DENIS JOHNSTON
While many Canadian theatre companies have been active in script development, only a few have distinguished themselves so much as to have an anthology published in their name. We have The Factory Lab Anthology (1974), Twenty Years at Play: A New Play Centre Anthology (1990), and now this anthology of plays from Theatre Passe Muraille. If the volume contains fewer plays than we might have hoped for, there are compensations: all the pieces are previously unpublished, all are lesser-known works of important Canadian playwrights, and all have introductions written by artists long associated with play development at Passe Muraille --Jim Garrard, John Palmer, Booth Savage, and the late Clarke Rogers. In addition, the editor has chosen to include some historical materials (again previously unpublished) which are extremely valuable in illustrating the early years of this unique and seminal company.
The anthology begins with John Palmer's Before the Guns, a.k.a. Memories for My Brother, Part One. This play was first mounted at Palmer's and Martin Kinch's storefront theatre in Stratford in the summer of 1969, and its remount at Passe Muraille that autumn marked the beginning of their rise to prominence in Toronto's theatre scene. Before the Guns is a highly episodic play in twenty scenes, tenuously connected by a wandering youth named Berlin. Many of the episodes seem optional--indeed some are marked so by the author--and the play's overall tone of absurdist whimsy reads like a tribute to such '60s playwriting icons as Ionesco and Arrabal.
If Before the Guns adds up to anything now, it is a picture of the time--not of the world as it was, but as constructed by young sensitive artists like Palmer who were sometimes prone to narcissism and self-pity. In scenes which satirize these artists' own pretensions, the play is snappy, funny, incisive. In scenes which condescend to an older generation, or romanticize a younger one, its naivety makes one squirm. What emerges, however, even in these moments, is Palmer's fine ear for dialogue, which later appeared in a more disciplined form in A Day at the Beach (produced in 1987). Of all the writers who began in Toronto's alternative theatres in the '60s, John Palmer was perhaps the most talented. I wonder what he's writing now.
Like Before the Guns, Sally Clark's Lost Souls and Missing Persons is highly episodic, but has a more cogent story to tell. It centres on Hannah, the comfortably middle-class wife of a comfortably middle-class lawyer. On holiday with her husband Lyle in New York City, Hannah abruptly leaves their hotel room in the middle of the night, and disappears. Lyle dutifully reports her as a "missing person," but the authorities can find no trace of her. Meanwhile, we see Hannah on the street in a cheerfully catatonic state, eventually taken in by a misanthropic artist named Turner, who becomes her lover.
Thematically the play covers very familiar ground--The Diary of a Mad Housewife meets Being There. Structurally, the play presents three stories of three different families. One series of interleaved scenes shows how Hannah met Lyle in the '60s, and how they declined into the middle-class conservatism that eventually drives her to a breaking point. A second series of scenes takes place in the present, showing Hannah's new "family" and Turner's growing affection for her. (The perfect woman for a self-absorbed male: she reacts very little and speaks only gibberish.) A third series of scenes deals with another family which is still more grotesquely dysfunctional--Fred Cape, his estranged wife, and their brain-damaged son. Perhaps this story is intended to cast light on the other two, but it is ineffective in doing so. With no strong through-line to carry it, Lost Souls and Missing Persons is left staggering under the weight of its 22 characters and 37 scenes (though the sheer profusion gives the play a certain kind of energy). Finally, one feels it is more successful as a technical exercise than as a play.
Like Lost Souls and Missing Persons, O.D. on Paradise may bring back memories of movie themes--this time of the Ship of Fools genre--but with a distinctly Canadian flavour. If there's one thing Canadians have in common, it's a desire to escape to somewhere warm in the middle of a long winter. I can remember seeing this play at Theatre Passe Muraille on a freezing February afternoon in 1983. What delights awaited the shivering parka-clad audience: a sandy shore, lots of reggae music, and some very attractive actors (of both genders) in swimsuits.
The play begins with the arrival of eight adult Canadians on a one-week vacation package in the Caribbean. If the psychological disrobing which follows--peeling off layers of defences, exposing desires and recrimination--seems somewhat inevitable, it also carries a ring of truth. Not so the death of one of these travellers, who seems to have contracted a fatal metaphor, a not-uncommon disease in this kind of play. Equally disconcerting is the other characters' relative indifference to this brush with untimely death--no more upsetting, it seems, than a piece of lost luggage. Perhaps Canadians understand the rapid progression of the disease of fatal metaphor.
The gem of this collection is Peggy's Song by Jim Garrard, the only one of the four plays which does not seem somehow a captive of its time. This provocative two-hander opens with the recently widowed Peggy hiring a private detective to investigate her late husband Howard's past. An amateur pilot, Howard died in the crash of a light private plane--but he was not the only passenger aboard. The other body recovered was that of a girl about 15 years old--unidentified, unknown to Peggy, and whose relatives have never come forward.
The detective, named Patterson, is a slob in the tradition of disgustingly ill-groomed private eyes. But his methods seem efficient enough; and as he sets his procedures in motion, Peggy begins to search doggedly through Howard's thousands of photographs--a search which becomes a metaphor for discovering her own past, a past which she failed to apprehend when it was her present. The most haunting moment in the play occurs in a monologue in which Peggy describes her husband's negligence in the death of their only child, a sin which would have driven them apart eventually, had Howard lived. Was it faithlessness which led to the presence of the girl in the plane, or was it a kind of atonement? But by the time they solve Howard's riddle, the solution has lost its urgency. Patterson may be no Bogart, and Peggy no Lauren Bacall, but they both prove capable of overcoming their isolation and choosing to live in the present--perhaps even with each other.
Appended to these four plays are some historical materials related the early years of Theatre Passe Muraille. One is the original prospectus for the company, which Jim Garrard wrote in 1968 for the governing council of Rochdale College, where Theatre Passe Muraille originated. The second is a stunning collection of production photographs taken between 1969 and 1974, photographs which the editor has collected mostly from private sources. The third is a calendar of performance spanning what she calls the company's first era, 1968-1974, including the few productions at Rochdale College and the company's entire period of tenancy at Trinity Square.
Some of the assumptions here seem questionable, such as the notion that the "first era" of Passe Muraille lasted as long as six years. It seems to me that the theatre which Jim Garrard founded at Rochdale in 1968 had very little to do with the one which Paul Thompson later ran at Trinity Square--I think there were at least two eras in the period 1968 to 1974, and arguably three or more. A more surprising distortion, if we can call it that, is the fact that Thompson himself is so absent from this book. Though not the founder of Passe Muraille, it was Paul Thompson who took over the company when no one else wanted it, Thompson who developed its distinctive performance style, Thompson who scoured the hinterland for new audiences, who built bridges to other companies, and who raised the money for its present home. Paul Thompson was also Passe Muraille's longest-serving artistic director, from 1970 to 1982, and still functions as a kind of itinerant conscience and éminence grise. Yet, except for the photo captions, the performance calendar, and a single passing reference, there is no mention of his name in the entire volume. Nor is there any play included from Thompson's long tenure as artistic director. Did none of his unpublished "collective creations" survive in written form? In a book which is part anthology and part historical record, it seems strange that such a large part of the history of Theatre Passe Muraille should go unrepresented.