WORDS ON PLAYS prepared byelizabeth brodersenpublications editordan rubinpublications & literary associatemichael pallerresident dramaturgkatie maypublications intern

Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the donors of The Next Generation Campaign.

written and directed by morris panychamerican conservatory theatermarch 25–april 18, 2010

Vigil

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O RY T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director

P R E S E N T S

© 2010 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

table of contents

1. Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Vigil

3. Vigil Meet and Greet / Design Presentation

7. Married to Their Work: An Interview with Playwright/Director Morris Panych and Designer Ken MacDonald by Dan Rubin

17. For the Pleasure of Seeing Him Again: a.c.t. Artistic Consultant Beatrice Basso Interviews Actor Marco Barricelli

24. Playing in a.c.t.’s Attic: An Interview with a.c.t. Properties Supervisor Ryan Parham by Dan Rubin

29. The Old and the Lonely by Dan Rubin

31. The “Perfect Existential Country”: A Brief History of Canadian Theater by Dan Rubin

36. Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .

OPPOSITE Pre-rehearsal costume design for Kemp by designer Ken MacDonaldNEXT PAGE Pre-rehearsal costume design for Grace by designer Ken MacDonald

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characters, cast, and synopsis of vigilVigil was first produced as a cooperative venture between the Belfry Theatre of Victoria, British Columbia, and the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver, British Columbia, opening first at the Belfry Theatre on September 28, 1995, and subsequently at the Arts Club Theatre on October 28, 1995.

ensemblegrace Olympia Dukakiskemp Marco Barricelli

settingThe upstairs room of Grace’s decrepit old house.

synopsis

Kemp arrives, suitcase in hand, at the home of his Aunt Grace, who greets him with a hurled hairbrush. Kemp explains that he received her letter—which claimed that

she was “old and dying”—and traveled a thousand miles to be with her. Grace does not verbally respond, nor will she: she remains mute. Kemp settles in to await her passing. As time goes by, Kemp discusses matters pertaining to Grace’s death and funeral. He grows increasingly frustrated with the amount of time it is taking Grace to die, but he refuses to “dump her on the state.”

As days turn to months and the seasons change, Grace maintains her health, as well as her silence. Because he did not pack for an extended stay, Kemp is at times forced to wear Grace’s clothes. He passes time by watching people out the window, including a woman across the street who sits in her window staring back at him. Kemp, we learn, has not visited his aunt in 30 years, but he is still upset by Grace’s apparent distaste for him and is offended that she has not a single picture of him in her house, not even the “adorable” one taken when he had the mumps.

In many conversations over many days, Kemp recounts his unhappy childhood, from which he had always imagined the glamorous Grace would rescue him. Instead, after a singular visit Grace disappeared from Kemp’s life, leaving him alone to deal with his alco-holic mother, who dressed him in women’s clothes because she never accepted the fact he was a boy, and his manic-depressive father, a failed magician who eventually shot himself. “Between them,” Kemp says, “they destroyed every illusion I ever had.” His unhappy

childhood preceded an unhappy adulthood. He has managed to “go through life without accumulating a single friend,” which suits him, he confesses, as he does not particularly care for people.

After almost an entire year, Kemp builds Grace a machine intended to make it easy for her to end her own life: one lever activates an electric shock, while the other delivers a massive blow to the head. As Kemp shows her how to use the machine, Grace pulls a lever: a frying pan smashes into his head and a massive jolt from the electric device electrocutes him. He collapses but does not die. Over the days following, he makes a number of failed attempts on Grace’s life.

Eventually the police visit the house to question Kemp about the woman across the street: apparently she died a long time ago, sitting, watching out her window, and clutching a faded photograph of a little boy with the mumps. The awful reality of what has happened dawns on Kemp: he is not in the right house. Grace is not his aunt. Grace explains that she did not reveal Kemp’s mistake because she was glad for the visit. Emotionally distraught, Kemp leaves. But, after consideration, he returns. He watches over Grace until she dies.

Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company’s 2007 production of Vigil. Set design and photograph by Ken MacDonald.

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vigil meet and greet/design presentationExcerpts from Remarks Made to a.c.t. Cast and Staff, September 15, 29

During the first week of rehearsal of each production, a.c.t. staff members and the show’s cast and creative team gather in a studio to meet, mingle, and get to know

each other. After personal introductions are made, the director and designers present to the assembled group their vision for the design of the production, which is typically the culmination of months of research, discussion, and textual analysis. This introduction is a kind of “snapshot” of the creative team’s understanding of the world of the play at the moment they step into the room with the actors, an understanding that will evolve and grow and perhaps change in significant ways as the cast brings life and breath and physical action to the playwright’s words over the following weeks of rehearsal.

Below are excerpts from remarks made at the first rehearsal of Vigil at a.c.t., which offer a glimpse into the initial impulses behind the look and feel of the upcoming produc-tion. To work around scheduling conflicts, the first three weeks of Vigil rehearsals began in September 2009, six months before the show’s opening. The cast and creative team then reunited in March 2010 to complete the rehearsal process.

artistic director carey perloffDuring The Overcoat [a.c.t’s 2005–06 season opener, which was originally created in Canada by Morris Panych, Ken MacDonald, and Wendy Gorling], Morris sent me a pile of his plays. He’s very prolific. It’s a wide canon full of wonderful stuff. At that time we originally started talking about Vigil, so it has been a very long, interesting conversation. This play seemed like a great reunion for the cutest couple we know in American theater, Marco Barricelli and Olympia Dukakis, who last did a Canadian play here [a.c.t.’s 2002 production of Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again] in which Olympia talked the whole time and Marco talked hardly at all. This time, Marco talks the whole time and Olympia makes snide faces. [Laughter]

For those of you wondering why it is so peculiar that we are here in September working on this play that does not get produced until March: it was a creative producing decision, because Marco runs a theater [as the artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz], Olympia lives in New York, Morris and Ken are doing plays in Toronto, and everybody’s schedules are really complicated. This was the moment when we had a chunk of time when we could all work together. Then we will come back together in time to really de-ice all this and heat it up again and see what we remember before we put it up onstage.

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playwright/director morris panychVigil is a play that I wrote in 1995. It was first produced in Victoria, British Columbia, and it’s gone on in a lot of other productions. It’s been translated into, I think, 19 languages, including Latvian. How many plays, come on, have been translated into Latvian?

The play was written in response to a couple of things. I had always had the idea of playing with mixed/mistaken identity, but I never really had an idea for a play [that incor-porated that concept]. Then we were visiting Ken’s mother in the hospital, and she wasn’t doing very well, but the woman next to her was doing even worse. Her back was to us, but the hospital had these volunteers going around trying to help people, and the volunteer woman was standing beside her saying to this old lady, “I got a message from your nephew. He says he can’t make it. Sorry.” There’s nothing, and then the volunteer says, “Are you okay? Would you like me to wipe the tears off your eyes, dear?” I just walked out of the

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hospital and I thought, “This is what life is becoming for a lot of people: being left alone, cut loose. Society is taking no responsibility for people looking after other people.”

So the play was written in response to that. Ostensibly, one person talks and the other listens with very little dialogue, but it really is a conversation, and, in many ways, a love story between this nephew and aunt, or whatever you want to call them. In a sense, it’s an incredibly difficult and tricky kind of dialogue to put together, when one person has most of the words. We are just going through it now [in rehearsal] and trying to figure out how that happens. It is very exciting to have two fantastic, thinking actors who can help us try to develop the production in the way I think it should be, which is a true conversation between two people.

The set is a variation on a kind of set that Ken’s done before, because he doesn’t really have much imagination. [Laughter] No, that’s not true!

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designer ken macdonaldI’m very used to it. We’re married and we’ve been together 29 years.

The play takes place in Olympia’s—Grace’s—upstairs room in her very strange house. In my mind it looks kind of warehousey, but it is just a strange sort of wonderful attic from which she has blocked out the world with newspapers, yellowed newspapers, that have kept the light out, kept the sun out, kept her in her own private world. It’s a world that, as a kid, you’d always hoped you might discover—an attic full of things, her history, and then that history sort of stopped. Interesting little things for [Marco Barricelli’s charac-ter] Kemp to look through, for him to climb on, to explore to find out who his aunt was. And the lighting is quite interesting, because it is all backlit through these newspapered windows.

panychThe play is broken down into 39 scenes, and when we first started to do this show we just did hard blackouts [between those scenes]. Then over time we realized that was too unsubtle, and now it rolls through a little bit more.

I acted in this show a couple of years ago in Vancouver. That was the first time I actually got a chance to do it, and I loved the score from that show so much I asked them if we could have it. It’s very haunting and weird and funny. It’s like the show itself.

macdonaldCostumewise, Olympia and I have already totally changed her outfit [from the initial concept]. We’ve come up with this new look for her. Marco is a man in a little brown plain suit, and this is all he’s brought with him in his empty suitcase, what he has on, so he is forced to occasionally wear Grace’s clothes when he washes his own clothes. If he goes out shopping and it’s winter, he’ll have to wear her outfit.

panychI was thinking about how important a time it is for a show like this to happen, when you are having this conversation about health care [in the United States] and, believe it or not, in our country people are trying to revisit it because there’re so many people out there who are so against this idea of people helping other people. It’s just shocking. So I think it’s a good time to talk about responsibility and what we owe each other and society, and I think this play does that in a kind of compassionate, funny, interesting, quirky way (if I can boast).

PAGES 4 and 5 Costume sketches for Kemp and Grace created during the first rehearsal of Vigil, by designer Ken MacDonald

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married to their workAn Interview with Playwright/Director Morris Panych and Designer Ken MacDonald

by dan rubin

The plays of Morris Panych are defined by a darkly humor-

ous treatment of what the play-wright has described as “the daily struggle of ordinary people with life’s bizarre minor annoyances.” He demonstrates the absurdities of life (and, just as often, death) through his colorful and amus-ing depictions of characters—who are often stubbornly unhappy and categorically unlikeable—as they navigate ridiculous and extreme circumstances. The productions of the plays Panych directs (fre-quently ones he has written) are also defined by the sets—equal in richness, color, and quirkiness—designed by his husband and longtime collaborator, Ken MacDonald.

MacDonald and Panych both attended the University of British Columbia, MacDonald for arts education and Panych for creative writing, but they graduated five years apart (1972 and 1977, respectively) and didn’t meet until Panych returned to Canada in 1979 after studying acting in London. They began collaborating artistically in the 1980s, a partnership that immediately bore fruit. Canadian literary and design awards followed in spades, as did national attention and a growing international fan base. Panych has won the Governor General’s Award for Drama—Canada’s highest literary honor—twice (The Ends of the Earth, 1995; Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, 2004); Natalie Rewa’s 2004 Scenography in Canada devotes an entire chapter to MacDonald. Photographs of MacDonald’s designs adorn the covers of all of Panych’s numerous published scripts, which is appropriate, because, as Panych has written, MacDonald’s “visual presentation of my work is central to it . . . to invent plays on paper is only the starting point of a whole integrated process.”

Designer Ken MacDonald (left) and playwright Morris Panych. Photo courtesy Ken MacDonald.

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At the heart of their joint endeavors is a fundamental agreement that theater should “convey a dreamlike sense of reality that should not be confused with nonreality,” as Panych writes in the introduction to his 2005 play The Dishwashers. “A dream, when you are in it, is real; sometimes frightening, sometimes alarming, sometimes funny, but the stakes for you in its ‘reality’ are always high, and the existential outcome of its events is always vital. If you have ever woken from a nightmare, screaming, or ever found yourself laughing out loud in your sleep, you will know how deeply real and truthful a dream can appear to be.”

The pair is in high demand in Canada, and Panych’s plays have been produced in New York and around the United States—as well as in London’s West End, Europe, Japan, etc. So it is surprising that Panych and MacDonald have never before been invited to work on a production in the United States as part of the creative team. a.c.t. audiences were introduced to their work when the company imported The Overcoat from Canada in 2005, but Vigil is the first time Panych and MacDonald have directed and designed a produc-tion from start to finish on u.s. soil. We took advantage of their presence in San Francisco to ask some questions about their relationship, their careers, Vigil, and what it is like for Canadians to work in the United States.

PART I: the actor and the art teacherdan rubin: Did your relationship begin as a professional or a personal one?

ken macdonald: I was designing the set and costumes for a play in Victoria, British Columbia, and the fella who was running the theater said, “Why don’t you come with me to meet this young actor who is coming back from England. Take a look at him with me and see what you think, because he looks like a good candidate for the show we’re doing.” So I went with him to the cbc [Canadian Broadcasting Centre] cafeteria and spotted Morris. Morris had on a little blue suit and a little tie.

morris panych: Very British.macdonald: Very British schoolboy look. And I said, “Yeah, I think he looks great,”

and so we hired him and I costumed him.panych: But we really had nothing to do with each other.macdonald: Nothing. Then we did another show. panych: And then we started hanging out.macdonald: We had some mutual friends. panych: For a long time I was an actor, so Ken and I worked independently. I guess

the [personal] relationship came first [before the artistic collaboration]. I got really bored with acting really quickly. I thought, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. This is just really tedious. Really soul destroying.” So I decided I wanted to write a musical. The year

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before, Ken and I had worked on a summer rep together, and as part of it we had put on a musical that was pretty simplistic. And I thought, “If this guy can write this, I can write a musical,” because it really didn’t seem all that challenging. So I decided I was going to write a musical [which would become Last Call: A Postnuclear Cabaret]. By then Ken and I were living together, and every day Ken would come home and there would be new lyr-ics sitting on the piano, and he was like, [sighing] “Oh my god . . .” I knew he could write music. I don’t know why.

macdonald: I don’t know why because I had never written a song in my life. I could play the piano and sing. When I was in university, all my friends were in theater, and I was in the club that did musicals: West Side Story, Hello Dolly! I was always in the chorus.

panych: I thought you could write songs because you really understood old musical theater.

macdonald: I know every musical theater piece from the ’60s and ’70s. So he knew that I could sing, but he didn’t know I could write, but I didn’t know either. It was actually fantastic. He would literally put lyrics down and then two hours later there was a song.

rubin: When Morris first started writing Last Call in 1982, did you think, “This is okay and it will be fun to work with him on this, but it’s not great,” or did you think, “Oh, wow, he can really write”?

macdonald: No, it was really well written. And very funny and a huge hit. They were lined up around the block every night to see it. It toured Canada. They made a tv special of it. Ran for months.

rubin: Together you went on to write four more political cabarets between 1982 and 1988, but eventually Morris gravitated towards straight plays. Why?

panych: I just felt like musicals weren’t really my genre. It was hard because we thought we would just always do musicals. Ken, I think, felt kind of left out. So it was really hard for me to start writing just plays.

macdonald: My income tax form used to say “composer/designer.” It was sort of half and half. But I haven’t written a musical for 15 years now. At the time that Morris started to write straight plays, I was getting more and more into design. And eventually he started directing. It was only the very first show he directed that I didn’t design. [For that first show] I was in the background saying, “Get the designer to do this, this, this.” Since then I have designed everything he has ever directed.

rubin: How did you become a designer?macdonald: I was a high school arts teacher—grades 11 and 12, drawing, painting, and

applied design—and a friend, Don Shipley [artistic director of Victoria’s Belfry Theatre from 1976 to 1979], said out of the blue, “Do you want design a show for me?” And I said,

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“I don’t know how.” “So do you want to try it?” “Well, okay.” And he asked me on the next show, and the next show, and the next show, and then he said, “Do you just want to be my resident designer?” And so I quit teaching high school. I have no training. Zero. None. But I’ve done it for so long.

rubin: Why did Shipley think you would make a good set designer?macdonald: He was going out with a really good friend of mine, Sheila McCarthy, an

actress in Canada, and she said, “Ken can draw things.” It was as vague as that. They were starting a new theater, and I designed Puttin’ on the Ritz [Belfry Theatre, 1977], a revue, which became very successful: we did it at the Shaw Festival; we took it to Vancouver.

panych: It’s funny, you start out your life . . . I started my life and thought, “I’m going to be an actor.”

macdonald: I was going to be a teacher.panych: But then it changes as things happen. macdonald: I had taught for five years, from 22 to 27, so I was really young. At 27 I

quit and became a set designer.

PART II: the playwright/director and the designerrubin: When did you start designing for Morris?

panych: Well, I was still trying to be an actor till about ’90, I guess, when I finally just walked away from it.

macdonald: Well, when did you write 7 Stories?panych: ’89.macdonald: 7 Stories takes place on the edge of a building and a man is going to jump

off and all these people don’t bother to stop it, couldn’t care less about it. It’s a beautiful play, and it’s had a big history. Every student when they first meet Morris always says, “Oh my god, I was in 7 Stories in high school. I did 7 Stories in university.”

panych: It is very big in schools for some reason. It was the first play I wrote that was produced by a professional theater.

macdonald: It was a big transition for me, too. It was the first time I ever did a set like that.

panych: The set was extraordinarily beautiful. It was revolutionary, and the play too.macdonald: The man on the ledge was dressed like a surrealist René Magritte man

[in his painting The Son of Man]. The set is this huge sky, which is what Magritte always did.

panych: Then the next play we did, your design was based on Escher.

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macdonald: For a while I was really interested in designing based on a certain artist. It was called The Necessary Steps [1991], and there were stairs going everywhere.

panych: It was about a man who found a pair of shoes and the shoes had their own life and they took him places.

rubin: Where do your ideas for these plays come from?panych: 7 Stories: aids had just come into the news and everyone was terrified, espe-

cially gay people, and when you start to be afraid of dying then you start to think about what it is about life that is worth living. Why is life important? I started to read Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and really became interested in existentialism. The play is really a riff on that. And The Necessary Steps is the same thing: it’s extremely existentialist because it is about a man who has no control over his life.

I really believe that the absurdists and the existentialists in the ’50s and ’60s were onto something. Then something happened in the ’70s and it all evaporated. No one was trying to do absurdist theater. No one was trying to do fatalistic theater. Suddenly everyone was trying to do naturalistic, realistic stuff. But I think there is a place for it. That’s how that went. What was next?

macdonald: Ends of the Earth [1992]. I would say that most of Morris’s plays are about a little man with a big grudge. One man sticks out his tongue at another man and he chases him to the ends of the earth [as happens in Ends of the Earth], or a little man pushes a button, but another man has already pressed it, and he wants to kill him for that [as in Lawrence and Holloman (1998)]. Just a little man who has a chip on his shoulder.

panych: I’m really interested in a certain kind of morality. I think the theater is the best next place for moral teaching, but in a way that’s not religious. Those plays, I believe, are kind of spiritual. In 7 Stories, the man jumps at the end, but his umbrella goes up and he flies across to the building across the street. There’s this whole notion: if your life is meaningless anyway, then you create your own meaning, which is incredibly liberating and freeing. Your life no longer belongs to any other idea.

rubin: Would you say that is the difference between existentialism and nihilism?panych: Yes. I’m not a nihilist at all. I believe there is some purpose, but that purpose

is internal. I don’t think it’s a big universal purpose. I think there’s a purpose for people to be on the earth, but I think it is to do some good things while they are here. That’s the moral lesson of these plays.

rubin: Do you think theater needs to be moralistic?panych: No, but they shouldn’t be Google plays about Afghanistan and Iraq . . . macdonald: Frost/Nixon.

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panych: I’m sorry, that’s not even a play. Ken and I have extremely strong views on the theater, but they are not very popular.

macdonald: We don’t like a lot of theater.panych: We think theater has to be visually appealing. That’s the first thing. Why else

would you do it? You might as well do a radio play. Even if the set is a red apple hanging in the middle of the room, it has to have some visual appeal. Otherwise, it’s not theater.

rubin: Do you agree with each other about theater?macdonald: Very much. panych: We might not agree on the nuts and bolts of it, how it’s carried out. Ken does

not like reality. The reality of who has to move where. macdonald: I’m growing more to like realistic sets, but realistic sets that are extended.

I like sets that are super real, filmically real, but are actually built to be 18 feet tall or the proportions are stretched. I used to be much more abstract.

panych: We’ve been working together for so long that once we agree on the basic idea, the basic feeling, then I don’t even care what he does.

macdonald: We trust each other to do what we’re going to do: I’ve never done a bad set for him.

panych: It’s the same with Alan Brodie, who’s doing our lights for Vigil: he’s done the lights for at least 20 of our shows. We’re interested in hanging on to the collaborators we have, because if we’re likeminded it is so much easier. They get what you want. Alan and I now don’t talk: he does the design and I look at it and it’s great.

PART III: VIGIL

rubin: Has your new bent towards distorted realism snuck into your design for a.c.t.’s production of Vigil?

macdonald: I’ve now done Vigil five times, and the set has always been basically the same. The only thing that changes is that there’s a skylight or there’s not a skylight.

panych: But I think Vigil [which was first done in 1995] was the start of that, because Vigil does exemplify this naturalism that explodes onto a large scale. The internal part of Vigil is very naturalistic, and then as it goes out it becomes more and more absurd.

macdonald: No one would live where [Olympia Dukakis’s character] Grace lives. panych: We have to tell the audience (this is what people aren’t used to in the theater

anymore, unfortunately), when the lights come up they aren’t watching tv. They’re not watching a real story. They are watching a fable. They are watching something bigger than life. They are watching an extended story version of reality.

macdonald: Something theatrical.

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panych: It’s not supposed to be real, but it’s supposed to be like a dream or a strange little book you read. It’s supposed to take you somewhere outside yourself.

rubin: Why, of all your plays, do you think Vigil has had the life that it’s had? panych: I think people understand in their guts what that story is. Looking after an old

relative: it’s a big problem right now, and every society has to deal with it in a fundamental way. How are we going to look after our old people as baby boomers are getting older and older? Are young people going to be able to look after them?

macdonald: We baby boomers are exactly in those years: Morris’s mum died two years ago, and his father three years ago. My mum died. All of our parents are dying right now.

panych: There isn’t a single person sitting in this theater who won’t fundamentally understand what a horrible situation that is. This play is like a bloodletting for them. It’s like they’re afraid to think those things that we all think: “Why don’t you just die?” It’s not really what you’re thinking, because, of course, you’re not thinking that. But there’s a kind of a delicious sharing of a true feeling, deep in your guts, that there is something very dif-ficult about the situation. [Marco Barricelli’s character] Kemp is confronted head on with this problem. Every time there is a new production in another country, in another lan-guage, I think, “Wow, it’s being done in Tokyo?” But, yeah, there are old people in Tokyo and there are young people thinking, “I don’t want to deal with my parents.”

rubin: Were you dealing with a dying parent when you were writing Vigil? macdonald: My mother.panych: His mother. Your parents are fine until they can’t move. The minute that hap-

pens, that illness, if you’re the person [who will become the caretaker], you realize, “My life is effectively over in terms of what I thought it would be. The freedoms that I had before, I no longer have.” This person is now going to take up so much time and energy and effort that you have to rethink everything.

We’re just so selfish now. We’re so concerned about doing our own thing, because we don’t live in family groups anymore. We live in weird urban groups, so family is seen as “a problem.” Vigil addresses that. It’s a satire, essentially, but the springboard was Ken’s mother becoming terribly infirm, to the degree that she couldn’t move.

macdonald: And when my mum was in the hospital, we heard the nurse saying to this old woman in the bed beside her, “Oh, dear, your nephew isn’t going to be able to come and visit you. Sorry to tell you . . . Do you want me to wipe the tears away from your eyes?” She couldn’t wipe her own tears away. No one was coming to see her. I think it gave Morris the idea of [a character] writing to a relative saying, “I’m dying. Come and take care of me.”

panych: That scene made me really sick. It was just awful. macdonald: The loneliness of it.

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PART IV: canadian exchangerubin: What is the difference between Canadian theater and American theater?

panych: There are so many parts to that question. It is so interesting. I find American critics generally like theater and are supportive of the people who do it, at least compared to the critics in Toronto.

macdonald: And Britain. panych: The first time I ever went down to Seattle from Vancouver to see some plays, I

remember reading reviews for a play that, frankly, wasn’t very good, but I read the reviews and the critic said it wasn’t very good but go anyway, and I thought that’s what it should be. Okay, it’s not that great, but you should see it for whatever reason. Find a reason to see it. So that was the first difference.

Americans have a whole different system—especially on Broadway and off Broadway—where people actually have to raise their own money to do plays. It moves me greatly to think that people will go out and raise money to do your play. That’s a big thing.

macdonald: And not Canadian, because we are all subsidized. panych: Nobody would ever raise money in Canada to do theater. For someone to

invest $25,000?macdonald: It’s unheard of. Our regional theaters are all subsidized by the govern-

ment. The government gives you a certain amount of money, a grant, every year for a mil-lion dollars, or some number.

panych: There’s the Canada Council for the Arts: every year they give the same amount of money to each of these theaters. And the Ontario Arts Council also gives money. And Toronto is interested in culture, so the Toronto city government will give money to orga-nizations.

rubin: Does this allow for more risk taking by theaters?panych: Sadly, I don’t think it does. In terms of the acting, I think Canadian actors

are more like British actors. They hold things a little bit closer to their chests. I think American actors are a little bit more out there.

What is weird is, culturally speaking, Canadians (and I’m excluding Quebec from this) essentially are peripheral Americans. Everything we do is based almost entirely on American culture. I really almost wish we spoke a different language. If the British can barely escape it, imagine what the Canadians . . . I mean we are inundated with it. It is essentially our de facto culture, with the exception that maybe we’re a little bit more lib-eral. Weirdly it doesn’t happen any more in music. The pop music culture in Canada has changed immeasurably over the last 20 years. I think it had to do with government regula-tion. The government decided that radio play had to be a certain amount Canadian music.

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macdonald: Sixty percent or something.panych: They decided they needed to expose Canadians to their own people, and sure

enough it had a huge effect. macdonald: Because Canadian music turned out to be really good. panych: And the same happened with literature, too. There has been a huge crop of

great Canadian novelists, nonfiction writers . . . but it hasn’t really happened in theater. It has to a certain degree. We have a lot of really great theaters, but there’s no place that develops really big plays. But it’s all collapsing in the States too. Nobody is doing really great new plays. They’re doing commercial musicals.

macdonald: With movie stars. You have to have a movie star in your play. Even for [2009’s off-Broadway production of ] Vigil they got Malcolm Gets, a television star.

panych: On a day-to-day basis you don’t feel like an outsider because you are just doing your work, but as a Canadian there is this market that you can’t quite get access to.

macdonald: It makes us very angry because we’ll read a bad review of one of Morris’s plays and think, “Well, if we could have done it . . .” We know we’ve done a good produc-tion of it in Canada, but they’re not interested in us [working on the American production] at all. This is the first time we’ve ever worked in the States.

panych: It is really difficult to do.macdonald: The papers and review process. The stuff you have to do to prove that you

are worthy of doing a show here. We’re only able to come because he wrote and I designed the original production. It’s insane.

rubin: Have you ever considered moving to the States?panych/macdonald: No.panych: I like being up there. I like it living in Canada.macdonald: I don’t want to be a part of the political America. We’re married. Here

an anti–gay marriage bill can be put on the ballot by a handful of signatures and all of a sudden the entire state is voting for it. It’s ridiculous.

panych: I don’t think that we feel like we live in a better country by any means, because I really admire the United States. I think it’s the best country in the world in some ways. It is just when you live outside of it and look at it all the time, to be in it is weird. We’re outsiders.

macdonald: We know more about you than you know about us. We get abc, cbs, and nbc news every night. Do you get cbc news? We follow you a lot more.

panych: When I came here to direct this play I was very nervous, partly because it was a different country and I didn’t know how this country and these people would accept my being here. But I’m only three weeks into it, and it is like I am working anywhere else.

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macdonald: Me, too. I thought, “Oh, I don’t know how to work with sets and costumes in the States.” But I feel like now I could work in New York. What’s the difference? It’s just people.

rubin: Is there anything inher-ently “Canadian” about your work? Where the plays come from? Where the designs come from?

macdonald: I don’t think so. We got an amazing Canada Council grant in 1991—we both got $18,000

to go to Europe to see theater. We went to Europe for four months and we saw 88 plays and it was pretty incredible. We saw them all together and I kept a journal. It’s been a reference point for years.

panych: I’ve always tried hard, when I’m writing plays, not to iden-tify a place.

macdonald: Or time.panych: But especially a place. macdonald: [In Vigil,] I don’t

want the newspaper that Kemp reads to say “San Francisco” on it. Morris has a time period that he kind of likes—late ’50s–early ’60s—in terms of a look, but it’s modern day. Vigil is taking place now, but you’ll see nothing onstage that couldn’t have been there since 1956. Same with most of [Morris’s] plays: they have almost a classic American mid-century look, but it isn’t in Canada, it isn’t in the States, and it isn’t in Europe. It’s just anywhere, everywhere. That makes it more universal.

Ken MacDonald (at piano) and Morris Panych in Billy Bishop Goes to War at the Grand Theatre in 1986. Photo by Robert C. Ragsdale. Reproduced from the Toronto Public Library website, http://www.tpl.toronto.on.ca.

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for the pleasure of seeing him againa.c.t. Artistic Consultant Beatrice Basso Interviews Actor Marco Barricelli

Marco Barricelli has been part of the a.c.t. family since

making his Geary debut as the pas-sionate Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo in 1996. The following year he became an inaugural member of a.c.t.’s resident core acting com-pany, where he remained until 2005, directing in the Master of Fine Arts Program and serving on the artistic team while taking on a host of pow-erful roles on the mainstage, includ-ing Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross, Teach in American Buffalo, James Tyrone, Sr., in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Leicester in Mary Stuart, the mad king in Enrico IV, Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, James Tyrone, Jr., in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Tilden in Buried Child, Oscar Wilde in The Invention of Love, and The Narrator in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (opposite Olympia Dukakis), among many others. A graduate of Juilliard, he has also performed on and off Broadway in New York, in regional theaters across the country—including eight years with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—and on television. Also a director and edu-cator, Barricelli switched theatrical hats in 2008, taking on the role of artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz.

Barricelli is also the longtime partner of Beatrice Basso, an artistic consultant with a.c.t. So, we thought, who better to interview him? Basso agreed, and on Valentine’s Day she cornered him with our recorder to ask him a few questions about returning to a.c.t. to take on the role of the misanthropic Kemp in Vigil.

Marco Barricelli outside his Santa Cruz home. Photo by Beatrice Basso.

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how did VIGIL come to you, and what was your reaction to the script?[a.c.t. Artistic Director] Carey Perloff knew Morris Panych, the playwright, and had produced his Overcoat to great success at a.c.t. [in 2005]. I remember it was two Januarys ago. I was in the snow, freezing cold, out in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a staa [Shakespeare Theatre Association of America] conference. Carey had sent me the play a week or two before that and said that it was something she was interested in. She was interested in trying to bring Olympia [Dukakis] and myself back together on a project. So I read the play, of course, and I just really loved the writing. I thought it was odd and unconventional and disturbing and funny. But disturbing and funny in the way Pinter can be disturbing and funny. And it was written very well. The craft of Morris’s writing really appeals to me.

Carey and I had a conversation out in the snow. The problem was, really, calendars and trying to make dates work. But Carey came up with this very strange and inventive idea: Morris, Olympia, and myself, and Ken MacDonald, the set designer, would all rehearse in the fall [for a show that would not open until the following spring]. So we rehearsed for three weeks and then we put it on ice. Now, five months later, we’re about to start up again with an abbreviated rehearsal process.

how can a play stay with you for all those months when you’re not rehearsing?This is unique in that I have most of the language in this play. I never shut up. It’s a series of scenes that are basically monologues. So it’s a different kind of learning process, because you’re not responding to cues. It’s self-generated and you have to find that in yourself.

I’ve had the opportunity in my career to repeat roles. They’re different productions, but I’ve come back to do the same role. I always feel good about coming back to it because the preliminary work is done: you’ve gone through all that thought process, so you can then start the second time at a different level with a different understanding of the character. Plus, you as a person have grown. You’ve gotten older. Things have happened in your life, and all that stuff hopefully informs your work somehow.

When Carey proposed this odd rehearsal process, I thought it might be a good thing for this play. It lends itself to somebody working on it alone, unlike a typical piece of theater where there’s a lot more dialogue involved. And, I thought, even if it’s only five months, maybe coming back to it later . . . there’s a process of osmosis that happens, and even though it may not be in the forefront of your mind every single day (like it is when you’re in a regular four-week rehearsal process), it’s always there with you. You see something and it reminds you of a moment in the play, or you hear something and it reminds you of

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something your character says. It’s always with me. I never leave it. If I have long drives, I speak the words out loud and I hope they’re going to be there.

you mentioned that in this play you talk quite a bit more than olympia. this experience seems to echo an older canadian experience you have shared: a.c.t.’s production of FOR THE PLEASURE OF

SEEING HER AGAIN. Even though Vigil is a series of monologues, it’s very much a dialogue: I am very dependent on Olympia. It’s not like a one-man show or anything like that. Olympia and I did the opposite in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, years ago [2002], written by the brilliant [Quebecois playwright] Michel Tremblay. Olympia and I had a very special time with that play. That play is very sweet and full of a real sort of pure sentiment about a man finally finding a way to thank his mother for everything she gave him, which influenced his artistry and his career. It was a very good experience for Olympia and myself. We did that play both at a.c.t. and at Williamstown in Massachusetts. Of course, we worked together on Hecuba years before that [1995, 1998], so we have a long history together. In For the Pleasure, Olympia had the bulk of the language and had a lot of long, long speeches to learn, as I do in this play. So it’s Olympia and myself again, but this time the tables are turned.

Olympia Dukakis and Marco Barricelli rehearsing For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again at A.C.T. in 2002. Photo by Kevin Berne.

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when you agreed to take on this project, you had recently started your new job as artistic director of shakespeare santa cruz. it was at a time when you wanted to concentrate on being an artistic director and you were doing very limited acting jobs. what made you think, “okay, this is a project i want to act in”?It’s back at a.c.t. on the Geary stage. I still think the Geary is one of the most beauti-ful theaters in America, and it’s a real privilege to play there. There was the chance to be around all my friends at a.c.t., with whom I’ve spent a large portion of my career. There was the chance to work again for Carey, who has been very important in my career, not only with all the shows I’ve done at a.c.t., but with Carey herself. Carey and I have worked on 16 plays together in our careers. Not many actors have a chance to work so exclusively with one director.

Then there’s the fact that, of course, I like the play and I responded to the oddness of it. I want to say “creepy,” but that’s not the right word. It’s kind of disturbing. I was laugh-ing while I was reading, but it was disturbing laughter, and I like that kind of theater: it’s playing two levels at once, which I like. Then there was a chance, of course, to work with Olympia again, and who’s going to say no to that, right? And there was the chance to actually work with Morris. Morris, who wrote it, was also directing it, and I thought that would be a very interesting experience and not something I’ve done a lot of in my career. Interesting and also intimidating, in a way, because Morris has directed this play before (to great acclaim), and has played my role before (to huge acclaim), so I have to admit that, as wonderful as it is, it’s very intimidating at the same time.

how has that been in the rehearsal process?Oh, he’s a really mean bastard. He’s very mean to me. He makes me feel inadequate and insecure all the time. [Laughter] No, Morris is very great and wonderful. I only worked with him for three-plus weeks in the [fall segment of the] rehearsal process, but I already know Morris is the kind of director that I would love to work with again, any time. There are a few people that you meet along your career and you think, “Yeah, I like working with this person, but I could take it or leave it in the future.” But Morris is one of those guys where you really feel like you’re in good hands. I have an enormous amount of trust in him, not just because this is his play, but in his eye as a director. He’s very astute. He’s one of the good ones.

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what in the character you’re playing speaks to you, and what scares you?Oh god, what doesn’t scare me? Everything, every syllable of it scares me. What speaks to me? I think that people think that actors by nature are such gregarious, outgoing, social, wonderful people that everyone loves and loves being around, etc., but I’ve never felt that way. I don’t think I’m as extreme as this character, Kemp, but there is an element of me that feels like a real outsider, and certainly a loner. I know that that’s true about me. He’s somebody who is always on the periphery. He had a desire to be part of the group, to be part of “something,” but he doesn’t really have the ability to do that. He’s one of those people who’s been marginalized all his life. And there are reasons for it. He, obviously, as we hear through the course of the play, had a very strange (to put it lightly) upbringing: an odd relationship with his mother and even odder relationship with his father. This is a guy who’s been alone his whole life. He’s one of those people that nobody really notices. He works at a bank, and, as he’s sitting at his desk, he has a huge, rich life going on inside his head about everything that’s going on with everybody else at the bank. Everything that’s going on in the world. It’s a vibrant, active life, and he’s full of opinions about it, but he has nowhere to put it. He doesn’t share it with anybody. He claims that he doesn’t like people, yet he has a desperate need for relationship. And I don’t mean a sexual relationship; I mean any kind of relationship with anybody. He’s alone.

For me, the play is about disenfranchisement, and tremendous longing and tremendous need being fulfilled in ways that are the least expected. It’s about two disenfranchised, lonely people finding . . . I want to say finding comfort in each other, but it only comes through misguided attempts and failure and . . . I don’t know: you’ll have to come and see for yourself, and make up your own mind.

i was just thinking, when this play came to you, you were dealing with having discovered that you had cancer and the beginning of chemotherapy. now that you’ve talked about kemp’s solitude, is there some connection there because of the weight of that kind of experience, that brush with mortality?I don’t know. There might be. If there is, it’s probably unconscious, or subconscious. [Kemp is] somebody with enormous needs, as I had when I was going through chemo. But ulti-mately, at some point, there’s an inability for anyone to really help you. So you are really alone, in a sense, even though I had my partner, I had my family, I had my friends, and all of that. It is a very singular experience in all senses of that word.

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Kemp has this enormous need for help, but he doesn’t have the tools. He doesn’t have the ability in life to connect with anybody. Even if someone were to offer help, he would not know how to accept it. He would probably say that it has to do with other people, but, I think, looking from the outside at him, it would be his inability. And we all know people like that. There are people you see and you know that they’re alone, and part of you wants to reach out to them, but the other part of you knows that this is just a very strange, odd person, and you’re not sure you want to open that Pandora’s box of trying to relate to him. I think Kemp is, in a way, his own worst enemy. Having cancer informs absolutely everything in your life to a certain extent, so to say that it’s not informing the way I think about this character would not be true, but I don’t think it’s conscious.

the other big adventure in your life since you left a.c.t. has been becoming an artistic director, which is something you had wished for for quite some time. what are your favorite things about being an artistic director, and what are your favorite things about being an actor?My favorite thing about being an artistic director is being a producer: to bring the right people in on the right project at the right time. To be able to stand in the back of a dark theater and watch the show that you brought to these people unfold onstage. To watch the people become enchanted with something that maybe they had not expected or had not known previously. That’s pretty great. I really love that.

I think my favorite part about being an actor is rehearsing. I love the rehearsal. I love the rehearsal a lot more than I love the performance, I have to admit. I love being in a room with other actors and with a director that you like and respect and trust. Whatever that process is of trying to find the zone where you’re suddenly in a moment that actu-ally surprises you and is not expected. There’s that moment of letting go—when you’ve worked so hard and you’ve done whatever the research is and you’ve learned the words and you’ve become intimate with the script and the text—and then all of a sudden you let it go and something happens between two people or inside yourself that’s surprising and unexpected. You’re connected, somehow, to the material, to the language, to another person onstage, to the audience. You feel all of it at once. If you’re in a rehearsal room, it’s with everyone in the room. If you’re onstage acting, it’s with an audience. But it happens much less in performance. It does happen, but you can’t count on it really. It doesn’t happen with any regularity in performance.

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do you find yourself using different sides of your mind when you do one or the other?As an artistic director the scope of your vision is much wider, and there are a lot of factors to take into account. It’s just nonstop; there are lots of fires to put out every single day. It’s managing a group of people. It’s managing a business, even though it’s a not-for-profit business. In my particular case it’s managing a university system. There are all those things you have to think about.

As an actor, of course, you don’t. It’s a much narrower focus. I’m certainly focused on people: I’m focused on the people I’m onstage with or in rehearsal with, etc. But as an actor if I’m doing a scene and I think, “You know what I need in this scene? What I need is a huge vase that I can smash.” And you want that and try to see if there’s a way to make that happen. As an artistic director, if an actor needs something like that, it’s not just, “Well, it would be the best thing for the scene,” but, “Can we afford it? Do we have the people to make it? Do we have the material to make it? What from our budget is going to go to balance out this new element that we have to bring in? Is it going to be possible? And if it isn’t going to be possible (which more often than not is the case), how am I now going to approach this actor and keep him happy but tell him he can’t have what he wants?” So there is that kind of negotiation. I learned in my first year that being an artistic director is not about building a vision as much as it is about managing compromise.

so have you become a less demanding actor because you understand more of the other side? I don’t know if I’m less demanding, but I’m a whole lot more understanding. If somebody tells me no, I get it. I really understand why we can’t have that chandelier to swing from, and I won’t ask again.

and what about being an actor for so many years has informed your approach to being an artistic director?All artistic directors should be actors. It’s about empathy, but it’s more than that: it’s a real understanding, not an intellectual understanding, but a real profound understanding of what is going to be needed in order to set the tone for these artists to do the best work that is in them. I just feel like I know that innately. I can’t always provide it because of whatever restrictions we have, but sometimes I can, and I love that part of it. I love opening the door to watch an artist perform to the best of his or her abilities. I think more actors should be artistic directors in this country. Frankly, I’m sorry that there aren’t more of them.

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playing in a.c.t.’s atticAn Interview with a.c.t. Properties Supervisor Ryan Parham

by dan rubin

The story of Vigil takes place in the cluttered attic bedroom of a poorly maintained home belonging to Olympia Dukakis’s character, the aged and ailing Grace.

Playwright Morris Panych explains: “As Grace got older and her world started to close in on her, she just went farther up the stairs” until she could not ascend any higher. She sur-rounded herself with a personal history to which she is no longer contributing. We asked a.c.t.’s properties supervisor what goes into creating the clutter of a retired hoarder.

with a set that is so full of stuff, where is the line between prop design and set design? As with any show, sets is still in charge of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling pieces, doors, windows, things like that. Any item you would put into a moving truck when you change residences: that’s considered a prop. That’s a good way of thinking about it. It can even come down to lighting fixtures and rugs and pillows. Food, dried goods, canned goods, bicycles.

so it’s not simply that if it is static onstage it’s part of a set, and if it has the capability of moving it’s a prop? what is the bed in VIGIL?The bed would be a prop. Any sort of furniture piece is a prop. The lines can get a little bit blurred, like they will get blurred with The Tosca Project coming up [in June]. There is a huge 15-foot-long bar, and that’s in set world (I imagine . . . I’m hoping), because it is more of a permanent fixture of that room. But then with something like that there is definitely a lot of coordination between sets and props: sets will build that Tosca bar, and then props will dress it out with the bottles, the beer tap system, the espresso machine, all the glassware and barware. There’s collaboration: sets will make the base structure of an item and then props will take over and dress it out or trim it out.

is there anything like that in VIGIL?I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty straightforward. All the items onstage are furniture items. This is Grace’s attic, where all her leftover junk from all her life—including photo albums, an accordion she played when she was eight years old, newspapers and magazines—they’re all in this room. It’s all her possessions, and that definitely falls in props’s world.

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when you have a world defined by a specific character’s stuff, do you have long conversations with the director about that character? for example, how do you know grace played an accordion when she was eight?Sometimes I would have that conversation with the director, but with Ken MacDonald designing . . . [he and Morris Panych have] been talking about this play for years, so he’s the go-to guy. They’ll talk about what items are actually in the space and then, when I come on board, I get more involved with the actual actor usage of those items. Like, Ken and Morris will create this stack of trunks near the window that Marco [Barricelli, who plays Kemp,] needs to climb up. They just want a stack of trunks. I come in and say, “Well, we probably shouldn’t put the wicker trunk on the bottom. We should probably use a metal trunk.” That’s how I get involved: helping them physically shape a world that will withstand theatricality.

tell me about the “death machine” that kemp builds for grace when he grows impatient waiting for her to die from natural causes.It’s based on a photo [from a past production], because Ken and Morris have done this production numerous times before, though there are only a few elements that are constant: they love the fact that it is made out of one of those portable commodes that invalids would have in their room. So it is on a castered dolly with a portable commode. There’s a big lever. Because it is so huge, it of course doesn’t fit through the doorway into this attic space, so the crossbar is lowered. It comes into the room. It’s raised up. There’s a jerry-rigged counterweight system.

do we see kemp bring the machine in?Yeah, we see him bring it in, set it up, hook up the jumper cables to the battery. Really the constants are: the commode, the hangman structure, the car battery, and there’s a frying pan [activated by] a big switch that will allow it to drop. Kemp gives Grace the choice: she could die an electrical death or from a massive blow to the head. Other than that, the machine is made from basically whatever you can find in the props shop, junk stores, refuse places, as far as gearing it out, making it look like it was built by someone who has never really built anything before.

do you have any idea what those elements are going to be?We’re still at the research stage, but we have the battery and the commode and some random pulleys, ropes, and levers and stuff like that. This week we are actually going to

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be working on the frying pan. It’s a cast-iron frying pan that swings down, and it’s sup-posed to look like it hits Marco in the head and knocks him onto the bed frame, which is then electrocuted. We can’t use a real frying pan, because if it does actually make contact with him it would do some damage. So we’re going to be researching and doing some experiments as far as what kind of rubber or silicone or foam we can use that will give the appearance and have the rigidity of a fry pan, but if it does make contact it’s not going to do much damage.

is the selection of materials you use the primary precaution you take with something like this, or are there other failsafes in the apparatus itself to prevent injuries?It definitely has to be designed to operate the same way every time. The actor has to be comfortable enough to know what to expect. With something like the death machine, you don’t want any improvisation. Technically it would fall under stage violence, so it is highly choreographed and metered out, as far as the actor counting off his steps, timing it to make

Sketch of the “death machine” for Vigil by properties supervisor Ryan Parham

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sure that all safety precautions are met and everyone is in control the whole time, no matter how out of control it looks.

going back to how you create the world: my understanding is that grace basically stopped leaving her house after a certain time and stopped accumulating new stuff.I think that’s right. The items are definitely dated. The newest items we’re using are from the late ’70s, early ’80s. The building itself is pre-’50s. Ken and Morris came out here [to the a.c.t. scene shop in the Mission] and had a field day of just pointing and pulling: “Oh! Give me one of those! Oh, give me that! Give me this!” We’d give them truckloads of junk, and then they would start shaping their world in the rehearsal room. There is definitely editing that goes on. They have probably gotten rid of some items, but for the most part it’s been, “Well, if we’re not going to directly use this, we’ll just add it to the pile in the back.” Amazingly enough, they are pretty much using everything they pulled in one way or another.

did you have to go out and get anything for this show?We had to get the accordion. And newspaper: she has piles and piles and piles of news-paper, which gets tricky because, when she was collecting newspapers, they were all black and white, but there’re really no black-and-white newspapers these days except obituaries and classifieds, and the audience can really recognize those sections. So you start delving into foreign newspapers or black-and-white tabloids or making black-and-white copies of newspapers and wrapping colored newspaper in black-and-white pages to add bulk. If the papers are just sitting there it is a lot easier; it’s the ones that they actually open and fold

The “death machine” in Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company’s 2007 production of Vigil. Photograph by Ken MacDonald.

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and show the audience that are a build-it-from-scratch project.The rest of it: we have a lot of junk in our storage. We have the busted bentwoods and

the crutches and the punched-out paintings, the gramophone, the chandeliers, the arm-chairs that are missing a leg.

so this is like a.c.t.’s attic. Pretty much. Subscription holders should be able to recognize tons of items from previous

productions: “Oh, that’s the hall tree from Little Foxes!” There’s a trunk in there that was in the first two previews of the first run of A Christmas Carol. A purple arm-chair from American Buffalo. The gramo-phone has been in a lot of things; it is one of the workhorses of a.c.t. The bed frame might be from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but we are busting it up and break-ing bits off and scratching paint on it. The bedspreads are actually the curtains from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had lace panels over floral print curtains, and Ken saw the curtains and said, “Oh, these are horribly beautiful. Let’s get them up there!”

after a show, it all comes back to the prop shop?Everything has a home back in stock. We’re pretty much stuffed to the gills

right now, so when we have a production when we actually have to buy a new item we have to be pretty judicious about what we then have to get rid of. We only have so much room. But some items you just hang on to for coolness factor—like the golden city of Troy from War Music. We still have that.

Rehearsal props for A.C.T.’s Vigil. Photo by assistant stage man-ager Danielle Callaghan.

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the old and the lonelyby dan rubin

Playwright Morris Panych has been fascinated by death since he began writing plays. In 7 Stories, his first play, the nurse of 100-year-old Lillian converses with a suicidal

man (simply named Man) while he stands on the ledge outside her apartment window: “Where’s the nobility in watching people hang on to the last shred of a meager existence? Hooked up to every imaginable medical apparatus. Jumping is the only way to go these days, otherwise you run the serious risk of a protracted survival.” One might view this caretaker as callous if her elderly ward did not share similar views:

lillian: When you’re a hundred years old you’ll understand everything. And then you’ll die.man: Why wait?lillian: Something interesting might happen. But then again, it might not. I think you should jump now.man: You do?lillian: If that’s what you want to do, I think you should do it.man: There really is no reason to live, is there?lillian: Not really.

As seen here and in Vigil, Panych is intrigued by the vacuous period of life created by modern health care’s delay of death. As reported in a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center entitled Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality, 39 million Americans are over the age of 65. This demographic currently composes 13% of the population, up from 4% in 1900. This number will get a bump in 2011, when 76 million baby boomers turn 65, and will rise to 20% by 2050.

Interestingly, Panych’s Lillian has lived a good decade longer than the average person desires to live: 89 years, according to the study. Only 8% of those asked have a desire to pass the century mark. This might be because one in six adults over the age of 65 are lonely. One in ten say they feel like they aren’t needed. Statistically speaking, however, they’re about as happy as everyone else, and, Growing Old in America finds, “older adults report experiencing [negative benchmarks] at lower levels (often far lower) than younger adults report expecting to encounter them when they grow old.” That is to say, it’s not as bad as we think it will be.

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Outliving one’s partners and peers is an unfortunate yet predictable circumstance that makes maintaining meaningful connections more of a challenge, but loneliness, regardless of the period of life in which it occurs, is a frequent theme of Panych’s plays, which are populated with socially inept loners. John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Chicago, would argue that the playwright’s focus is right on time: as a society we are suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.” A 1985 survey asked Americans how many confidants they have. The most common answer was three. In 2004, however, the most common answer (from 25% of those asked) was zero. Technological social media such as Facebook, twitter, and mmorpgs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) can be useful connectors, Cacioppo acknowledges, but they are simultaneously dangerously supplying “a façade of being connected . . . [that] can make you lonelier.” And loneliness leads to unhappiness. Cacioppo writes:

In surveys to determine the factors that contribute most to human happi-ness, respondents consistently rate connection to friends and family—love, intimacy, social affiliation—above wealth or fame, even above physical health. This should come as no great surprise. We are social animals, descended from a common ancestor who generated all the other social primates. It may well be that the need to send and receive, interpret and relay increasingly complex social cues is what drove the evolution of our expanded cerebral cortex—the reasoning part of the brain. After all, it is our ability to think, to pursue long-term objectives, and to form bonds and act collectively that allowed us to emerge as the planet’s dominant species.

This may be why Panych’s protagonists are rarely successful. Connections between char-acters are made accidentally, usually despite their best efforts to avoid them. These bonds last just long enough for the characters to realize the benefits of companionship, before their new friendships dissolve and they are plunged back into isolation. In 7 Stories, Man takes Lillian’s advice and jumps, but his umbrella opens and he glides to the building across the street. He jumps back to his original ledge in hopes of telling Lillian of his adventure. In the brief interim, however, she has died. Man is alone once more. At least Lillian is not.

SOURCES Monte Burke, “Loneliness Can Kill You,” Forbes (August 24, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0824/opinions-neuroscience-loneliness-ideas-opinions_print.html; John Cacioppo, “Epidemic of Loneliness,” Psychology Today (May 3, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/loneliness/200905/epidemic-loneliness; Morris Panych, 7 Stories (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990); Paul Taylor, project director, Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality, Pew Research Center (released June 29, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009, http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/736/getting-old-in-america.

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the “perfect existential country”A Brief History of Canadian Theater

by dan rubin

“It appears that the cultivation which we imported and consumed, much as we import and consume fig bars, is not adequate to sustain the spirit in times of stress. And it is a crisis of spirit we are experiencing as we slide through the millstones of history.”

—George Ryga, author of the groundbreaking1967 Canadian play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, in 1977

“Canada is the perfect existential country, because it’s constantly searching for answers.”

—Morris Panych, 2007

Iris, a precocious ten-year-old, opens Morris Panych’s 2003 award-winning hit, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, by announcing to the audience, “I live in a country where nothing

happens. In a town where nothing happens. In a house, where nothing much has ever really happened. Until now.” In a sense, all of Panych’s plays could start with a similar statement. Nothing of much significance has happened to the characters who populate these dramas, until, that is, the curtain rises. The plays attempt to capture these abnormally interesting moments in these otherwise boring lives—moments with which these charac-ters are ill-equipped to deal because their circumstances have never before pressured them to define themselves. Panych’s characters often have hopes about who they will become and regrets about who they have been; they rarely have any concept of who they are. When they do happen to be living examined lives, they are usually suicidal. In this way Panych’s characters aptly dramatize Canadian culture’s ongoing quest for definition.

For much of its history, Canada had no independent identity. In the late 1960s, when as a people Canadians finally began looking in the mirrors their playwrights had been trying to hold up, they were not entirely impressed with what they saw. But they didn’t turn away, and over the last 40 years the country has begun to support a class of playwrights who continue to hunt for a national character. In doing so, these artisans have had to overcome 200 years of tradition of Canada defining itself only by comparison to what it was not: it was not Great Britain, it was not France, and it was not the United States.

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In 1760, after 150 years of French dominion in Canada, the British arrived, quickly took over, and began their occupation. In order to indoctrinate the local Frenchmen—and to keep their own troops entertained—amateur garrison performances of Shakespeare and hits from the Restoration implemented the tradition of cultural colonialism. As English Canada spread out and grew prosperous, foreign touring companies delivered melodramas and classics to fire-prone opera houses, prominently built in the center of every major town. Local actors were restricted to supporting roles; Canadian voices were discouraged.

World War i momentarily silenced all theater, as Canada was asked to play a significant international role for the first time. The country came out on the other side of the Great War with a sense of national pride and a desire for a national identity. This desire had been growing since 1867, when the British colonies remaining in North America were united under the British North American Act to become the Dominion of Canada. A number of Canadian voices emerged, but despite this moment of cultural celebration, the “establish-ment of Canada, moulded [sic] by its long, colonial past, endorsed the familiar British, or embraced the ubiquitous u.s. cultural exports as it had always done,” writes historian Brian Kennedy. Writer Robert Fulford, one of Canada’s best-known cultural journalists, remembers this period: “My generation of Canadians grew up believing that, if we were very good or very smart, or both, we would some day graduate from Canada.”

During the first half of the 20th century, Canada continued to bring in shows from abroad and lacked major professional theaters of its own. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the craft of making theater was preserved by amateur groups called Little Theatres. These companies, however, were not enough to support Canadian writers, who found work with the Canadian Broadcasting Centre (cbc). Established in 1932, the cbc began broadcast-ing radio plays in 1936. Between 1944 and 1955, the cbc’s two radio play programs received ratings bested only by hockey game broadcasts. Indigenous drama could be heard over the airwaves, just not in the theater.

Hardships for playwrights were not limited to English Canada: in Quebec the Francophone theater similarly suffered. Since the defeat of the French by the British in 1759, the French-speaking province’s cultural identity as a whole struggled to survive on an otherwise English-speaking continent. Additionally, theater was bound by the Catholic Church’s demand that dramas preach Christianity, as well as by the state’s crippling cen-sorship. As a result, only histories and religious dramas came out of Quebec until the mid 20th century. Unlike English Canada, however, this region, by virtue of speaking a dif-ferent language, could still boast a stronger sense of identity than the rest of the country, and important playwrights—Gratien Gélinas, Marcel Dubé, and Michel Tremblay—did emerge starting in the late 1940s.

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The Massey Commission Report of 1951 brought significant change to the theatrical landscape of the country. As had happened with the First, the Second World War brought a wave of nationalism. In its wake, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent created the commission to make recommendations on how to best encourage cultural fields “which express national feeling, promote common understanding, and add to the variety and richness of Canadian life, rural as well as urban.”1 The report’s findings articulated to politicians what was already obvious to artists: “Canada . . . was losing its culture, its arts, its artists, and its scholars to its friendly neighbour [sic] to the south,” summarizes theater scholar Don Rubin. Out of the report came the Canada Council of the Arts, entrusted with doling out federal subsidies for professional theater projects and the construction of regional playhouses. “Suddenly,” writes Rubin, “major cities across the country were producing the classic plays from world dramatic literature with professional companies. Actors were being developed, designers were appearing, and newspapers even began hiring full-time theatre critics.”

Even then, however, artistic directors were frequently hired from abroad and, not familiar with (or not confident in) the local writing pool, programmed their larger spaces with British, Irish, and u.s. hits, regulating their annual token Canadian offering (if they had even that) to smaller second stages. Canadian playwrights were still dependent on shoestring-budget “beggars’ theatres” for productions.

The profession continued in this way until 1967, when the country’s centennial celebra-tion renewed cries once again for a national identity that was something more than their colonial identity. In November of that year, at the Vancouver Playhouse, came George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a play “which ostensibly anatomized Canada’s treatment of its minorities . . . [and showcased] Ryga’s earlier preoccupations with the dehumanization of Western man in general and Canadian man in particular,” Rubin explains. The piece was a blow against what Ryga called the “transplanted English and American theatre of illusion to which a small percentage of our population—notably, those who have never known the biting eloquence of unemployment or enforced welfarism—cling like aging wolves to an arthritic moose.” It also celebrated what Ryga saw as the evolution of a national literature:

A qualitative change is taking place in the language of our theatre. The com-mon speech of people, carefully studied and reproduced, is now being elevated into theatrical poetry. Regional speech mannerisms are no longer treated as aberrations—they are examined and integrated into emotional lines not previ-ously explored.

1. Report of the Royal Commission on the National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1951), xi.

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Rita Joe was a cultural turning point, but theaters did not begin producing indigenous work overnight. In 1970, the seven major regional theaters produced the work of a total of two Canadian playwrights. The national fervor surrounding the centennial was a momen-tary blip on the public’s radar. Wasserman writes, “Modern Canadian drama was born out of an amalgam of the new consciousness of the age—social, political, and aesthetic—with the new Canadian self-consciousness. Since the larger theatres were generally unsympa-thetic and unaccommodating to both these forces, an even newer Canadian theatre had to be invented, an alternate theatre.”

These alternate theaters refused to let the 1967 impulses fade. In Toronto, Factory Theatre Lab set out to prove that “there was no lack of Canadian playwrights; they were just waiting to be discovered and encouraged,” writes Wasserman. Theatre Passe Muraille gravitated towards local subject matter and collective creation. And Tarragon Theatre, founded in 1971, cemented Toronto’s position as the Canadian center of new work by bal-ancing artistic and commercial success and bringing Canadian drama into the mainstream. In Vancouver, Tamahnous Theatre provided a home for progressive new work, including a special brand of small-cast musical, establishing a groundwork for works like Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald’s 1982 cabaret Last Call!

The government grants that had helped the regional theaters prosper provided the financial infrastructure for new companies, which sprouted up everywhere in 1971 and 1972 to fulfill the national interest in homegrown work, but the financial disparity between the regional theaters and the alternate theaters was still striking. In 1971, a group of playwrights met to consider “The Dilemma of the Playwright in Canada,” which resulted in a number of recommendations, the boldest of which was a call for a 50% Canadian content quota for all theaters receiving government funding. Theaters resisted, but after the controversy went public, the Canada Council politely suggested to its recipients, in a nonbinding manner, to do more Canadian plays. By the 1972–73 season, nearly 50% of the plays produced by subsidized theaters were Canadian. The theaters also began to commission new plays by local playwrights. “One lesson of this era,” writes Kennedy of the state of playwriting in Canada following the centennial, “is that any national drama is limited only by the extent to which the country encourages and financially supports its native talent. If writers can make a living in theatre, or at least be assured of a venue for their work, then the way each writer chooses to interpret the Canadian reality—his or her choice of dramatic style and structure—has no limits.”

In English Canada, Ryga’s Rita Joe and Fortune and Men’s Eyes—written by John Herbert in 1965 but only popularized in Canada in the 1970s after its success in New York and London—became the first true classics in the dramatic canon. In Quebec,

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Michel Tremblay, who shocked French-Canadian audiences with his frank working-class drama Les belles-soeurs (The Sisters-in-Law) in 1968, by 1972 had written his grand 13-play cycle spotlighting the culturally and sexually marginalized of Canadian society. Since the late ’60s, Canadian theater has brought forth a substantial body of plays. In 1973, David Freeman’s brutally naturalistic Creeps helped launch Factory Lab and Tarragon Theatre, which are still dedicated to fostering new work, and set the tone for much of the Canadian work of the decade. Also a 1973 trendsetter, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt, by Rick Salutin, cap-tures the power of collectively created docudramas. In Wasserman’s anthology he acknowl-edges the works of Sharon Pollock, James Reaney, Michael Cook, George F. Walker, David Fennario, David French, Erika Ritter, John Gray, and Eric Peterson as “representative of the primary patterns into which modern Canadian drama has shaped itself.” “Probably the strongest impression made by Canadian plays through the mid 1970s was of a theatre of the underdog and the outsider,” Wasserman writes. “The dramatic focus is on the losers rather than the winners, the victims (or the process of victimization) rather than the victors.”

Morris Panych continues this trend today, but has pushed away from the naturalism of the ’70s. His characters are not just outcasts; they are hyperbolically peripheral, even to their own lives. He seems to be asking how much longer Canadians are going to cripple themselves with a national pastime of reclusiveness. How much longer will they suffer their own insecurities? Panych’s dramaturgy suggests that Canada’s national character has been identified; now it is time for it to grow.

SOURCES S. M. Crean, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture (Don Mills, ON: General Publishing, 1976); Ken Gass, “What Is a Canadian Play?” in The Factory Lab Anthology, edited by Connie Brissenden (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974); Brian Kennedy, The Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid: A Compact History of Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004); Don Rubin, “Creeping Toward a Culture: The Theatre in English Canada Since 1945,” Canadian Theatre Review 1 (winter 1974) 6–21; George Ryga, “Contemporary Theatre and Its Language,” Canadian Theatre Review 14 (spring 1977) 4–9; ibid., “The Need for a Mythology,” Canadian Theatre Review 16 (fall 1977) 4–6; ibid., “Theatre in Canada: A Viewpoint on Its Development and Future,” Canadian Theatre Review 1 (summer 1974) 28–32; Jerry Wasserman, Modern Canadian Plays, revised edition (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986).

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questions to consider

i. Why doesn’t Grace speak for the majority of the play?

2. Why did Kemp idolize Grace when he was young?

3. What reasons does Kemp give for coming to Grace’s home? Are there other reasons that are left unsaid?

4. Do Kemp and Grace ever find comfort in each other?

5. What do you learn about Grace from the clutter in her attic room? For returning patrons, what props do you recognize from past shows?

for further information

Cacioppo, John T. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York: w. w. Norton, 2008.

Kennedy, Brian. The Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid: A Compact History of Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005.

Panych, Morris. 7 Stories. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990.

——. Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003.

——. The Dishwashers. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.

——. The Ends of the Earth. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993.

Rewa, Natalie. Scenography in Canada: Selected Designers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Rubin, Don. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004.

Taylor, Paul. Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality. Pew Research Center. Released June 29, 2009. Accessed February 9, 2009. http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/736/getting-old-in-america.