Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike 

By Christopheer Durang

Directed by Michael Shamata 

The Belfry Theatre

April 14 – May 17, 2015 

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Playwright Christopher Durang admits there are echoes of Chekov in his 2013 Tony Award-winning play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. He likes to say he’s taken Chekhov characters and scenes and “put them into a blender.” That’s a pretty fair description.

The setting for the play is rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. (Durang and his long-time partner John Augustine moved to Bucks County several years ago, and Durang says it was this move to the country that turned his mind toward Chekov.)

In the play, Vanya, Sonia and Masha are 50-something siblings whose amateur thespian parents named them after Chekov characters. Vanya and his adopted sister Sonia stayed home to nurse their parents through dementia and, after their deaths, stayed on at the family farm (think Uncle Vanya). Masha left home and became a B-grade movie star (think of a technologically-updated Arkadina in The Seagull). Masha’s money supports the farm, as well as Sonia and Vanya, who don’t have jobs.

As the play opens, Masha (played with unabashed self-absorption by Brenda Robbins) has come home to tell her siblings that she has decided to sell the house. As in The Cherry Orchard, this threatened loss of the family estate provides the core conflict and theme of the play. In this production, the importance of the home is established by a handsome set designed by Cory Sincennes, who earned a degree in Architectural Studies from Carleton University before studying design at Ryerson Theatre School. The peace of the countryside is effectively evoked by lighting designer Brian Kenney, whose warm red dawns and sunsets flood through the expansive leaded glass window upstage.

Another Chekhovian theme, unrequited love, plagues the title characters. Sonia (played by Vancouver actress Deborah Williams) suffers from a life-long yearning for Vanya (played by lauded Canadian actor R. H. Thomson) who has no interest in her “that way” because he is gay (but apparently not in a relationship). Masha, married and divorced five times, is in a relationship with a much younger “boy-toy,” Spike (played by Lee Majdoub), who is fond of disrobing down to his underwear in public and flaunting his well-muscled body, much to the discomfort of both Masha and Vanya.

As in Chekhov, there is also a pervasive sense of missed opportunity and loss, and of the approaching end of an era. At one point, Vanya walks into the room and finds both Sonia and Masha sobbing loudly, Sonia because she feels she’s never lived, and Masha because she feels she’s lived but lost.

It is left to Vanya to voice misgivings about the perceived end of an era, which he does in a 10-minute Baby Boomer rant that bemoans the loss of everything from postage stamps that had to be licked to the passing of such 1950s “shared experiences” as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Bishop Sheen’s TV sermons. This long rant demanded the complete unravelling of Vanya’s carefully buttoned-down control. Thomson, who had just days earlier won a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement, was, despite that recognition, not quite up to the task on opening night. His choked delivery seemed too reservedly Canadian for this quintessentially American tirade.

There is also, as in Chekov’s plays, a certain genre confusion in this play. Chekhov insisted he was writing comedies, but his plays were produced as tragedies, or, at least, as lugubrious drama. Durang’s play is billed as a comedy, and no one would mistake it for a tragedy—Williams’ transformative impersonation of Maggie Smith alone is a send-up worth the price of admission—but this play pushes well beyond comedy into farce. Any doubt is dispelled by Cassandra, the housekeeper (played with appropriate exaggeration by Carmela Sison in her Belfry debut), who, like her mythological name-sake, receives presentiments of the future; she also resorts to voodoo at crucial moments. The only non-farcical character is Nina (played with sweet sincerity by Yoshie Bancroft), a modern-day version of the young, unspoiled Nina in The Seagull.

You don’t have to know Chekov to enjoy this play, but, if you do, it’ll add an extra layer of texture to your pleasure. When Sonia insists she’s a “wild turkey” and your mind flies to The Seagull, your laugh will broaden into a guffaw.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover.

For Your Safety Please Hold On

Kayla Czaga

Nightwood Editions

96 pages, $18.95

Reviewed by Kelly Shepherd

It’s exciting to review a book with so many award-winning poems. I was a little nervous, even, when starting to read it. But I was quickly drawn in to Kayla Czaga’s large and eccentric (yet eerily familiar) extended family, and within the first few pages of her debut collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On, I willingly got into the car for the road trip, for the small town coffee joints and the provincial parks of northern B.C. But this is not a book about the road, although it is haunted by stories of leaving one place and arriving at another; its concerns are much more domestic. It’s a geography of interiors, landmarked with brown floral couches and potato salad on soggy paper plates and houseplants shivering in the cold.

Originally from Kitimat, Kayla Czaga lives in Vancouver where she recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Some of the poems in this collection have won several of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, including The Fiddlehead‘s 23rd annual Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, The Malahat Review‘s 2012 Far Horizon’s Award for Poetry, and an Editor’s Choice Award in ARC Poetry Magazine‘s 2012 Poem of the Year Contest. Among others.

For Your Safety Please Hold On is divided into five sections that follow the narrator through sketches of her parents and family, from small town childhood to living alone in the city. Despite their often somber themes—the unspoken violence of childhood, family illnesses and deaths, the Sandy Hook school shooting—there is nonetheless a playfulness and an almost joyous energy running throughout these poems. There is wordplay: in the long poem “Many Metaphorical Birds,” a philosophical coffee barista “is Hegeling with a customer” and “Adornoing his pastry case.” There are surprising turns of phrase on every page. The family is “wicked with worry”; a nickel is a “slender metaphor.”

“The Drunk Uncle,” one of the family case-studies, wears “the same old skull T-shirts for thirty years / to unnerve his mother.” He has “buddies for every occasion”; he “yammers / the nails, beats the dead horse, bags the wind, / blows it hot and beery into your face.” Attending the same family gathering is “The Decorative Aunt,” who belongs to “the Ativan side of the family, / bejewelled and bleached, leather-shoed / from therapeutic tanning-bed snoozes.” In “The Other Grandmother” both the family legend and the immigrant experience are writ large, almost approaching hagiography.

“Your other grandmother walked barefoot across Europe with your infant father.

[…]

Your other grandmother drank her husbands
under the coffee table. She slapped your cheeks
with stories, kissed you with myth, carried
on into all hours, carrying children on
both her hips and shoulders.”

These irreverent family portraits, replete with awkward personal details and pop-culture references, are reminiscent of characters in an early Douglas Coupland novel. In some instances, however, their detached tone might be a little too effective: they feel disconnected, almost callous. It’s as if the narrator were an ethnographer attempting objective field notes, but unable to resist using playful figurative language at the same time. The reader isn’t quite sure what to do. When “The Grandmother” is compared to a “silly old child” with “lilac slacks / billowing out from her twig body”—and when the narrator confesses “[w]hen she died you had just started / university in a new city and weren’t / allowed to attend her funeral”—it’s hard to know if the poem intends wry tenderness, or alienation.

Nonetheless, I admire Czaga’s eye for minutiae, for the sense of glow and wonder in the smallest details. These poems are lyrical and funny, honest and sad, sometimes painfully so. The car is cold, the nighttime streets are lonely, and the dashboard is cluttered with distractions and nostalgia, but this is a ride I wouldn’t want to miss.

Kelly Shepherd lives in Edmonton and has a Creative Writing MFA from UBC Okanagan. His fifth poetry chapbook, Fort McMurray Tricksters, was recently published by Vancouver’s Alfred Gustav Press. He is a poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter. 

University of Victoria creative writing professor Bill Gaston’s remarkable insight into human nature, his gentle sense of humour and his imagination make him one of Canada’s most highly acclaimed authors. His previous collections of short stories have received nominations for many national awards, so it is no surprise that his most recent collection, Juliet Was A Surprise, was nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Award in fiction. Gaston recently took time away from his teaching and writing to answer reviewer Janet Ralph’s questions.

When you begin a story, do you always know it’s a short story and not a novel?

I always know, and always the main character determines it for me. It’s really pretty simple: some characters I get very interested in, kind of like we become close friends, and I want to hang out with them to see what they do with their life. That becomes a novel. But many of the characters I come up with are not good-friend material. Anyone who has read my short stories can see this. The main character is often someone you don’t want to spend more than twenty minutes with. They’re interesting, [I hope], but often in the way a car accident is interesting, and some of them are downright warped and nasty. But still worth probing, so to speak. Those become the short stories.

What authors and musicians are you currently reading/listening to?

At the moment I’m reading The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell’s newest, and just reread Pastoralia, by George Saunders. Next is Lee Henderson’s The Road Narrows as You Go. As for music, I’m checking out Alt J’s new album, and I often gravitate to old Eno. Otherwise I listen to our house background music, which is my 16-yr-old daughter’s playlist, and that’s anything from Dixie Chicks to vintage Chili Peppers and some really slimy hiphop.

Do you ever consciously turn off your powers of observation and analysis of people? What do you find most endearing, and most annoying, about human nature?

No. I’m frequently dull, blind, and stupid, but I don’t become that way consciously or deliberately. Though maybe that’s what I do when I grab one beer too many. What I find most endearing is kindness. Most annoying? Pettiness and lack of humour. I include my own sometime petty and humourless self in this, of course.

Cake is probably the most complex character in your recent book because of his peculiar power over people. What are your thoughts about this sort of “other power” some people have?

Well, I have encountered at least a couple—that I know of—people with an undeniable and somewhat magical “power” over others. But Cake I did make up. Mostly, he stands as a kind of metaphor for those who do have power over others, not necessarily a magical kind but the ordinary kind. We see it all the time: it might be charisma, or it might be more hidden, and we see it in families, and on the street. And of course in politics. I think that’s the point of Cake’s character: that often people don’t have a handle on what power they have.

Juliet, the title story, and others are so funny, I wonder if you are laughing as you write. Is there a part of you that identifies with the arborist?

I wouldn’t say I’m laughing out loud, but I might be caught smirking. I do often write what I consider to be funny characters and stories. My sense of humour might be of the driest sort because lots of people seem to miss the humour. Or maybe they just aren’t that funny, I don’t know. But I do identify with characters like the arborist. Here is a person who is socially awkward, with low self-esteem, and eyeglasses 20 years out of date, who thinks too much. He has a carnal angel throwing herself at him, in the form of Juliet—so what’s he supposed to do? It’s very much a set piece male fantasy, but I think everyone can relate to and find funny the dilemma of forbidden fruit and a lack of will power. And, of course, mindless rage and murderous revenge.

Janet Ralph is a UVic student.

Whatever Lola Wants

by George Szanto

Brindle and Glass

424 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

From his heavenly cloud, Ted tells stories about what he sees on Earth. His audience is Lola, once a movie star, now a god, ranking higher than Ted’s status as an immortal. There is a gentle irony in this idea: the gods are out of touch with the world and need storytellers to re-learn their humanity. Szanto establishes this premise with nimble efficiency, exploring the laws of this particular heaven more fully as the novel progresses.

Ted’s story revolves around the conservation-minded Magnussen family and Johnnie Cochan, a developer whose vision of a utopic, hermetically sealed city called Terramac becomes a megalomaniacal obsession. Caught between is Carney, Ted’s son, a disaster-recovery specialist.

The concept of Terramac – where all ecological processes are controlled – raises fascinating questions. What is ecological perfection? How do we define “pristine” in relation to true wilderness? Thematically, Carney’s attraction to chaos mirrors Cochan’s desire for complete control.

Like the American writer/environmentalist Rick Bass, Szanto explores not just our relationship with the natural world, but the way our differing perspectives on nature affect our personal relationships. But whereas Bass’s writing encompasses the minutiae of an ecosystem down to the geological, Szanto is at his best in the human sphere, crafting vivid scenes and dialogue.

Szanto is also an accomplished crime fiction writer, and his gift for creating fast-paced narratives is evident throughout. The prose is energetic and expressive, carrying us through an intricate story covering multiple decades, characters and plot strands. His warm, ironic humour is reminiscent of Jack Hodgins’ stories.

While the Magnussen family is the David to Cochan’s Goliath, every character comes in shades of grey, bearing flaws and neuroses sourced in earlier tragedies. Even Carney, ostensibly the hero who unites the Magnussen family in their fight, is burdened by an incapacity for empathy. Though some characters never rise above their defining traits, the evolution of Carney and others into complex, realistic protagonists is one of the novel’s great satisfactions.

The omniscient point of view – being able to see into the minds of every character – is particularly apt in a novel where an immortal is telling the story. However, the sheer number of points of view, including that of minor characters onstage for a mere page or two, stymies Szanto’s otherwise crisp pace, creating a surfeit of detail and dialogue in some places.

Another risk is in Lola becoming a proxy for the reader’s emotions as she laughs, cries or rages at key points in Ted’s story. This is a tricky balance, as we need to see Lola grow invested in the story, but without us being told how to feel. As for Lola and Ted, their own story, while endearing, takes a while to catch fire.

Quibbles aside, Szanto has created a fictional world of remarkable scope and depth, exploring family, science, poetry and the nature of storytelling itself. He casts a wide net, but his joy in the undertaking is palpable and infectious, making an epic journey feel like light lifting.

Aaron Shepard’s first novel, When is a Man, is published by Brindle and Glass.

Emerging Artists Alumni Series, School of Music, University of Victoria 

Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, Sept. 21

Featuring Sarah Tradewell and West My Friend

Reviewed by Chris Ho

I was skeptical. A classical violinist and chamber-folk band seemed like an unusual pairing for a concert. But Victoria-based musician Sarah Tradewell and local favourite West My Friend proved me wrong.

The inaugural Emerging Artists Alumni Series, featuring graduates from the University of Victoria’s School of Music, made for an eclectic night of music recently at Phillip T. Young Recital Hall. The evening started with Sarah Tradewell, a violinist, music teacher and stage actor, who performed a range of classical pieces, including movements by Bach, Polo, Stravinsky, and Bunch.

Aside from the shaky start where there were some tuning issues, (she had commuted to and from Duncan with the Victoria Symphony that same day), her performance was flawless. As she further progressed into Bach’s Suite No 1. In G Major, I had that feeling you get when you know exactly when the chorus is going to hit in a song you’re hearing for the first time. I wanted the familiarity of a beginning, middle, and end, and that’s exactly what I got. The simplicity and serenity of Bach’s movement was the perfect introduction.

Half way through Bach’s movement, the tempo picked up, as if we’d cut to a film scene where the camera pans wide, revealing the rolling hills of rural England. Tradewell’s music brought many scenes to mind, but what stood out was the final song. She performed a modern piece by Kenji Bunch, playfully titled The 3 G’s, because three strings need to be tuned to G to play it. The suspenseful and rhythmic bowed sections were tempered by sharp pizzicato, eventually building into a powerful finish.

This is when I expected the night to get awkward. I wasn’t sure if the audience would be ready to transition into the realm of chamber-folk after a traditional classical performance. Instead, it felt euphonic to begin the concert with a solo instrumental act, and then follow it up with a full-fledged folk band. It made for a well-rounded evening of music. The venue was ideal for the instrumental hooks and four-part vocal harmonies that make West My Friend a local favourite.

Their synergy as a band is one of the reasons why they never seem to overdo the sometimes complex and overlapping harmonies. Maybe this is to be expected from a group of highly trained musicians, but the collaborative composition is something to be remarked on. Writing vocal melodies and mandolin hooks that are catchy and original is something not all indie bands can boast about.

But if there’s something that West My Friend has in common with many indie bands, it’s the difficulty of placing their music into a particular category. When asked to describe their genre in an interview, Jeff Poynter (accordion, vocals) replied: “Cascadian third-wave indie prog chamber folk roots music.”

Not the most marketable genre, as some producers and labels would argue. But if accessibility and marketability are seen as two sides of the same coin, then music doesn’t need to be conveniently categorized to be appreciated.