PATRICIA BADIR
Jason Sherman's anthology of monodrama is an important collection because it commits to print and therefore to history an important form of theatrical production in Canada. In a climate where budget cuts are eating away at the fabric of alternative theatre, one increasingly viable way to continue producing has always been to stage a one-person show. Moreover, acting solo has become a medium through which performers and playwrights can act up against the clamour of the mega-musical and of mainstream repertory theatre by recharging the stage with an intimacy that has the potential to be captivating and disruptive.
The collection opens with Ken Garnhum's Surrounded by Water in which an artist stands amidst an island he has constructed out of the canon of art history. While not the strongest piece of writing in the book, the play successfully establishes one of the fundamental tenets of speaking alone: the irresolvable contradiction between the desire to establish firm, absolute boundaries between oneself and the rest of the world and the irresistible desire to then pull those walls down. Likewise, Caroline Gillis's Caveman Rainbow and Edward Riche's Possible Maps are fascinating less for their prose style than for the perplexingly awkward sense of intimacy that their lecture-style dramaturgy produces. The former constructs a woman who draws upon medical texts, photographs, clothing and maps (each variously displayed on the stage) to tell of her battle with cancer; the latter charts the memories of an individual upon slide-projected maps of significant spaces both topographic and imagined. More noteworthy as pieces of writing are James O'Reilly's Work and particularly Alan Williams's Cockroach Trilogy. O'Reilly's play, presenting three different takes on alienation and the work force, avoids cliché by locating masculinity in crisis as labouring upon a sensitively drawn landscape of Saskatchewan. Williams's piece, also notable for the sense of place it creates, is a fractured rant about superheroes and rock stars which cuts across a particularly British and postmodern space of disillusion and despair. "You have to separate what's you and what's everyone else," says the speaker, "even if I was right and everyone's losing hope, what reason is that for me?" The despair that solitude brings reaches its direst conclusions in Robin Fulford's Lovesong which sensationally describes the rape and murder of a woman from the perspective of the perpetrator. While stylistically proficient, I found this piece to be the only example of gratuitous self-indulgence within an otherwise uncompromised collection. Women's voices, most powerfully represented by Joan MacLeod, Linda Griffiths (in collaboration with Sandra Balcovske) and Judith Thompson, also speak to the tenuous boundary between the self and the other. MacLeod's Jewel is a beautifully cut, multifaceted work which peers into the memories and sentiments of a woman who tentatively realizes that she is surviving the death of her husband. Griffiths's and Balcovske's A Game of Inches develops a delightful neurotic who works through her obsessions with men, baseball and French feminism with hilarity and poignancy. Thompson's offering, Perfect Pies, is initially simple and understated but as her speaker unravels a tale of friendship, betrayal and tragedy, the piece begins to sit uncomfortably and remains intriguingly oblique. Engaging for their exploration of the erotics of auto-performance are Andrew Kelm's Black Bride and Jennifer Ross's Anne Marie's Bedroom. Kelm provides a corporeal critique of 'sing a song of sixpence' while Ross maps the trajectory of mental breakdown across a tattooed body. And then there is Michel Tremblay's La Duchesse de Langeais, the unchallenged queen of Canadian monodrama whose fame precedes this collection and needs no further commentary on my part.
If the tension these pieces establish between isolation and intimacy is resolved on any level it is through a politicizing of the personal by the very act of speaking in public-an audacious gesture which makes the spectator both confidant and voyeur. Rather surprisingly, the introduction to the collection provides no commentary to this effect and for this reason I would attribute any disenchantment with the anthology as a whole to the editor. Without even a gesture toward the politics of performing the self, Sherman engages his readers in a juvenile anecdote about cave-men, burnt venison and a version of what he thinks is French existentialism. People do need to talk, "to commit that public and brave act of speaking aloud their stories. . . " but the courage of these twelve speakers is, without question, mediated by a whole series of theatrical, literary and social conventions not the least of which is the complicated relationship between the speaker and playwright. Sherman seems to be aware of the politics involved-at least his decision to place Fulford's piece between feminist pieces by MacLeod and Griffiths leads me to believe that he is. Solitude and loneliness may indeed be a fundamental aspect of the "human condition" to which these stories speak; however to claim that they are "our stories" received through a gesture that is fully innocent, wholly truthful and somehow apolitical is not just sorrowfully naive but willfully ignorant and unjustly reductive.