Category Archives: Joy Fisher

Gaslight illuminates psychological abuse

Gaslight

By Patrick Hamilton

 

Directed by Brian Richmond

Blue Bridge at the Roxy

October 21 to November 2

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Thankfully, I have never been involved in a psychologically abusive relationship, but, as United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” I saw it – and heard it – last week at the Roxy Theatre.

If you think Gaslight, set in the London of the 1880s, has no relevance in today’s world, I urge you to catch this Blue Bridge production directed by Brian Richmond. Five minutes into the play, you will be disabused of that silly notion as Mr. Manningham, the abusive husband, played by Vancouver actor Adrian Hough, sets out to undermine his wife’s sanity. Hough’s demeaning tone rings with authenticity and pierces like an ice pick through the heart.

Hough wasn’t solely responsible for this chilling effect. He was given his lines by playwright Patrick Hamilton, who wrote Gaslight in 1938. Hamilton, whose father was a financially inept drunk, was raised in relative poverty (and, one suspects, abuse). His formal education ended in 1919 when he was just 15, but he published his first poem that year and kept on writing. Gaslight made him rich. After six months at the Apollo Theatre in London, the play went on to a four-year run on Broadway. In 1940, it was made into a film in England, and in 1944, MGM released the Hollywood version starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton. Bergman won her first Oscar for her nuanced performance as the abused wife.

Thea Gill, who plays Mrs. Manningham in the Blue Bridge production, does not, unfortunately, follow Bergman’s fine example. Gill’s interpretation seemed stuck in the high hysterical range. Still, when she got her revenge at the end of the play, it was a satisfying denouement.

Wes Borg, who plays Rough, the retired detective who solves the case of the husband’s long-ago murder of another woman in the same house, provided welcome comic relief as he bustled loquaciously through the mystery with a Scottish accent. (Iris Macgregor Bannerman, who played Elizabeth the maid, doubled as dialect coach.) When he handed Mrs. Manningham a flask of Scotch whiskey and said “It’ll give you faith in your reason like nothing else,” I couldn’t help but laugh.

The technical aspects of the production were mixed. The hiss of the gaslights when first lit provided an ominous touch, and the rise and fall of their light as the mystery progressed was timed to perfection. The blurred black-and-white film of a pianist projected onto the piano at the beginning of both acts puzzled me until I watched the 1944 film and discovered that the husband was a pianist. The film projection coupled with recorded music set a sinister mood and eliminated the need to have a live actor playing. Attention to these technical aspects enhanced the play’s theatricality. The sound design, however, was flawed, or else the microphones were faulty. Volume fluctuated distractingly as the actors crossed from one side of the stage to the other.

When the actors took their final bows on the night I saw the play, Hough seemed momentarily shocked as he was roundly booed. He needn’t have been. The boos were not directed at him but at his character. Booing the villain in early melodrama has a long tradition. Although the practice was less common in later, psychological melodramas like this one, Hough’s superb depiction of the quintessential abusive husband earned him this tribute.

If you need to be reminded that psychological abuse is still a problem; if you want to see an abused wife get revenge; if you want to let off some steam by booing a villain, go see this production of Gaslight at the Roxy through Nov. 2.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover. 

Pride and Prejudice play up for scrutiny

Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austin

Adapted for the stage by Janet Munsil

Directed by Judy Treloar

Langham Court Theatre

October 1-18, 2014

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

“The movie wasn’t as good as the book” is a standard refrain. Whether that judgment should be applied equally to adaptations of great novels for the stage is currently up for scrutiny at Langham Court Theatre as it presents its production of Pride and Prejudice.

The audio book of Jane Austin’s 200-year-old novel runs about 11-1/2 hours. When well-regarded Victoria playwright Janet Munsil accepted a commission two years ago to adapt the book for a joint production by Theatre Calgary and the National Arts Centre, she had to condense the popular story to as close to two hours as possible.

There are perils attached to such drastic reductions. One is the danger of transforming a richly nuanced classic into a theatrical Readers Digest Condensed version of itself. That didn’t happen here, but the play does gallop from one plot point to the next, and the dramatization robbed the work of some of the delicate understatement of Austin’s prose.

For example, the necessity of repositioning the opening line of the novel had unintended consequences. The novel begins: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This line, assigned to an omniscient narrator, sets the novel up as an intentional, if subtle, critique of social mores. In the play, this line is spoken part way into the first act by Mrs. Bennet, the protagonist’s mother, a foolish woman. Thus located, it is reduced to a laugh line, and the overarching purpose of social satire goes unmarked.

All 19 of the major characters are retained in the dramatization, and drawn with such distinctness that there is never an occasion to confuse one with another. The credit for this success is attributable in equal parts to the novelist, the playwright and the capable actors who played the roles. Significant emotional depth, however, is lost in the adaptation. As I left the theatre on opening night, I overheard one audience member remark that one of the characters seemed more like a caricature than a character. “Oh well,” he added, sounding unhappy, “I suppose it had to be that way.”

Costumes, designed by Merry Hallsor, cloak this production in class. Credit is also due for the set designer (Caroline Mitic), carpenter (John Taylor) and production crew in charge of set decor (Maureen Colgan) for designing a flexible set that can quickly accommodate scene changes. As a result, the story plays straight through each of the two acts.

The confines of the Langham Court stage, combined with the large cast, did lead to some awkward moments. The repeated use of dance scenes in the first act became a bit tiresome. And, at least once, a group of characters was left onstage with nothing to do while two characters engaged in private conversation.

Why turn novels into drama? Michael Billington, theatre critic for The Guardian, tried to answer that question in a commentary he wrote a few years ago. Some novels, he conceded, might acquire more “texture,” but, he concluded, the “really great novels invariably lose more than they gain.”

Pride and Prejudice is a great novel. Pride and Prejudice, the play, was a sell-out hit in Calgary in 2012 and has since won acceptance in community theatres in Saint John, N.B., and in England. It awaits your judgment here through October 18.

Joy Fisher is a Victoria playwright and theatre lover. 

My Rabbi makes for riveting drama

My Rabbi

A play co-created by Joel Bernbaum and Kayvon Kelly

Directed by Julie McIsaac

The Belfry Theatre, Sept. 16-28, 2014

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

When a Jew and a Muslim walk into a bar in My Rabbi, two old friends rediscover each other. But can they revive and maintain their friendship in a time when Palestinians and Israelis are locked in conflict? That’s the central question of the play. Their struggle makes for riveting drama.

Co-created and acted by Joel Bernbaum (Jake) and Kayvon Kelly (Arya), the play races along as it explores the question in a series of short scenes. The two actors capably take on other roles to advance the narrative. In one scene, Bernbaum plays a brutal interrogator; the snap of Arya’s broken finger is audible and convincing. Character changes were clear and convincing, testament to the talent of both of these actors.

The setting is spare—a table, a couple of chairs—a classic set-up for great theatre. And, in this play, that’s exactly what emerges.

My Rabbi is described as a comedic drama, and humour (too often sexist humour) leavens the drama. But I had tears streaming down my face for much of the 60-minute show, as the two characters struggled with increasing difficulty to be supportive of one another as they each faced life’s trials. In a monologue near the end of the play, Jake, by then a rabbi, questions how hate can be resisted in this polarized and polarizing world.

The play offers no easy answers, but the playwrights wisely disrupt the chronology to leave the audience with a glimpse of a happier time. The final scene is a flashback to a moment just before Arya is to leave on a cultural exploration of his father’s homeland, Syria. Jake celebrates with him. They clink drinks and salute each other. “L’Chaim,” they say—to life!

Kelly and Bernbaum, collector and editor of last season’s popular verbatim theatre presentation Home is a Beautiful Word, sketched out a first draft of the scenes in a pub after graduating from the Canadian College of Performing Arts in Victoria in 2008. The characters were initially based on themselves (Bernbaum is of Jewish descent and Kelly, whose last name was formerly Khoskan, Iranian). But the play developed over the next six years into an exploration of what might happen if two formerly non-religious friends embarked on very different journeys of religious discovery in a world where adherents to their respective faiths are locked in mortal combat.

In 2009, the play had its first reading as part of Puente Theatre’s WorkPlay series, and, in 2011, it was featured at the Belfry’s Spark! Festival. The finished work was well-received in its world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August during the height of the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. The current run at the Belfry is the Canadian premiere. After it closes in Victoria, it will play at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre from Oct. 7-18.

Do yourself a favour and go see this play before it closes in Victoria on Sunday (Sept. 28). You’ll be glad you did.

PGC Issues a Call for Action

By Joy Fisher

The Playwrights Guild of Canada announced a new initiative at its annual general meeting in Montreal recently aimed at redressing the chronic underrepresentation of women in key creative positions in Canadian theatre.

The Equity in Theatre (EIT) initiative will call on the theatre community as a whole to respond to gender inequities in the industry, according to Rebecca Burton, PGC’s Membership and Contracts Manager, who is coordinating the initiative.

“Although approximately 70 per cent of theatre audiences are women, and women make up 50 per cent of PGC’s membership, only 22 per cent of plays produced in Canadian Theatres in 2013/14 were by women playwrights,” Burton said. PGC’s Theatre Production Survey revealed that percentage varied by province, with Manitoba scoring highest at 44 percent and British Columbia dragging the bottom with only 18 percent of produced plays by women.

The percentage of productions by women playwrights reached a record high between 2000 and 2005 when 28 per cent of productions were plays by women according to an Equity Study published in 2006. “The figures demonstrate an actual regression since then,” Burton noted.

A key component of the initiative will be a Symposium to be held in Toronto in April 2015 facilitated by an equity and diversity consultant funded by Canada Council’s Leadership and Change program. Participants will include partners from industry organizations such as Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, Canadian Actors Equity Association, Associated Designers of Canada, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas as well as associations of the underrepresented, such as Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario, the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance and Artists Driving Holistic Organization Change. The end result will be the development of a first draft of a strategic plan for improved equity in the theatre industry as a whole.

In the year following the Symposium, a series of monthly play reading events will be held across Canada in partnership with Play Development Centres and other organizations. Other events and community actions will also be developed. Women patrons, for example, could exercise their consumer power by demanding more plays by women (reflective of their own reality and age demographics) from the theatres they support.

A research project will seek to identify successes in the industry and to establish best practices. A website will be created as an informational hub to facilitate meet-up groups and provide advice on how to create social actions. It will also house a searchable database of Canadian women artists, including playwrights, to serve as a resource to communities.

The desired outcome is to see representation rates rise to 50 percent, which would not only provide increased opportunities for women but would also produce a more balanced and inclusive vision of Canadian society for audiences to enjoy. “We’ve studied this problem for years,” Burton said. “Now it’s time to act.”

The official public launch of the initiative will be in September 2014.

The link below will take you to the PGC website and Valerie Sing Turner’s lyrical and compelling article Redefining Normal: A Challenge to Canadian Theatres & Artistswhich explores equality and redefining the norm in Canadian theatre. www.playwrightsguild.ca/sites/default/files/FINAL_POV_V.S.TURNER.pdf

Joy Fisher is a UVic writing graduate and a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. 

Playwrights Guild of Canada focuses on gender

By Joy Fisher

The Playwrights Guild of Canada at its annual general meeting in Montreal recently turned its focus to redressing the chronic underrepresentation of women in key creative positions in Canadian theatre.

The Equity in Theatre (EIT) initiative will call on the theatre community as a whole to respond to gender inequities in the industry, according to Rebecca Burton, PGC’s Membership and Contracts Manager, who is coordinating the initiative.

“Although approximately 70 per cent of theatre audiences are women, and women make up 50 per cent of PGC’s membership, only 22 per cent of plays produced in Canadian Theatres in 2013/14 were by women playwrights,” Burton said. PGC’s Theatre Production Survey revealed that percentage varied by province, with Manitoba scoring highest at 44 percent and British Columbia dragging the bottom with only 18 percent of produced plays by women.

The percentage of productions by women playwrights reached a record high between 2000 and 2005 when 28 per cent of productions were plays by women according to an Equity Study published in 2006. “The figures demonstrate an actual regression since then,” Burton noted.

A key component of the initiative will be a symposium to be held in Toronto in April 2015 facilitated by an equity and diversity consultant funded by Canada Council’s Leadership and Change program. Participants will include partners from industry organizations such as Professional Association of Canadian Theatres, Canadian Actors Equity Association, Associated Designers of Canada, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas as well as associations of the underrepresented, such as Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario, the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance and Artists Driving Holistic Organization Change. The end result will be the development of a first draft of a strategic plan for improved equity in the theatre industry as a whole.

In the year following the symposium, a series of monthly play reading events will be held across Canada in partnership with Play Development Centres and other organizations. Other events and community actions will also be developed. Women patrons, for example, could exercise their consumer power by demanding more plays by women (reflective of their own reality and age demographics) from the theatres they support.

A research project will seek to identify successes in the industry and to establish best practices. A website will be created as an informational hub to facilitate meet-up groups and provide advice on how to create social actions. It will also house a searchable database of Canadian women artists, including playwrights, to serve as a resource to communities.

The desired outcome is to see representation rates rise to 50 percent, which would not only provide increased opportunities for women but would also produce a more balanced and inclusive vision of Canadian society for audiences to enjoy. “We’ve studied this problem for years,” Burton said. “Now it’s time to act.”

The official public launch of the initiative will be in September 2014.

The link below offers the PGC website and Valerie Sing Turner’s lyrical and compelling article Redefining Normal: A Challenge to Canadian Theatres & Artists which explores equality and redefining the norm in Canadian theatre.

www.playwrightsguild.ca/sites/default/files/FINAL_POV_V.S.TURNER.pdf

Joy Fisher is a UVIC writing graduate and a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. 

A long time coming, but worth the wait

Fists Upon a Star

By Florence Bean James with Jean Freeman

University of Regina Press

298 pages, $34.98

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

If you like true stories about strong women, you’ll like this book. If you’re interested in live theatre, this book will engage you. If you have a vague notion that it’s important to fight injustice, this book will snap into focus your understanding of the human cost of government tyranny.

If, like me, you have a sparking interest in all three topics, this book will ignite you.

Subtitled “a memoir of love, theatre, and escape from McCarthyism,” Fists Upon a Star tells the story of Florence Bean James and her husband Burton, who founded and ran the Seattle Repertory Playhouse for 23 years, until Washington State’s House Un-American Activities Committee convicted them both of “willful refusal to answer proper and material questions.”

Ruined financially by the legal expenses incurred to fight the charges, they lost the lease on their theatre to the University of Washington. By December 30, 1950, the final curtain had descended on their last production, and, by November 13, 1951, Burton James had, according to his doctor, died “of a broken heart.”

In Seattle, the Jameses had devoted themselves to a “theatre of the people, by the people and for the people.” When Florence migrated to Canada in 1952 after being offered a job with the new Saskatchewan Arts Board by none other than Tommy Douglas, she finally found a “philosophical home.”

Norah McCullough, former executive secretary of the Arts Board, recalled a conversation she had had with then Education Minister Woodrow Lloyd. Concerned the Jameses might have been Communists, Lloyd asked about Recreation for All, the proposal Burton James had made to the State of Washington which had brought him under suspicion. McCullough had a copy and gave it to Lloyd. When he read it, he said: “Well, it sounds like the Saskatchewan Arts Board,” and she replied: “Yes, exactly.”

Already in her 60s when she moved to Canada, Florence James travelled “the length and breadth” of Saskatchewan by train in all kinds of weather conducting acting workshops and directing amateur theatrical productions in hundreds of communities. After her retirement from the Arts Board in 1968, Florence continued to work as a dramaturg with the Globe Theatre, the first professional education theatre company in Saskatchewan. In 1976, she was awarded the Diplome d’honneur by the Canadian Conference of the Arts, presented to a Canadian who has “made a sustained contribution to the cultural life of the country.”

In Canada, Florence James took up the job of finishing the book her husband had started before his untimely death. He had defiantly named it Fists Upon a Star, from a passage in Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body, about the radical abolitionist who raided Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

Florence kept the title, wrote and, with author/actor Jean Freeman, rewrote the book and searched in vain for a publisher until her death in 1988 at the age of 95. Fists Upon a Star was finally published in 2013, after Canadian playwright, journalist and social activist Rita Deverell took up the cause and persuaded the Canadian Plains Research Center (now the University of Regina Press) to take a look.

Now we can all take a look. And I hope you will.

Fists Upon a Star includes a preface by Freeman, an annotated introduction by Mary Blackstone, professor emerita of the University of Regina Theatre Department, and an epilogue by Deverell.

It was a 2014 nominee for the Saskatchewan Book Awards in the categories of non-fiction, publishing, and publishing in education.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. 

 

Belfry nails tri-level family drama

Equivocation: Telling the Truth in Dangerous Times

April 25, 2014

Playwright: Bill Cain, Director: Michael Shamata

Belfry Theatre, Victoria

April 22-May 25: (Belfry), June 11-September 20: (Bard on the Beach)

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Equivocation is a play about family told on three levels. Politics, says Shagspeare (playwright Bill Cain’s favourite spelling of Shakespeare’s name), is “family writ large.” On this level, the play is about a country divided into the “old religion” (Roman Catholicism) and the new one (the Church of England).

These are dangerous times: it’s 1605, the “Gunpowder Plot” has fizzled, and dissident Roman Catholics, including Father Henry Garnet, are about to be executed. Shagspeare, played by Bob Frazer, has been commissioned to write the official history of the Plot, but he begins to suspect that the government’s version is not true. What to do? He fears he must choose between two equally unpalatable alternatives: “lie or die”.

Shag turns to Father Garnet, who wrote A Treatise of Equivocation, for help in resolving his dilemma. Garnet advises him to look for the “question under the question” in order to avoid both lying and dying. He illustrates with this story:

Suppose you are hiding the king, and his enemies come to the door and ask: “Is the king within?” If you say “no,” you are lying, but if you say “yes,” the king will die. However, if you look for the question under the question, you will discover they are really asking: “Can we come in and kill the king?” To this question, the true and moral answer is “no”.

Cain wrote his play in recognition of the dangers that exist whenever governments lie. The philosophical lesson of Equivocation thus resonates today as much as it did in 1605.

Tobin Stokes’s non-diegetic music powerfully underscored the sense of danger, while the lighting design by Alan Brodie provided an apt visual metaphor for the concept of equivocation: grey fog swirled in a spotlight above stark black and white lighting throughout the show.

I was keen to see how Shag would equivocate his way out of his dilemma. Alas, it was not to be. Somewhere in the middle of Act Two, the commission to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot fizzled like the Plot itself, and so did the plot of the play. On the political level, Equivocation is a play without a climax, and this was disappointing.

The emotional heart of Equivocation is embedded in the second level, which is about the family created in theatre companies. During the period depicted, Shakespeare was a member of The King’s Men, a company in which the actors owned shares that entitled them to participate in decision making. They squabble among themselves, but are held together by their mutual love of theatre, the nature of which they debate at length. Cain, who once ran his own theatre company, writes this story with great affection and high humour.

The third level is about Shagspeare’s relationship with his daughter Judith. The audience is told that both Judith and Shagspeare understand that Shag wishes Judith had died instead of her twin brother, Hamnet. To Judith, stoically played by Rachel Cairns, goes the last line of the play: as she washes Shag’s dead body, she says: “I never knew I had a story until he wrote it.” This line sours the ending because Judith did indeed have a story, but neither Shakespeare nor Bill Cain wrote the truth of it and Judith, who lived it and therefore did know it, was illiterate, and could not.

This co-production runs until September 20, so the actors have plenty of time to perfect their roles. Four of them, Anousha Alamian, Shawn MacDonald, Gerry Mackay, and Anton Lipovetsky have dual roles as both players and characters. They clearly delight in this complexity.

The play runs two hours and 45 minutes with one 15-minute break—inordinately long. It’s nevertheless easy to understand why Michael Shamata, the Belfry’s artistic director, directed it himself. This play may not be perfect, but it’s rich faire, intellectually stimulating and an emotional treat for anyone who loves theatre—two very good reasons to go see it.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

Canadians, playwrights minority at AWP

By Joy Fisher

Undaunted by winter weather, a small contingent of intrepid writers from Victoria boarded the Clipper for its morning run to Seattle recently to attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference.

Joined by a smattering of Canadian writers who rolled in from Vancouver and flew in from points east, the Victoria group claimed their space among some 12,000 other writers, most from the United States, who attended the three-day conference.

The number of panel discussions devoted to playwriting were also in the minority at the conference–just three out of more than 500 offered. The dismal status of playwriting was reflected in the title of one of the three: “Playwriting: the Bastard Child of Literature?”

The two minorities came together memorably, however, in a panel entitled “Playwriting in the Pacific Northwest: A Specialized Craft in a Unique Region.”

Moderated by Bryan Wade, associate professor of dramatic writing at the University of British Columbia, panel members considered whether playwrights from the Pacific Northwest on both sides of the border had more in common with each other than they did with their compatriots to the east.

Joining Wade were two Canadian playwrights, Kevin Kerr and C.E. Gatchalian; Oregon-based playwright Andrea Stolowitz; and native Alaskan playwright, Cathy Rexford. Each examined the disadvantages and advantages of playwrights situated at a distance from the theatre centres of their respective countries.

One disadvantage was what Kerr characterized as a “battle against theatrical loneliness.” He recounted a conversation in which a Toronto colleague happened to mention that he had always thought of Vancouver as a “cultural backwater.” At that moment Kerr realized “we are on our own.”

Perhaps because of this isolation, west-coast playwrights have, in recent decades, pioneered theatre companies in which members collaborate on the writing of plays. Kerr, an associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, co-founded the Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver and has worked to bring collaborative companies together for conferences to share their respective processes.

Gatchalian called this collaborative model the “Vancouver esthetic” and distinguished it from what he termed the “Toronto esthetic” which he described as the “text-based” model of the individual playwright working alone on a script. Gatchalian also noted the comparatively “financially precarious” position of the Vancouver theatre scene, which he attributed, in part, to the fact that theatre-going is not as ingrained in the population because it must compete with easy access to a wide variety of outdoor activities.

Stolowitz acknowledged the relative financial insecurity of working in places that are not theatre capitols, but argued that the trade-off is “a certain freedom to dream.” She is a member of Playwrights West, a new professional theatre company in Portland focused on presenting top-level productions of its members’ work. Playwrights West produces work for local audiences and Stolowitz says her writing is often inspired by “place.” “But there are no rules—I can do what I want,” she said.

Rexford, the most geographically isolated of all the playwrights on the panel, had perhaps the most defined mission. Following completion of an MFA in playwriting at UBC, she returned to work in the Alaska Arctic, where she labours to adapt traditional stories and revitalize the native language of the Inupiat people through performance theatre and native dances. “It’s the narratives of the people that connect Alaska natives involved in theatre,” she said.

Joy Fisher graduated with a BFA in writing from the University of Victoria. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

 

 

 

 

Poet captures link between language and place

By Joy Fisher

Vancouver writer Daphne Marlatt took her audience on a flaneurial stroll through the history of her city and its influence on her poetry and prose in the Lansdowne Lecture that opened the Second Annual Malahat Review Spring Symposium, WordsThaw at the University of Victoria recently.

Aided by archival photographs by Philip Timm that capture the city’s early history when big timber hid the sky and streams snaked through town and more recent photographs by Trevor Martin that reflect glass-walled skyscrapers, Marlatt illustrated the constantly transforming nature of Vancouver since its incorporation in 1886.

Marlatt’s personal connection with Vancouver began when she arrived as an immigrant in 1951. Born in Australia, she moved with her family to Malaya (now Malaysia), at age three, finally arriving in Canada as a nine-year-old. Her first impressions of her new country were of the “cold clarity of the sea” and a creek that ran through the family’s yard in North Vancouver, from which she gathered a sense of Vancouver as “fluid.”

When she was a student at the University of British Columbia, a visiting professor suggested Marlatt try to write about her early years in Malaya, but it was her adopted land that captured and held her attention.

Her first published piece, an imaginative story about Vancouver pioneer “Gassy Jack” Deighton, drew on city history. Although few knew it at the time, that piece predicted the future of Marlatt’s writing life. Vancouver has been a “well-spring” for her writing since 1972, she acknowledged, and she freely confessed that, although she writes about other subjects as well, her 40 years of writing about Vancouver has been “fairly obsessive.”

She noted, however, that she is not alone in taking Vancouver as her muse.  There are many others, she insisted, listing some prominent writers including Douglas Coupland, who roamed the world before coming home to Vancouver to settle down for good. Coupland later published a book of short essays and photographs about the Vancouver skyline called City of Glass. 

A series of exits from and re-entries to Vancouver living sharpened Marlatt’s sense of Vancouver as a constantly changing city. This affected not only Marlatt’s choice of subject matter but also her writing style. For instance, in the 1970s, during a time of rapid growth in the city and change in her own life, she wrote of vacant lots and construction sites. Reading from her work, she demonstrated how the rhythms of her writing became “jumpier,” echoing the rhythms of the city life around her. Her prose was becoming more poetic, and eventually her genre of choice became poetry.

As a young writer, Marlatt delved into city archives as a way of trying to make herself feel at home in a strange new place. She acknowledged that, for her, acculturation was a long process, but by the time of her “fourth entry” into the city in 2000, after some years spent on Salt Spring Island,  she finally felt like she was “coming back home.”

As the city continues to change, she and her friends sometimes ask one another: “Do you remember what used to be there?” Often they don’t, but Marlatt insists that the ongoing transformations don’t leave her with a sense of loss, but rather with a sense of “layered richness” which she tries to embody in her poetry.

“Life’s a gift. You can either hold onto it or you can give it away,” Marlatt said. She believes in giving it away through her writing.

Marlatt’s most recent book is Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, published in 2013 by Talonbooks.

Joy Fisher graduated with a BFA in writing from the University of Victoria in 2013.

 

Proud: parsing a farce

February 7, 2013

Playwright: Michael Healey

Director: Glynis Leyshon

Belfry Theatre, Victoria

February 4-March 9

Reviewed by Joy Fisher

Photo by David Cooper

When I emerged from the Belfry Theatre after seeing actor-playwright Michael Healy’s latest play, Proud, I felt confused. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

Billed as “political satire” by its distinguished director, Glynis Leyshon, Proud was somehow unsatisfying despite “crackling” dialogue, fast pacing and polished acting by some of Canada’s finest, including Rick Roberts. Roberts, you may recall, played Jack Layton in the CBC biopic. In Proud, he shows his range by playing an unnamed Prime Minister modelled after our current Prime Minister. Now that’s versatility.

Proud proposes an alternative universe in which the Conservatives won Quebec in the last federal election and the Prime Minister has a massive majority including a feisty political neophyte named Jisbella Lyth, played assertively by Celine Stubel.

The Prime Minister, and his Chief of Staff, Cary, played by award winning actor Charlie Gallant, soon learn Jisbella has something in common with them: political amorality. Recognizing a kindred spirit, the PM concludes Jisbella is worth mentoring—and using. Having Jisbella author an anti-abortion (“pro-life”) bill to distract the press so the PM can slip through a change to government unnoticed seems like a fine idea to them all.

What’s the big change the PM wants to slip through on the QT? Muzzling government scientists? Ditching environmental laws? No, the PM wants to reduce the size of the Privy Council Office—a modest goal.

So where is the dramatic conflict in this play? There isn’t any, and, artistically, that’s this play’s main problem.

There are others. A fourth character, Jisbella’s grown-up son, played by UVic Theatre grad Kieran Wilson, talks about political morality from the vantage point of 2029, when the Prime Minister is still in power; but he’s too removed from the principal action of the play to matter. Finally, Proud is a “talky” play. During all the political yak, the Chief-of-Staff makes the point that “politics is fundamentally an emotional event.” Plays are also fundamentally emotional events, and a play that’s too talky can kill emotional response in the audience.

It might be argued that laughter is an emotional response, and it can’t be denied that Proud is humourous. But analyzing its humour reveals its genre confusion.

Although satire, like farce, is usually humourous, unlike farce, satire has a greater purpose: to draw attention to troubling social issues and offer constructive social criticism. Proud doesn’t do that. Since all the principal characters agree that political amorality is just fine, that issue isn’t examined; and since the PM’s goals are so modest and reasonable, no substantive issues are critiqued. Proud confused me because I expected satire; but what it offers isn’t satire: it’s only farce.

So if we can’t be proud of Proud as political satire, what can we be proud of?

We can be proud of Michael Healey for not giving up when Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, fearing a libel suit from the Prime Minister (the real one), nixed his play despite the fact he had been a playwright-in-residence there for more than a decade.

We can be proud that other theatre companies all across Canada from Halifax to Vancouver staged readings of Proud, both to raise money for its independent production and to support the principle of free artistic expression.

And we can be proud that the Canadian public rallied to the cause by contributing almost $18,000 in twenties and hundreds in response to a crowd-funding campaign to pay for its premiere in Toronto.

As a work of art, Proud may disappoint; but the circumstances surrounding its realization are cause for celebration.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing. She is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.