ANNE NOTHOF
Sharon Pollock has frequently constructed theatrical environments that interrogate the interpenetration of past and present. The lives of her characters are staged on several levels of time. In the productions of Doc at the Studio Theatre, Edmonton, in November 1999, Moving Pictures at Theatre Junction, Calgary, in March 1999, and End Dream at Theatre Junction in March 2000, the stage design demonstrated this fluidity of time, but also the distinct moments that embed themselves in the memory. In Pollock's plays, linearity is disrupted through spacial structures and resonant sounds.
Sharon Pollock a fréquemment conçu des environnements théâtraux qui mettent en question l'interpénétration du passé et du présent. Les vies de ses personnages sont mises en scène en plusieurs tranches de temps. La linéarité est brisée par des structures spatiales et la résonance des sons. Dans les productions de Doc au Studio Theatre d'Edmonton, en novembre 1999, de Moving Pictures au Théâtre Junction á Calgary en mars 1999 et de End Dream au Théâtre Junction, en mars 2000, la scénographie a démontré cette fluidité du temps, mais également les moments distincts qui s'encastrent dans la mémoire.
Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock has frequently constructed theatrical environments that act out the intersections of past and present. The lives of her characters are staged on several levels or planes of time, meeting at common points. Past and present may be conflated, disrupting linearity of form and of time and space to problematize assumptions of cause and effect. As Ric Knowles has observed of Foucault's principles in relation to "forms" of Canadian drama, authoritarianism and patriarchy are countered not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization, but by "proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction"—by the multiple, different, and fluid (Knowles 81). In many of Pollock's plays, "spacial structures of multiplication" conflate time and fragment character (Knowles 162). To quote Einstein, as quoted in Knowles' text, The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning, "time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live" (215).
In Blood Relations, the past is present in the role-playing, and in the process the "real" and the "imagined" are conflated. In Pollock's radio play Sweet Land of Liberty, the protagonist experiences his past as present through flashbacks of memory; in The Making of Warriors, the lives of two women activists from two centuries are replayed within a contemporary social/political frame to show the ironic interaction of past and present and the interplay of historical "fact" and fictionalized event. In Doc, as Diane Bessai has observed,
[T]he past occurs in a multidimensional refraction from the present with fragmented memory images arising associationally from the minds of the two present-day characters, Ev and Catherine, who are both remembering and commenting on the family past [...]. Here the years collapse into a swirl of dominant images of either word or actions. Dramatic progression is deliberately buried in the kaleidoscopic patternings of recurring character motifs within the scenes or fragments of scenes. (135)
In Moving Pictures, character and time are fragmented into three stages of a woman's life, which interact and comment on each other, transforming life experience into fiction and fiction into life experience. Again, all the "characters" of the life drama are present on stage, created in terms of the memory of filmmaker Nell Shipman. In End Dream, events are collapsed into the final seconds of a woman's life, evoked through light and sound as lived nightmare. The theatrical space is envisioned as a limbo between reality and illusion, life and death.
Doc begins with the return of Catherine (a woman in her mid-30s) to the family home to visit her father (Ev) who has suffered a heart attack. As in Moving Pictures and End Dream, lives are re-experienced close to the moment of death. The confrontation of father and daughter resurrects ghosts from the past—Katie, or Catherine as a child, and her mother, Bob. A family friend, Oscar, functions as intermediary and commentator, observing and interacting with his friend and colleague, Doc Everett, as a younger man in his roles as a dedicated Doctor and an insensitive husband and father. For Catherine, this visit is also inevitably an encounter with her dead mother, whose life with Ev was one of desperate loneliness and frustrated ambition, ending with suicide. Ev's own reliving of this relationship, however, provides a variorum to the text inscribed in Catherine's memory: the point of view in the play is effectively fractured. Her memories are not countered or rebutted, but are placed in juxtaposition to Doc's; the "truth" remains occluded.
Pollock points out in her "Author's Notes" on the play that
[s]tructurally, shifts in time do not occur in a linear, chronological fashion, but in an unconscious and intuitive patterning of the past by Ev and Catherine [...] which are often, but not always, time shifts as well. In production, music has been used to underscore the pattern shifts [as is also the case in End Dream]; however, the characters' shifts from one pattern to another must be immediate. They do not 'hold' for the music. The physical blocking must accommodate this immediacy and the stage setting facilitate it. (129)
In her "Author's Notes," Pollock also suggests that the play "is most effective when the set design is not a literal one, and when props and furniture are kept to a minimum. [She] think[s] of the setting as one which has the potential to explode time and space while simultaneously serving certain naturalistic demands of the play" (129).
In the production of Doc at the Studio Theatre, Edmonton, in November 1999, the stage design by Narda McCarroll demonstrated this fluidity of time, but also the distinct moments that embed themselves in the memory. The set was constructed on several levels: on the lowest level downstage Doc Everett occupied an armchair, his patriarchal family throne; from a trunk placed in front of him, he took the habiliments of the past. Catherine also inhabited the foreground. The tiered levels upstage were the domains of the dead—her mother, Bob, and her father's friend, Oscar—the furniture draped in dustcloths. As the young Katie, Catherine moved through these levels; as a woman she remained in a confrontational position with her father. Looming behind the levels of present and past place and time were four draped columns, suggesting ancestral ghosts, or Greek columns—evoking other times, other tragedies.
The Studio Theatre production began on a dark stage with insistent, overlapping whispers infiltrating the silence, anticipating "bits and pieces of dialogue heard later in the play" (Notes 129). A child's rhyme, spoken by Katie, penetrated through the miasma of voices:
Fire on the mountain, kiss and run
On the mountain berries sweet
Pick as much as you can eat
By the berries' bitter bark
Fire on the mountain break your heart
Years to come—kiss and run
Bitter bark—break your heart.
The rhyme anticipates the tragic family events and places the child's perspective in relation to the others. In effect, this rhyme provides a choric comment on her own history:
Stand up straight
Upon your feet
Choose the one you love so sweet
Now they're married wish them well
First a girl, gee that's swell. (130)
The woman, Catherine, is congruent with the child, Katie, and lives out the implications of the rhyme. Pollock often uses child's verses or songs as echoes of the past, but also as ironic or tragic comments on the present. The "kaleidoscope of memory"(129) that constitutes the dialogue and action of the opening sequence is rotated throughout the play to reproduce different coloured patterns of pain and loss.
Pollock also uses aural imagery to signal intersections in time—the past impinging on the present. The sound of a train whistle punctuates the play, bridging the death of Ev's mother with the death of his wife, and warning his daughter of a possible future. As a young girl, she has denied affinities with Catherine, but as a woman she has come to empathize more with her mother, and Ev suggests that she is much like her. In her reassessment of the past, then, Catherine is indirectly assessing her own capacity for self-destruction as well as destructive behaviour in relationships. In the mirror, Katie sees "Gramma, and Mummy me" and she doesn't want to be like them (162).
The play ends with a reprise of Katie chanting the "Fire on the Mountain" rhyme as her mother's inevitable death draws closer. She blocks out the sound of Bob's voice, and denies her a sympathetic audience, realizing too late that she never did hear her at all. As an adult, Catherine witnesses and re-experiences the anger, pain, and guilt of the child, Katie:
KATIE. I don't hear you! (pause) I don't hear you! (pause) I don't! (KATIE jumps up and whirls around to look over at where she last saw BOB. Pause. Softly.) I don't hear you at all. (165)
Catherine finally burns the letter that has haunted the family, which was written by Ev's mother before she was killed by a train as she walked across a railway bridge. In effect, this brings the "time" of the play back to the beginning when Ev pulled the letter from the trunk in which is stored the detritus of the past. Bob has insisted that this is a suicide note, in order to punish him with the responsibility for his mother's death. But the contents are never revealed. As the letter burns, Catherine smiles at her father, an enigmatic acknowledgement of a shared complicity, and a ritualistic purgation of the past.
Moving Pictures similarly interrogates the life of a woman in terms of a fragmented body, but this time in three stages of time. The Canadian producer of silent films, Nell Shipman (1892-1970), is played as "Helen," a young actress; as "Nell," a director and actress in middle age; and as "Shipman," an older woman near the end of her life. Shipman looks back at her younger, ambitious selves from a cynical perspective, questioning whether all the sacrifice was "worth it." However, in the process of replaying her life and reuniting with her younger selves in a final Gilbert and Sullivan chorus, "Three Little Maids from School," she accepts and celebrates her past. As in Doc, the different stages of Nell's life interact, showing how the past informs the present, and the present informs the past. In a typically informative introductory note to the 1998 rehearsal draft of Moving Pictures, Pollock provides a context for the play:
The woman plays for and against herself in the reconstruction of a life dedicated to the creation of play on stage, on screen, and in life. She creates fiction in order to experience being. She transforms her life experience into fiction in order to determine how well she lived, why she lived—in order to know she did live and that her life has meaning [;] the fiction reveals to her [w]hat the actual living of her life did not.
Moving Pictures plays with the reconstitution of past memories because of present experience; the employment of life stories from the past for present and active motivations in the now; and the subjective recall of shared or individual experience with multi-layers of time, space and performance. The style and structure of the play is [sic] intended to comment on, inform, encapsulate, and expand all of Nell Shipman's "stories" which form the parts of the play. (2)
The men in Nell's life are played as projections of her memory process— characters in the film of her life. They are played by two actors: the first enacts Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant and founder of Universal Studios, and Ernie Shipman, a theatre and movie entrepreneur, and Nell's first husband; the second "Man" plays Bert van Tuyle, American independent movie producer, and Nell's lover and creative partner, and Sam Goldfeldt, Polish immigrant and founder of Goldwyn Pictures. As in Doc and End Dream, all the actors are present on stage throughout, observing, witnessing and commenting, although the two "Men" in their various configurations fade in and out of the action as their lives intersect with Nell's. Other people in her life are evoked through voices—her young son, for example, who is not sufficiently present in her life to have even a corporeal existence on stage. The voice of Thomas Edison is also present as a "voice over" on tape. His definition of "moving pictures" functions as a choric comment on the nature of Nell's attempt to reshape life as illusion and to replay time: "The illusion of continuous movement through persistence of vision" (4).
Moving Pictures unfolds in one continuous act. In structure and style, it simulates the screening of a film, the images flickering across time, as is suggested by the stage directions at the beginning:
(BLACK. A light picks out SHIPMAN sitting in a chair; NELL, behind SHIPMAN, leans on the back of the chair; HELEN stands behind NELL. The effect is of the three melded together as they gaze front.)
NELL. Play.
(Sound of the rythmic [sic] click of film running through a projector)
Plaay.
(Black and white film plays on the bodies of the set and the characters which provides the "screen". Elusive images flicker and flash, a strobe-like effect, illuminating SHIPMAN, NELL, and HELEN. All are looking out as if caught by a film they see playing on a distant screen, as the film plays on them.) (4)
Light and sound effects distort present "reality" and blur the distinctions between life and art, past and present. Once the image of the "three in one" breaks apart, Helen assumes her role as a young actress studying her lines as Lady Teazle, while Nell gazes out as if she were still seeing the film, and Shipman ponders Edison's words. The three personae are placed in their respective time and place before they begin interacting. Like Ev in Doc, Shipman is close to her death: she will "drop dead" in a month. Her reluctant engagement with the past is, then, an attempt to justify her life, and to understand her choices and her motivations, to "make something of it." Her first attempt to address her younger self as Nell receives no response, however. Nell is not listening; she is wholly absorbed in her own present visions. The past is not always receptive to present overtures; it also requires a "persistence of vision." The ensuing exchange between Nell and Shipman further underscores the distance between the younger woman's ambition and the older woman's doubts, but Nell asserts her conviction that something can be made of a life, through the replaying and collapsing of linear time into a present moment: "I say make the end and the beginning and the parts in between come together all at once and make something of it" (11). In the process, they replay the pain and guilt they have inflicted on others: for example, Nell was too busy with her film-making to be with her father when he died, and to spend time with her son, who was sent to a military school. Although she achieves some success with her "wilderness" films, she makes disastrous business decisions, and alienates the men who have tried to support her personally and professionally. At the close of the play, which ends as it began with a flickering black and white film projected on set and characters, the vision that has driven a life is reasserted. Time is frozen, and "hot pools of light" focus on the three women. Nell refuses to let the lights go to black, and the three personae join hands and laugh. The present is reconciled with the past, and the young Helen reasserts her optimistic anticipation of a new beginning.
In the premiere production of Moving Pictures by Theatre Junction, Calgary, in March 1999, the set and lighting design by Terry Gunvordahl imaginatively reconstructed the levels of time, and the interplay of reality and illusion, life and art. A raised upstage level suggested the "illusion" of film and Nell's imaginative vision: stage right under a proscenium illuminated with marquee lights were double flats constructed of wooden boards on which was written like a silent film text, "Grubstake Saloon." A 1920's movie camera was also placed in this "film" space. Film scenes of Shipman's "A Girl in the Wilderness" were projected on the flats. Stage left, also under the proscenium, the title of the piece being enacted was projected on a draped white curtain— the play or scene titles, or the names of plays and vaudeville routines. Centre stage was a rack for costumes, and stage left was a wind machine and phonograph player located behind a second draped, opaque black curtain. In the foreground was a circular playing area on the same level as the audience, which constituted the present "reality" of Nell's life. In this space were located the props of her working life: a desk and telephone, a steamer trunk on which were located the costumes assumed by the men in her life, and a drinks table. These could be rolled around the area to accommodate the different places and times.
As in Doc and End Dream, songs also relocate the action and the character in time, the words assuming levels of irony as they anticipate the ends in the beginnings. Moving Pictures is placed in time through the music of the vaudeville stage and silent film—ragtime mimed in the style of Charlie Chaplin. Towards the end of the play, the words of the songs or vaudeville routines are fragmented and spoken by all three ages of "Nell" as the memories coalesce in the present, and provide a comment on the past:
HELEN; NELL & SHIPMAN. I never had a dream so nice
Thought I was in paradise
Waking up makes me feel cheap – (melody stops)
.......................................
HELEN. Am I to blame be
NELL. cause flowers are dear
SHIPMAN. in cold weather
NELL. you should find
HELEN. fault with the clim
SHIPMAN. mate and not with
NELL. me for my part I
SHIPMAN. wish it was
HELEN. Spring all year round and
NELL. that roses grew
HELEN. under one's feet
Sound effects for a pratfall, then melody plays
HELEN; NELL & SHIPMAN. Everything is a source of fun
Nobody's safe for we care for none
Life is a joke that's just begun. (87-88)
The story remains incomplete, but it continues in time to speak to other audiences, playing out Nell's assertion that "she never wanted complete" (60).
In Pollock's most recent play, End Dream, which premiered at Theatre Junction in March 2000, time is collapsed into a purgatorial moment experienced by a young Scottish nanny at the instant of her death. The circumstances of her death—whether by murder or suicide—are complicated by the variant points of view, and by her own variant responses to the individuals for whom and with whom she works. The story is one which Pollock encountered in a second-hand bookstore in Ottawa, written by a professor from the University of British Columbia, and based on an actual case in British Columbia in 1924. Although murder charges were laid against a Chinese houseboy, the police were unable to conclusively prove a murder, and he was acquitted, despite the racist climate of the time. The "facts" suggested a cover-up to protect the nanny's well-connected employer, who may have been involved in a drug smuggling operation. However, Pollock was more interested in investigating how Jenny Smith died than in who killed her (Clark C9). To do so, she internalizes the drama, but she also problematizes the focus of vision by playing out several possible scenarios. In the intersection of present and past "events" she shows how reality can be reconfigured: "Theatre can present a surrealistic irrational way of penetrating the truth of things and in so doing free the imagination" (Pollock, qtd in Clark C9).
The play begins with an ending: the moment of death of a young woman, evoked through sound and light:
BLACK. In the blackness a long low exhalation of a flute.
An extremely loud resonant sound accompanied by a blinding flash which diminishes to an increasingly smaller point of light – a pinpoint of light in the darkness. An acrid smell of gunpowder.
As the flash is diminishing to a point of light the faint sound of blood moving through chambers, through channels, the barely audible sound of a heart beat.
A voice speaking in Cantonese. The voice is low, but not a whisper. One cannot determine the location of the speaker. As the soft low voice pervades, permeates the space gradually the face of JANET SMITH grows visible seemingly suspended in space, in the pinpoint of light. (2)
The voice of the Chinese houseboy, Wong Foon Sing, speaking in Cantonese, appeals to Janet to speak to him. Janet's initial response is "No," but gradually as the other players become apparent, she begins to relive the events of the recent past. As in Doc, Pollock lights up particular places and characters, juxtaposing them in a collage of disrupted narrative and recollection. Doris, whose baby has been entrusted to Janet's care, summons up remembrance, but also brings closure in her detached comments on the baby's name and her crying:
DORIS. She'll stop. A little comforting is all it takes. I don't think she's really awake. We call her Rosemary. Rosemary, for remembrance.
The baby's cries begin to fade and soon stop altogether.
There, you see. She's stopping now. Yes, she's stopped. She was stopping and now she's stopped. (3)
Wong Sien, a Chinese interpreter with an unidentified connection to Doris's husband, Robert, comments on the consequences of the death of Janet—the abduction and beating of Foon Sing, and his trial. Robert comments on the unreliability of Janet's record of events, kept in a diary: "I wouldn't take her word for things. She may have said things, thought things, wrote things. A diary? It won't reflect reality reality reality" (4).
As "light begins a slow invasion of the space," the silhouette of a young woman is disclosed, standing in front of a door. Pollock's scene descriptions are highly evocative:
She stands in front of a door. It looks solid, a front door, with leaded stained glass windows, a door that befits an entrance way of substance. A door that leads somewhere. The room in which the young woman JANET SMITH stands is full of shadow and filtered sunlight. Small motes of dust catch the light and sparkle in the air. A warm golden glow grows in the room as JANET stands there, still, and listening. She looks as if she's been abandoned at the front door shortly after entering the room. (4)
This room is the antechamber to Janet's experience of death, and she hears again the voice of Foon Sing, asking if she is afraid. He is at this point an intermediary between life and death, past and present, and his words are ambiguous and suggestive. Wind chimes signal a shift in a spatial or temporal dimension, and Janet's experience shifts more into a present lived reality—recreating the time when she first came to the home of her employers. She is greeted by Doris, who poses a series of questions: Why is Wong Foon Sing's name a joke? Why does Rosemary cry in the night? What are the personal habits of Robert, her husband, and why did he hire Janet? In effect, the play poses many questions, and in doing so questions the nature of experiencing reality and of any perceived "truth." Reality is constructed as a process of remembering which never stops, even after death.
As in Doc and Moving Pictures, all of the characters remain on stage for the two acts, standing on the periphery and observing the action when not directly involved. Songs again precipitate shifts in time, and facilitate ironic allusions, and again they are typically children's songs or mordent nursery rhymes, like "My Bonnie lies over the ocean," in which the singer "dreams that [her] lover was dead." Doris invites Janet to sing this song with her, and sings it faster and faster, in a frenetic display of frustration and anger over her condition as mother and wife.
Janet's dream of dying is placed in "historical" time through a narrative frame spoken by the Chinese "court interpreter," Wong Sien, who is also probably implicated in her death. He recounts the details of the abduction and beating of the "murder suspect," Foon Sing, and his subsequent trial. The play suggests, however, that Janet's dream comes closer to the "truth" than any legal investigation. In Act Two, Foon Sing is illuminated by the point of light, and the focus is directed more on his lived experience at the time of Janet's death. His memories intersect with hers, sometimes corroborating them, sometimes contradicting them. He is a witness to her life and death, but not a wholly reliable one, since his point of view and his motives are conditioned by his feelings for her. He is constantly watching Janet, almost like a predator observes its prey, and at one point, Janet screams at him to stop looking at her. But Janet also watches him and the others, as they replay the critical moments before her death.
The end replicates the beginning with some minor variations and additions: Wong Foon Sing repeats his final words to Janet (this time in English)— "I did not want this. I do care for you. Did you have feelings for me?" (85). Again the stage directions are highly suggestive, but inconclusive:
The pinpoint of light goes out.
A brief moment.
The sound of the door as it opens.
It spills a pathway of light. No one is at the door.
After a moment the door closes. (85)
The set design by Terry Gunvordahl for the March 2000 Theatre Junction production was also highly evocative and symbolic—a timeless holding space or limbo which associated domestic space with violence. The large antechamber in which Janet relives her death was set on a raised thrust stage, the floor tiles suggesting a chessboard. In the centre of the "room" were four large upholstered red chairs, placed back-to-back, and each facing a different direction. The placement of the characters on these chairs, each one always partially obscured from the others, suggested different spatial and temporal configurations. Three tall, narrow windows with red glass constituted the back wall to this room, and two more red chairs were placed on the periphery of the room, suggesting a space out of current time. The chairs were initially covered with dustcloths that were taken off like shrouds as the evidence of Robert's illicit drug business was removed from the room.
Most of Pollock's plays work through series of disclosures—although rarely in terms of a linear temporal sequence. Incidents are played contrapuntally, each informing the other and contributing to the rich texture of sound and imagery. Events and characters function like aural and visual imagery, juxtaposed, resonating, their present reality only an illusion. Time and space are reconfigured in order to stimulate variant ways of imagining the "truth."
WORKS CITED
Bessai, Diane. "Sharon Pollock's Women: a Study in Dramatic Process." A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Eds. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest Press, 1986. 126-136.
Clark, Bob. "Playwright likes 'simple stories.'" Calgary Herald 10 Mar. 2000: C9.
Knowles, Ric. The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies. Toronto: ECW Press, 1999.
Pollock, Sharon. Doc. Modern Canadian Plays: Volume II. Ed. Jerry Wasserman. 3rd ed. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1994.
—. Moving Pictures. Rehearsal draft Dec. 1998.
—. End Dream. Rehearsal draft Feb. 2002.