone else, you see. A variation. Someone who has never been in love before. Someone who has never made love before. It’s exhilarating. I fall in love over and over again. I discover the pleasures of sex over and over again. As if for the first time. I relive the grief of the loss of my father. Innumerable times. The madness of it is brilliant.
INTERVIEWER: Would you say this is a dark piece?
WRITER: Yes.
ACTOR: —No!
WRITER: —It’s illuminating.
ACTOR: —It’s dazzling, it sparkles…
WRITER: —With wit…
ACTOR: Not “dark.” “Deep,” maybe.
WRITER: “Visceral” is the better word.
ACTOR: Suffering is my most sacred muse.
WRITER: But if the Actor plays “dark”—
ACTOR: —I’ll ruin the play. I’ve gotta play the opposite.
WRITER: Humour is imperative.
ACTOR: Plucked is funny.
WRITER: It is playful. It is hopeful.
INTERVIEWER: In what way is it “hopeful”?
ACTOR: She gets the guy in the end?
WRITER: She buries her father.
INTERVIEWER: That’s “hopeful”?
WRITER: You didn’t know my father.
[Pause.]
INTERVIEWER: So what, exactly, is the significance of this father figure?
ACTOR: You can’t trust her! She twists everything. That fable about the genesis of the play? I happen to know how it actually began. She fell in love. Poopsie Woopsie! She wanted to write a love story. And sing love songs. Sooo Cute! Yes, the hermit Writer, herself, possessed with stage lust. The affair turned sour, naturally. But she couldn’t let go of the work, so Plucked became the means to an end: How to get over a misguided affair.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t answer my question, but is there any truth to this claim?
WRITER: You know, there’s something I really don’t like about Actors. A certain… lack of… humility? All that let-it-all-hang-out-there kind of blasé look-at-me-and-my-dirty-underwear-too lack of dignity. Devoid of self-respect. There is much to be said for maintaining invisibility and anonymity.
ACTOR: Yes, well, that self-deprecation of yours really is a bit of an act, wouldn’t you say? ‘Fess up. You’re right about one thing, though. Imagine, an Actor who doesn’t want to take up too much space! That’s theatrical!
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your Director. She’s pretty hot, I hear?
ACTOR: Yeah, fuck, the fabulous Arianna Bardesono, this passionate insanely brain-bursting franco-Italian wildwoman—
WRITER: —Currently leading cycling tours through the Alps—
ACTOR: —Gathering inspiration for the play.
INTERVIEWER: I hear the number five has some significance? Something about five different lovers?
WRITER: I’m not good at math. And I don’t know how to explain the significance of five. And this play is not unfolding as I intended. I actually didn’t want to write this material. I got writer’s block, at one point, maybe because I was too close to my subject, so I tried to write the show for Leni Parker, because she plays the piano—
ACTOR: —Leni’s just soooo brilliant.
WRITER: I guess the theatre couldn’t afford her, eh?
ACTOR: Hey, wait a sec! I was second choice?
WRITER: Leni said being alone on stage was her worst nightmare. Paralyzing. Impossible. Imagine having to play all five roles: writer, performer, singer, pianist, librettist, composer…
ACTOR: One, two, three… that’s six, not five.
WRITER: There’s nowhere to hide.
ACTOR: So we’ve asked the Designer to give us a bit of a disguise. Colour our hair a different shade, you know. From blonde to brunette. That’ll fool people.
WRITER: And I can continue to live my anonymous, solitary life.
ACTOR: Boring.
WRITER: I’ll bury you, next.
ACTOR: Suicide?
WRITER: Homicide.
ACTOR: Buried alive.
WRITER: Death by mud.
ACTOR: Mmmmmm.
INTERVIEWER: Dramatic!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)