The playwright mayor

Could Dario Fo be the next mayor of Milan?


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Hi. I'm a newbie to this site, enjoying your posts very much. I was wondering if anyone out there knows of a site where one can have someone critique a rough draft of a short one-act. I fairly new to the genre, and could use some insight from a seasoned veteran...any ideas? Ta!

The year of Ibsen

The long, slow year of Ibsen. I guess I just don't get these big budget musicals with their flashing lights, soundtracks and laser beams.


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Canada's first playwright-in-residence

Takes up a bed of straw in his cage at U of A. Come watch the keepers feed him Stoned Wheat Thins and brie at 12, 2, and 5. But, please, children, no hands near the bars. We wouldn't want another Pinter-like incident.


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Pentameter and theatre

Glyn Maxwell, who's poetry I generally adore, riffs on how he writes for theatre.

Verse drama. There's an effective way to shed a thousand readers at a stroke. It's the one phrase I beg producers of my plays to omit from the publicity material. I write plays in verse because I trained as a poet, and I've been writing in loose pentameters for a quarter of a century. As Hamlet said of his imminent duel with Laertes, "I have been in continual practice", and I can write more powerfully and clearly in lines than I can in sentences. And since I, like most writers, believe I exist primarily to tell stories, I'll tell them in the best form I know. They are plays.


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A pillar of the community

Henrik Ibsen: a primer.


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You killed my father... prepare to die!

A Princess Bride musical?! Colour me sold! I am so audienced. So theatred. So toe-tapped. So must-seed.


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Edited by author 05-09-2005 06:31 AM
If you can make it out, you can make it

Actor-turned-playwright, Susan Coyne, profiled.


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re /m44 There was plenty more singing in the extended DVD versions, which should be considered the definitive versions. They're so much better it's startling.

Some of said singing was the kind of thing only hardcore fans could really handle. Like Aragorn breaking out in a dirge at his coronation. I loved it.

G

"When I meet with the cast for our first rehearsal, I'll describe the phenomenon of how everybody in the Canadian middle class gets in a car and drives two and a half hours north ... and spends anywhere from a week to two solid months in something dilapidated or slightly better than dilapidated"

Canadian playwrights get some bumph in London.



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Edited by author 03-16-2005 03:18 PM
Y'know, I kinda felt ripped off when there weren't any songs in the movies. I mean the hobbits are constantly breaking into song. I know it properly belongs in The Hobbit, but I longed for them to 'smash the plates.'

I'm hoping for Wagner meets Ashley MacIsaac...a Celtic-Teutonic fusion sorta thing.

K

What a good idea. Who could be bothered reading some 1200-page thing, anyway?

"Frodo still has the ring..." "How do you know?" "I can hear him singing about it..."

"Laaaa! I have a Riiiing! The one Riiiing! It's the Ring that makes my heart beat so that I can barely speeeeeak! But even Sauron's Ring can't stop me when I want to Siiiiing!"

The $27-million show, co-produced by Toronto's Mirvish Productions, will open in March 2006 at the Princess of Wales Theatre with a largely Canadian cast, said producer Kevin Wallace, a former Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator who produced Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar and Sunset Boulevard.
...
The show had been scheduled to debut in London this spring to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication of the complete trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. However, there was no theatre available to accommodate the massive and technically complex three-hour production, producers said. The London debut is now set for fall 2006.

The Lord of the Rings meets Lord of the Dance. Unprecedented numbers of nerds, killed by fits of apoplexy, wash up on the stoops of comic book shops across the planet.



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Anti-memory

Is that what kept me from getting the garbage out last night?

Primarily set in a nursing home, Half Life maps out the course of a romance between Clara (Carolyn Hetherington) and Patrick (Eric Peterson) that blossoms despite memory loss, death, transience, a previous encounter during the Second World War and the discomfort of their children. Math scientist Donald, Clara's son, encapsulates the play's underlying philosophy in the first scene: "We wouldn't survive if we remembered everything," later adding that "the way information is lost is as important as the way it is retained." At a time when "memory plays" have exhausted their possibilities and audiences, Half Life is a defiantly "anti-memory play."

I have Mighton's The Myth of Ability and it's quite a good read. Nothing spectacular on the mathematics front, but good for parents, and more than a few teachers, I would think.



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Say it ain't so!

Pinter giving up on writing plays.



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The end of gay...
...theatre in Canada?

In his controversial 1999 treatise, The End of Gay, Bert Archer proposed, essentially, that mainstream acceptance of homosexuals, the Will-and-Grace-ing of the commonweal, meant the end of gay and lesbian distinctiveness, that identities forged through oppression would dissipate in its absence. If this season's offerings reflect a coming trend, he's right. At least in the special enclave of the theatre, identified gay and lesbian playwrights, actors and directors have arrived. But what do they have left from the long slog to professional eminence? Is this the endpoint of liberation -- at last, to have the chance to produce work resembling everyone else's?

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Kiddie opera

Finally, literary adaptation for children that doesn't involve CGI.



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I'm torn

On one hand, I'm pleased to see that any work of literature or theatre can still rouse people to violence. On the other hand, I think, are you fucking crazy?! Death threats!? It's a fucking play!



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The play's done when someone agrees to produce it...

David Gow talks about his writing process and life in the theeeatuh.

"It's nothing to do with craft," he said in a recent interview. "I just get this channel, like an FM dial. Just tune in the playwright's network."

Fuck. I just get Q107.



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The fluck of the luckin Irish

John Doyle takes a shillelagh* to the McCourt brothers' play.

As the world must know by now, Limerick is the international capital of misery.

Look up "misery" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of Limerick. It has been so since Frank McCourt published Angela's Ashes, his raw, complaining and comic memoir, which established Limerick as the most miserable place on the planet. I'm surprised anyone still has the nerve to live there.

Up on the stage, Frank and Malachy are treating us to a litany of complaints -- the shared outdoor toilet, the unreliable dad, the pompous priest, the sadistic schoolteachers and the backbiting, belligerent neighbours. These complaints are delivered with gusto and glee.

At this point, I'm wondering what the hell we're all doing in the bloody theatre watching these two eejits boast about the horrors they endured.

For what it's worth, most Irishmen I know agree with you, John.



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Play enjoyed by all (except reviewer)

Dorothy Parker: the musical!*



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Nobody's Fool

A literary Mrs. Doubtfire. I'm laughing already... Hopefully Piers Brosnan will take another lime to the coconut. Hehehe...



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The Handmaid's Tale

The opera the English press loves, then hates. Can it be loved again? (As opposed to the porn version, The Handmaid's Tail.)



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Hamlet in Africa
Today was one of the stranger days in literature. But hey, that's show business.


On this day in 1607 Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship Red Dragon, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone. Scholars regard this amateur, one-show-only production by the ship's crew as the first staging of a Shakespearean play outside of Europe, one that predates any New World Hamlet by about 150 years. Even if all went "trippingly on the tongue," it is anyone's guess what sense the bard's most puzzling play could have made to the four local chiefs who attended the premiere -- with filed teeth, nose rings, tattoos in the shape of exotic animals, and no English.

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Secretly I long for the drama club to rise up and inherit the earth...

Rise, my pasty skinned brethren! Don your masks of tragedy and comedy and clad yourselves in the raiment of kings (should the dressers have your size on hand)! The time has come to straighten those knobby elbows, point to the heavens and utter your terrible battle cry: "Rubberbabybuggybumpers! Rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb!"

"If we feel that our safety is unable to be secured, then we'll have to consider cancelling the performance," said Jennifer Deon, a spokesperson for the Shakespeare in the Park Festival.

Over the weekend, Deon says members of her troupe were attacked by a group of young people during an afternoon rehearsal.

"They were swinging skateboards, throwing rocks at us, I just said, "That's enough. I can't believe this is happening.'"

In all seriousness, I wish I had a ready contingent of ninjas on hand to send down there to stand around, all menacing-like. We'd dance fight 'em to the strains of Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield! It'll be just like when she throws that drink in the pimp's face! Yeah! "We are young...!" (Slow connection and still want to see Pat pout? Click here.)



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Forget who wrote Shakespeare -- who cares?
After all, what does he have to offer contemporary audiences?


A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of going to see Measure For Measure at London's National Theatre.

As usual with Shakespeare's plays, the audience had to be told the plot beforehand in the programme notes, because everyone knows that Elizabethan English will leave you confused within seconds.

The woman to my left sat still throughout the whole thing, seemingly engrossed. At first, I assumed she must be a renowned Shakespeare scholar. But no, she was fast asleep.

The truth is that Shakespeare is losing his appeal in his own country.


And if you really want to check out some verse plays, give Steven Berkoff a try.

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The Brits love their political theatre
Meanwhile in Canada, we have Stratford and Bard on the Beach. And let's not forget Shaw. Pushing the boundaries, we are.


In theaters all over London these days, debates rage about power and justice, about leadership and its abuses. From the National's production of Euripides' 410 B.C. Iphigenia at Aulis to the New Ambassador's up-to-date Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, curtains rise on works that confront the morality of the coalition's invasion of Iraq and inquire into government's dubious motives.

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Stage Direction: Dies
I thought poets were bad when it comes to squabbling, but this theatre group takes centre stage. Ba-dum.


"In a flourish, his Arden copy of Hamlet is ejected from his nicotined fingers and misses my head by a whisper. Laertes-like, I hurl my copy (heavier due to notes) straight back at him, wounding his shoulder. Proverbial hell now ensues, hot with expletives as the Dane leaps Fairbanks-like at my throat and would surely have garroted me had Osric and Horatio not leapt to my aid."

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Marlowe Narrower?
I always liked Christopher Marlowe -- I found his characters had a little more psychological depth for me than Shakespeare's. If I had to pick a favourite though, it would be John Webster. The Duchess of Malfi was the best thing to hit English theatre until Tom Stoppard.


In reality, of course, it was Marlowe who died at 29, leaving behind only seven plays, while Shakespeare lived to the ripe old age of 52. Marlowe's reputation is further shadowed by the fact that Shakespeare deliberately re-imagined each of his major plays (in an act of "anxiety of influence" much studied by Harold Bloom), reducing Marlowe's works to the unhappy status of precursors. Yet as the new Penguin Classics edition of his plays shows, Marlowe was far more than a failed or forestalled Shakespeare. He was an entirely different kind of writer: narrower and less gifted than Shakespeare (who wasn't?), but for that very reason more pungently personal. To read Shakespeare is to enter a universe; to read Marlowe is to meet an individual human being.

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You Mean All that Shrieking MEANS Something?

The trials and tribs of a librettist.



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"You don't expect to find one of this country's most glamorous stars rehearsing a play about one of history's legendary actresses in a church basement, but sometimes that's how things happen in Canadian show business."

Who doesn't expect it? I thought the Gemini Awards were being held in a Lions Club this year... or at Avril's dad's Legion hall.



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Everyone's Got the Right to Their Dreams
And the American Dream is killing a president. Manhattanite ninjas may want to check out Sondheim's Assassins at Studio 54. One of my favourite plays.

As in Sweeney Todd before and Passion after, Assassins also finds joy in the most unexpected and nihilistic of places. This musical, in addition, shows a politically wise and prescient composer who is offering Americans his theory of why "this country is not what it was." But will they listen?

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"Toronto talent doesn't cross boundaries. Neither do audiences. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Tragically Hip fan at the International Festival of Authors, or, God forbid, a balletomane at the Horseshoe Tavern. And don't hold your breath for the day when book lovers start going to see modern dance."

The Whole Shebang.



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"Before there was Winnie-the-Pooh, even before there was Toad of Toad Hall, there were Carraway Pim and Oliver Blayds"

Milne's pre-Pooh history.* (Hehe... pre-Pooh...)



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See, If I Had Been There, I Would Have Stuck a Stake Through His Heart
Chekhov reads at a Barnes and Noble.

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Canada's Only Storyteller?
Part 2 of the Michel Tremblay story is up at Dooney's.
"When you read a story by Alice Munro, or Mavis Gallant, you read it alone; in a certain very real sense you don't share the experience with others. Brilliant as they are, these are inward writers, and they address the inwardness of their readers. Tremblay, however, is nourished by the popular imagination. He 'belongs' to Quebec in the same way that Dickens 'belonged' to nineteenth century England. He speaks for it; he tells its stories. So much is this so that the story he has been telling in the Chroniques and his plays has for many Quebeckers now supplanted the official records; it has become the actual history of Montreal."

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"All The Great Books (abridged)"

The Reduced Shakespeare Company does 90 books in 90 minutes.



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But What About Hosanna?
Bruce Serafin reflects on the universal appeal of Michel Tremblay.
"But it wasn't this huge crowd of characters -- all of them vivid -- that amazed me. What amazed me was this. Though Tremblay was writing about a city thousands of miles away, so closely did his storytelling methods resemble those that entranced me during our nights sorting, so homely and familiar was the book's feeling, that as I read it I seemed to see section after section of the old Vancouver that for me the postal plant had long since come to represent. And like those folded paper cities that pop up when you open the pages of certain children's books, as I read there appeared before me the projects near the Hastings Viaduct where Ann Jack lived with the son who had punched her in the face, the old stucco houses on Glen Drive that I passed when I went to visit Toni Leigh, George Vincent's gloomy hole on Lakewood full of copies of Vogue magazine, Jen's apartment up on Graveley where her one-armed mom made her pancakes when she came home from work and finally, connecting all these places, the city I saw when I pedalled home from the plant down Hastings and Powell: the Woodbine Hotel, the bus wires overhead, the wet skies and the North Shore mountains."

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Timothy Findley Award for New Canadian Plays

Stratford sets up the new award and it's first winner "will work with William Whitehead, Findley's lifelong companion, to finish a stage adaptation of Findley's book Famous Last Words -- a project the writer left incomplete when he died in June 2002."



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Coupland Oughtta Be On the Stage

The next one outta town! ... Can I get a rimshot please?



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I really liked the pictures in Steveston.

"An absence of sentimentality is a great thing in a writer, and separates the merely good from those who have something to say."

"For to say that all people are equal is not to say they are the same; and to confound the political with the practical gave us the enormity of feminist literary theory." David Mamet's play Oleanna, about a student who claims she was raped by her professor but may be lying, drove people berserk when it came out. Now Mamet reflects on the role of (and roles for) women in literature, film and theatre. When first shown in dress rehearsal to a group of undergrads, Mamet was asked if his portrayal of Oleanna was "politically questionable", of which he now writes, "I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn't realise it was my job to be politically acceptable. I'd always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error - in effect, rendered her other-than-human."



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"Though noh is very different from Western notions of what is 'dramatic,' the emotional and spiritual drama of a noh play touches an audience on a deep level, as poetry does."

Daphne Marlett is trying to write an English-language noh play based on her long poem "Steveston." Will she succeed? I don't... noh.



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It's Not Every Day Canadian Stage Gets Play on CNN

Stratford's stellar Lear has stormed Broadway and people are fools for it.



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"The fictional leader-for-life, Felix, is impotent, lecherous and politically desperate. But he has a plan to squelch the opposition in his country, now in its 38th year of civil war. Felix will crucify the rebel leader whom peasants view as their messiah. And if he broadcasts the execution worldwide, the dictator will pocket $25 million from an American advertising agency eager to televise the big event."

More Arthur Miller.



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Edited by author 03-21-2004 12:29 AM
Well, I don't think "experimental" is the antonym of "realism". Sure Miller experimented (i.e. fussed with) the form of his plays, but does that make them "experimental".

When I think of experimental theatre, I think mostly of Mummenschanz (or their god-children The Blue Man Group) and crap like that.

Well, he wasn't avant-garde, but he certainly experimented with, or at least adapted, the forms that came before. You can see Ibsen in his works, for instance, but the actual shape of his plays, the context for all the action, is radically different from the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, etc. Whatever you want to call his work, though, I wouldn't call it realism any more than I would call Pinter realism. Although some days Pinter does feel like realism....

Peter

High-modernist, maybe, but experimental? Pete, what's your take on this, you're the drama guy?

Arthur Miller: Experimental Playwright?
The London Review of Books has a nice review article about Arthur Miller and the politics of realism. I've always had a soft spot for Miller, and think he kind of got lost in the avant-garde trend. Glad to see someone else thinks the same way.
" Death of a Salesman supports the anti-realist-from-the-start thesis thanks to its remarkable form. The original title was 'The Inside of His Head', and its action is the unravelling of the dreams that the failed salesman Willy Loman had for himself and his sons. The contrast between Loman's dreams and present-day reality is exposed not through reminiscence or the arrival of a character from the past, but by dramatising Loman's memories at the moment they come into his mind."

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"High concept is really not a road to take with Chekhov, since his plays depend on a respect for the fluidity, perversity and subtlety of human personality. Any Chekhov production that works starts from the inside, not the outside."

Chekhov's Seagull a Drowning Cow.*



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Shopping and Fucking in Vancouver

Mark Ravenhill's killer play Shopping and Fucking is being put on at the Granville Island theatre for all you Vancouverites. Put down your latte, pick up your cell phone and order your tickets now.



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Wakka Wakka, Have I Got a Book for You! Hey!

The Reduced Shakespeare Company.




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