A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director
PRESENTS
Vigil
written and directed by morris panych
american conservatory theater
march 25–april 18, 2010
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
dan rubin
publications & literary associate
michael paller
resident dramaturg
katie may
publications intern
WORDS ON PLAYS
Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San
Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts,
and the donors of The Next Generation Campaign.
© 2010 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
table of contents
.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Vigil
3.
Vigil Meet and Greet / Design Presentation
7.
Married to Their Work: An Interview with Playwright/Director Morris Panych and Designer Ken MacDonald
by Dan Rubin
17. For the Pleasure of Seeing Him Again: a.c.t. Artistic Consultant Beatrice Basso
Interviews Actor Marco Barricelli
24. Playing in a.c.t.’s Attic: An Interview with a.c.t. Properties Supervisor
Ryan Parham
by Dan Rubin
29. The Old and the Lonely
by Dan Rubin
31. The “Perfect Existential Country”: A Brief History of Canadian Theater
by Dan Rubin
36. Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
OPPOSITE Pre-rehearsal costume design for Kemp by designer Ken MacDonald
NEXT PAGE Pre-rehearsal costume design for Grace by designer Ken MacDonald
characters, cast, and synopsis of vigil
Vigil was first produced as a cooperative venture between the Belfry Theatre of Victoria,
British Columbia, and the Arts Club Theatre of Vancouver, British Columbia, opening
first at the Belfry Theatre on September 28, 1995, and subsequently at the Arts Club
Theatre on October 28, 1995.
ensemble
grace
kemp
Olympia Dukakis
Marco Barricelli
setting
The upstairs room of Grace’s decrepit old house.
synopsis
K
emp arrives, suitcase in hand, at the home of his Aunt Grace, who greets him with
a hurled hairbrush. Kemp explains that he received her letter—which claimed that
she was “old and dying”—and traveled a thousand miles to be with her. Grace does not
verbally respond, nor will she: she remains mute. Kemp settles in to await her passing. As
time goes by, Kemp discusses matters pertaining to Grace’s death and funeral. He grows
increasingly frustrated with the amount of time it is taking Grace to die, but he refuses to
“dump her on the state.”
As days turn to months and the seasons change, Grace maintains her health, as well as
her silence. Because he did not pack for an extended stay, Kemp is at times forced to wear
Grace’s clothes. He passes time by watching people out the window, including a woman
across the street who sits in her window staring back at him. Kemp, we learn, has not
visited his aunt in 30 years, but he is still upset by Grace’s apparent distaste for him and is
offended that she has not a single picture of him in her house, not even the “adorable” one
taken when he had the mumps.
In many conversations over many days, Kemp recounts his unhappy childhood, from
which he had always imagined the glamorous Grace would rescue him. Instead, after a
singular visit Grace disappeared from Kemp’s life, leaving him alone to deal with his alcoholic mother, who dressed him in women’s clothes because she never accepted the fact he
was a boy, and his manic-depressive father, a failed magician who eventually shot himself.
“Between them,” Kemp says, “they destroyed every illusion I ever had.” His unhappy

Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company’s 2007 production of Vigil. Set design and photograph by Ken MacDonald.
childhood preceded an unhappy adulthood. He has managed to “go through life without
accumulating a single friend,” which suits him, he confesses, as he does not particularly
care for people.
After almost an entire year, Kemp builds Grace a machine intended to make it easy
for her to end her own life: one lever activates an electric shock, while the other delivers a
massive blow to the head. As Kemp shows her how to use the machine, Grace pulls a lever:
a frying pan smashes into his head and a massive jolt from the electric device electrocutes
him. He collapses but does not die. Over the days following, he makes a number of failed
attempts on Grace’s life.
Eventually the police visit the house to question Kemp about the woman across the
street: apparently she died a long time ago, sitting, watching out her window, and clutching
a faded photograph of a little boy with the mumps. The awful reality of what has happened
dawns on Kemp: he is not in the right house. Grace is not his aunt. Grace explains that she
did not reveal Kemp’s mistake because she was glad for the visit. Emotionally distraught,
Kemp leaves. But, after consideration, he returns. He watches over Grace until she dies.
Spoiler Alert
vigil
meet and greet/design presentation
Excerpts from Remarks Made to a.c.t. Cast and Staff, September , 
D
uring the first week of rehearsal of each production, a.c.t. staff members and the
show’s cast and creative team gather in a studio to meet, mingle, and get to know
each other. After personal introductions are made, the director and designers present to
the assembled group their vision for the design of the production, which is typically the
culmination of months of research, discussion, and textual analysis. This introduction is
a kind of “snapshot” of the creative team’s understanding of the world of the play at the
moment they step into the room with the actors, an understanding that will evolve and
grow and perhaps change in significant ways as the cast brings life and breath and physical
action to the playwright’s words over the following weeks of rehearsal.
Below are excerpts from remarks made at the first rehearsal of Vigil at a.c.t., which
offer a glimpse into the initial impulses behind the look and feel of the upcoming production. To work around scheduling conflicts, the first three weeks of Vigil rehearsals began
in September 2009, six months before the show’s opening. The cast and creative team then
reunited in March 2010 to complete the rehearsal process.
artistic director carey perloff
During The Overcoat [a.c.t’s 2005–06 season opener, which was originally created in
Canada by Morris Panych, Ken MacDonald, and Wendy Gorling], Morris sent me a pile
of his plays. He’s very prolific. It’s a wide canon full of wonderful stuff. At that time we
originally started talking about Vigil, so it has been a very long, interesting conversation.
This play seemed like a great reunion for the cutest couple we know in American theater,
Marco Barricelli and Olympia Dukakis, who last did a Canadian play here [a.c.t.’s 2002
production of Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again] in which Olympia
talked the whole time and Marco talked hardly at all. This time, Marco talks the whole
time and Olympia makes snide faces. [Laughter]
For those of you wondering why it is so peculiar that we are here in September working
on this play that does not get produced until March: it was a creative producing decision,
because Marco runs a theater [as the artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz], Olympia
lives in New York, Morris and Ken are doing plays in Toronto, and everybody’s schedules
are really complicated. This was the moment when we had a chunk of time when we could
all work together. Then we will come back together in time to really de-ice all this and heat
it up again and see what we remember before we put it up onstage.

playwright/director morris panych
Vigil is a play that I wrote in 1995. It was first produced in Victoria, British Columbia, and
it’s gone on in a lot of other productions. It’s been translated into, I think, 19 languages,
including Latvian. How many plays, come on, have been translated into Latvian?
The play was written in response to a couple of things. I had always had the idea of
playing with mixed/mistaken identity, but I never really had an idea for a play [that incorporated that concept]. Then we were visiting Ken’s mother in the hospital, and she wasn’t
doing very well, but the woman next to her was doing even worse. Her back was to us, but
the hospital had these volunteers going around trying to help people, and the volunteer
woman was standing beside her saying to this old lady, “I got a message from your nephew.
He says he can’t make it. Sorry.” There’s nothing, and then the volunteer says, “Are you
okay? Would you like me to wipe the tears off your eyes, dear?” I just walked out of the

hospital and I thought, “This is what life is becoming for a lot of people: being left alone,
cut loose. Society is taking no responsibility for people looking after other people.”
So the play was written in response to that. Ostensibly, one person talks and the other
listens with very little dialogue, but it really is a conversation, and, in many ways, a love
story between this nephew and aunt, or whatever you want to call them. In a sense, it’s an
incredibly difficult and tricky kind of dialogue to put together, when one person has most
of the words. We are just going through it now [in rehearsal] and trying to figure out how
that happens. It is very exciting to have two fantastic, thinking actors who can help us try
to develop the production in the way I think it should be, which is a true conversation
between two people.
The set is a variation on a kind of set that Ken’s done before, because he doesn’t really
have much imagination. [Laughter] No, that’s not true!

designer ken macdonald
I’m very used to it. We’re married and we’ve been together 29 years.
The play takes place in Olympia’s—Grace’s—upstairs room in her very strange house.
In my mind it looks kind of warehousey, but it is just a strange sort of wonderful attic from
which she has blocked out the world with newspapers, yellowed newspapers, that have
kept the light out, kept the sun out, kept her in her own private world. It’s a world that,
as a kid, you’d always hoped you might discover—an attic full of things, her history, and
then that history sort of stopped. Interesting little things for [Marco Barricelli’s character] Kemp to look through, for him to climb on, to explore to find out who his aunt was.
And the lighting is quite interesting, because it is all backlit through these newspapered
windows.
panych
The play is broken down into 39 scenes, and when we first started to do this show we
just did hard blackouts [between those scenes]. Then over time we realized that was too
unsubtle, and now it rolls through a little bit more.
I acted in this show a couple of years ago in Vancouver. That was the first time I actually
got a chance to do it, and I loved the score from that show so much I asked them if we
could have it. It’s very haunting and weird and funny. It’s like the show itself.
macdonald
Costumewise, Olympia and I have already totally changed her outfit [from the initial
concept]. We’ve come up with this new look for her. Marco is a man in a little brown plain
suit, and this is all he’s brought with him in his empty suitcase, what he has on, so he is
forced to occasionally wear Grace’s clothes when he washes his own clothes. If he goes out
shopping and it’s winter, he’ll have to wear her outfit.

panych
I was thinking about how important a time it is for a show like this to happen, when you
are having this conversation about health care [in the United States] and, believe it or not,
in our country people are trying to revisit it because there’re so many people out there who
are so against this idea of people helping other people. It’s just shocking. So I think it’s a
good time to talk about responsibility and what we owe each other and society, and I think
this play does that in a kind of compassionate, funny, interesting, quirky way (if I can boast).
PAGES 4 and 5 Costume sketches for Kemp and Grace created during the first rehearsal of Vigil, by designer Ken MacDonald
married to their work
An Interview with Playwright/Director Morris Panych and Designer Ken MacDonald
by dan rubin
T
he plays of Morris Panych are
defined by a darkly humorous treatment of what the playwright has described as “the daily
struggle of ordinary people with
life’s bizarre minor annoyances.”
He demonstrates the absurdities
of life (and, just as often, death)
through his colorful and amusing depictions of characters—who
are often stubbornly unhappy and
categorically unlikeable—as they
navigate ridiculous and extreme
circumstances. The productions Designer Ken MacDonald (left) and playwright Morris Panych.
of the plays Panych directs (fre- Photo courtesy Ken MacDonald.
quently ones he has written) are
also defined by the sets—equal in richness, color, and quirkiness—designed by his husband
and longtime collaborator, Ken MacDonald.
MacDonald and Panych both attended the University of British Columbia, MacDonald
for arts education and Panych for creative writing, but they graduated five years apart
(1972 and 1977, respectively) and didn’t meet until Panych returned to Canada in 1979 after
studying acting in London. They began collaborating artistically in the 1980s, a partnership
that immediately bore fruit. Canadian literary and design awards followed in spades, as
did national attention and a growing international fan base. Panych has won the Governor
General’s Award for Drama—Canada’s highest literary honor—twice (The Ends of the
Earth, 1995; Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, 2004); Natalie Rewa’s 2004 Scenography in Canada
devotes an entire chapter to MacDonald. Photographs of MacDonald’s designs adorn
the covers of all of Panych’s numerous published scripts, which is appropriate, because, as
Panych has written, MacDonald’s “visual presentation of my work is central to it . . . to
invent plays on paper is only the starting point of a whole integrated process.”

At the heart of their joint endeavors is a fundamental agreement that theater should
“convey a dreamlike sense of reality that should not be confused with nonreality,” as Panych
writes in the introduction to his 2005 play The Dishwashers. “A dream, when you are in it,
is real; sometimes frightening, sometimes alarming, sometimes funny, but the stakes for
you in its ‘reality’ are always high, and the existential outcome of its events is always vital.
If you have ever woken from a nightmare, screaming, or ever found yourself laughing out
loud in your sleep, you will know how deeply real and truthful a dream can appear to be.”
The pair is in high demand in Canada, and Panych’s plays have been produced in New
York and around the United States—as well as in London’s West End, Europe, Japan, etc.
So it is surprising that Panych and MacDonald have never before been invited to work
on a production in the United States as part of the creative team. a.c.t. audiences were
introduced to their work when the company imported The Overcoat from Canada in 2005,
but Vigil is the first time Panych and MacDonald have directed and designed a production from start to finish on u.s. soil. We took advantage of their presence in San Francisco
to ask some questions about their relationship, their careers, Vigil, and what it is like for
Canadians to work in the United States.

PART I: the actor and the art teacher
dan rubin: Did your relationship begin as a professional or a personal one?
ken macdonald: I was designing the set and costumes for a play in Victoria, British
Columbia, and the fella who was running the theater said, “Why don’t you come with me
to meet this young actor who is coming back from England. Take a look at him with me
and see what you think, because he looks like a good candidate for the show we’re doing.”
So I went with him to the cbc [Canadian Broadcasting Centre] cafeteria and spotted
Morris. Morris had on a little blue suit and a little tie.
morris panych: Very British.
macdonald: Very British schoolboy look. And I said, “Yeah, I think he looks great,”
and so we hired him and I costumed him.
panych: But we really had nothing to do with each other.
macdonald: Nothing. Then we did another show.
panych: And then we started hanging out.
macdonald: We had some mutual friends.
panych: For a long time I was an actor, so Ken and I worked independently. I guess
the [personal] relationship came first [before the artistic collaboration]. I got really bored
with acting really quickly. I thought, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. This is just
really tedious. Really soul destroying.” So I decided I wanted to write a musical. The year
before, Ken and I had worked on a summer rep together, and as part of it we had put on
a musical that was pretty simplistic. And I thought, “If this guy can write this, I can write
a musical,” because it really didn’t seem all that challenging. So I decided I was going to
write a musical [which would become Last Call: A Postnuclear Cabaret]. By then Ken and
I were living together, and every day Ken would come home and there would be new lyrics sitting on the piano, and he was like, [sighing] “Oh my god . . .” I knew he could write
music. I don’t know why.
macdonald: I don’t know why because I had never written a song in my life. I could
play the piano and sing. When I was in university, all my friends were in theater, and I
was in the club that did musicals: West Side Story, Hello Dolly! I was always in the chorus.
panych: I thought you could write songs because you really understood old musical
theater.
macdonald: I know every musical theater piece from the ’60s and ’70s. So he knew
that I could sing, but he didn’t know I could write, but I didn’t know either. It was actually
fantastic. He would literally put lyrics down and then two hours later there was a song.
rubin: When Morris first started writing Last Call in 1982, did you think, “This is okay
and it will be fun to work with him on this, but it’s not great,” or did you think, “Oh, wow,
he can really write”?
macdonald: No, it was really well written. And very funny and a huge hit. They were
lined up around the block every night to see it. It toured Canada. They made a tv special
of it. Ran for months.
rubin: Together you went on to write four more political cabarets between 1982 and
1988, but eventually Morris gravitated towards straight plays. Why?
panych: I just felt like musicals weren’t really my genre. It was hard because we thought
we would just always do musicals. Ken, I think, felt kind of left out. So it was really hard
for me to start writing just plays.
macdonald: My income tax form used to say “composer/designer.” It was sort of half
and half. But I haven’t written a musical for 15 years now. At the time that Morris started
to write straight plays, I was getting more and more into design. And eventually he started
directing. It was only the very first show he directed that I didn’t design. [For that first
show] I was in the background saying, “Get the designer to do this, this, this.” Since then
I have designed everything he has ever directed.
rubin: How did you become a designer?
macdonald: I was a high school arts teacher—grades 11 and 12, drawing, painting, and
applied design—and a friend, Don Shipley [artistic director of Victoria’s Belfry Theatre
from 1976 to 1979], said out of the blue, “Do you want design a show for me?” And I said,

“I don’t know how.” “So do you want to try it?” “Well, okay.” And he asked me on the next
show, and the next show, and the next show, and then he said, “Do you just want to be my
resident designer?” And so I quit teaching high school. I have no training. Zero. None.
But I’ve done it for so long.
rubin: Why did Shipley think you would make a good set designer?
macdonald: He was going out with a really good friend of mine, Sheila McCarthy, an
actress in Canada, and she said, “Ken can draw things.” It was as vague as that. They were
starting a new theater, and I designed Puttin’ on the Ritz [Belfry Theatre, 1977], a revue,
which became very successful: we did it at the Shaw Festival; we took it to Vancouver.
panych: It’s funny, you start out your life . . . I started my life and thought, “I’m going
to be an actor.”
macdonald: I was going to be a teacher.
panych: But then it changes as things happen.
macdonald: I had taught for five years, from 22 to 27, so I was really young. At 27 I
quit and became a set designer.

PART II: the playwright/director and the designer
rubin: When did you start designing for Morris?
panych: Well, I was still trying to be an actor till about ’90, I guess, when I finally just
walked away from it.
macdonald: Well, when did you write 7 Stories?
panych: ’89.
macdonald: 7 Stories takes place on the edge of a building and a man is going to jump
off and all these people don’t bother to stop it, couldn’t care less about it. It’s a beautiful
play, and it’s had a big history. Every student when they first meet Morris always says, “Oh
my god, I was in 7 Stories in high school. I did 7 Stories in university.”
panych: It is very big in schools for some reason. It was the first play I wrote that was
produced by a professional theater.
macdonald: It was a big transition for me, too. It was the first time I ever did a set
like that.
panych: The set was extraordinarily beautiful. It was revolutionary, and the play too.
macdonald: The man on the ledge was dressed like a surrealist René Magritte man
[in his painting The Son of Man]. The set is this huge sky, which is what Magritte always
did.
panych: Then the next play we did, your design was based on Escher.
macdonald: For a while I was really interested in designing based on a certain artist.
It was called The Necessary Steps [1991], and there were stairs going everywhere.
panych: It was about a man who found a pair of shoes and the shoes had their own life
and they took him places.
rubin: Where do your ideas for these plays come from?
panych: 7 Stories: aids had just come into the news and everyone was terrified, especially gay people, and when you start to be afraid of dying then you start to think about
what it is about life that is worth living. Why is life important? I started to read Albert
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and really became interested in existentialism. The play is
really a riff on that. And The Necessary Steps is the same thing: it’s extremely existentialist
because it is about a man who has no control over his life.
I really believe that the absurdists and the existentialists in the ’50s and ’60s were onto
something. Then something happened in the ’70s and it all evaporated. No one was trying
to do absurdist theater. No one was trying to do fatalistic theater. Suddenly everyone was
trying to do naturalistic, realistic stuff. But I think there is a place for it. That’s how that
went. What was next?
macdonald: Ends of the Earth [1992]. I would say that most of Morris’s plays are about
a little man with a big grudge. One man sticks out his tongue at another man and he chases
him to the ends of the earth [as happens in Ends of the Earth], or a little man pushes a
button, but another man has already pressed it, and he wants to kill him for that [as in
Lawrence and Holloman (1998)]. Just a little man who has a chip on his shoulder.
panych: I’m really interested in a certain kind of morality. I think the theater is the
best next place for moral teaching, but in a way that’s not religious. Those plays, I believe,
are kind of spiritual. In 7 Stories, the man jumps at the end, but his umbrella goes up and
he flies across to the building across the street. There’s this whole notion: if your life is
meaningless anyway, then you create your own meaning, which is incredibly liberating and
freeing. Your life no longer belongs to any other idea.
rubin: Would you say that is the difference between existentialism and nihilism?
panych: Yes. I’m not a nihilist at all. I believe there is some purpose, but that purpose
is internal. I don’t think it’s a big universal purpose. I think there’s a purpose for people
to be on the earth, but I think it is to do some good things while they are here. That’s the
moral lesson of these plays.
rubin: Do you think theater needs to be moralistic?
panych: No, but they shouldn’t be Google plays about Afghanistan and Iraq . . .
macdonald: Frost/Nixon.

panych: I’m sorry, that’s not even a play. Ken and I have extremely strong views on the
theater, but they are not very popular.
macdonald: We don’t like a lot of theater.
panych: We think theater has to be visually appealing. That’s the first thing. Why else
would you do it? You might as well do a radio play. Even if the set is a red apple hanging
in the middle of the room, it has to have some visual appeal. Otherwise, it’s not theater.
rubin: Do you agree with each other about theater?
macdonald: Very much.
panych: We might not agree on the nuts and bolts of it, how it’s carried out. Ken does
not like reality. The reality of who has to move where.
macdonald: I’m growing more to like realistic sets, but realistic sets that are extended.
I like sets that are super real, filmically real, but are actually built to be 18 feet tall or the
proportions are stretched. I used to be much more abstract.
panych: We’ve been working together for so long that once we agree on the basic idea,
the basic feeling, then I don’t even care what he does.
macdonald: We trust each other to do what we’re going to do: I’ve never done a bad
set for him.
panych: It’s the same with Alan Brodie, who’s doing our lights for Vigil: he’s done the
lights for at least 20 of our shows. We’re interested in hanging on to the collaborators we
have, because if we’re likeminded it is so much easier. They get what you want. Alan and
I now don’t talk: he does the design and I look at it and it’s great.

PART III: VIGIL
rubin: Has your new bent towards distorted realism snuck into your design for a.c.t.’s
production of Vigil?
macdonald: I’ve now done Vigil five times, and the set has always been basically the
same. The only thing that changes is that there’s a skylight or there’s not a skylight.
panych: But I think Vigil [which was first done in 1995] was the start of that, because
Vigil does exemplify this naturalism that explodes onto a large scale. The internal part of
Vigil is very naturalistic, and then as it goes out it becomes more and more absurd.
macdonald: No one would live where [Olympia Dukakis’s character] Grace lives.
panych: We have to tell the audience (this is what people aren’t used to in the theater
anymore, unfortunately), when the lights come up they aren’t watching tv. They’re not
watching a real story. They are watching a fable. They are watching something bigger than
life. They are watching an extended story version of reality.
macdonald: Something theatrical.
panych: It’s not supposed to be real, but it’s supposed to be like a dream or a strange
little book you read. It’s supposed to take you somewhere outside yourself.
rubin: Why, of all your plays, do you think Vigil has had the life that it’s had?
panych: I think people understand in their guts what that story is. Looking after an old
relative: it’s a big problem right now, and every society has to deal with it in a fundamental
way. How are we going to look after our old people as baby boomers are getting older and
older? Are young people going to be able to look after them?
macdonald: We baby boomers are exactly in those years: Morris’s mum died two years
ago, and his father three years ago. My mum died. All of our parents are dying right now.
panych: There isn’t a single person sitting in this theater who won’t fundamentally
understand what a horrible situation that is. This play is like a bloodletting for them. It’s
like they’re afraid to think those things that we all think: “Why don’t you just die?” It’s not
really what you’re thinking, because, of course, you’re not thinking that. But there’s a kind
of a delicious sharing of a true feeling, deep in your guts, that there is something very difficult about the situation. [Marco Barricelli’s character] Kemp is confronted head on with
this problem. Every time there is a new production in another country, in another language, I think, “Wow, it’s being done in Tokyo?” But, yeah, there are old people in Tokyo
and there are young people thinking, “I don’t want to deal with my parents.”
rubin: Were you dealing with a dying parent when you were writing Vigil?
macdonald: My mother.
panych: His mother. Your parents are fine until they can’t move. The minute that happens, that illness, if you’re the person [who will become the caretaker], you realize, “My life
is effectively over in terms of what I thought it would be. The freedoms that I had before, I
no longer have.” This person is now going to take up so much time and energy and effort
that you have to rethink everything.
We’re just so selfish now. We’re so concerned about doing our own thing, because we
don’t live in family groups anymore. We live in weird urban groups, so family is seen as
“a problem.” Vigil addresses that. It’s a satire, essentially, but the springboard was Ken’s
mother becoming terribly infirm, to the degree that she couldn’t move.
macdonald: And when my mum was in the hospital, we heard the nurse saying to this
old woman in the bed beside her, “Oh, dear, your nephew isn’t going to be able to come and
visit you. Sorry to tell you . . . Do you want me to wipe the tears away from your eyes?” She
couldn’t wipe her own tears away. No one was coming to see her. I think it gave Morris the
idea of [a character] writing to a relative saying, “I’m dying. Come and take care of me.”
panych: That scene made me really sick. It was just awful.
macdonald: The loneliness of it.


PART IV: canadian exchange
rubin: What is the difference between Canadian theater and American theater?
panych: There are so many parts to that question. It is so interesting. I find American
critics generally like theater and are supportive of the people who do it, at least compared
to the critics in Toronto.
macdonald: And Britain.
panych: The first time I ever went down to Seattle from Vancouver to see some plays, I
remember reading reviews for a play that, frankly, wasn’t very good, but I read the reviews
and the critic said it wasn’t very good but go anyway, and I thought that’s what it should
be. Okay, it’s not that great, but you should see it for whatever reason. Find a reason to see
it. So that was the first difference.
Americans have a whole different system—especially on Broadway and off Broadway—
where people actually have to raise their own money to do plays. It moves me greatly to
think that people will go out and raise money to do your play. That’s a big thing.
macdonald: And not Canadian, because we are all subsidized.
panych: Nobody would ever raise money in Canada to do theater. For someone to
invest $25,000?
macdonald: It’s unheard of. Our regional theaters are all subsidized by the government. The government gives you a certain amount of money, a grant, every year for a million dollars, or some number.
panych: There’s the Canada Council for the Arts: every year they give the same amount
of money to each of these theaters. And the Ontario Arts Council also gives money. And
Toronto is interested in culture, so the Toronto city government will give money to organizations.
rubin: Does this allow for more risk taking by theaters?
panych: Sadly, I don’t think it does. In terms of the acting, I think Canadian actors
are more like British actors. They hold things a little bit closer to their chests. I think
American actors are a little bit more out there.
What is weird is, culturally speaking, Canadians (and I’m excluding Quebec from
this) essentially are peripheral Americans. Everything we do is based almost entirely on
American culture. I really almost wish we spoke a different language. If the British can
barely escape it, imagine what the Canadians . . . I mean we are inundated with it. It is
essentially our de facto culture, with the exception that maybe we’re a little bit more liberal. Weirdly it doesn’t happen any more in music. The pop music culture in Canada has
changed immeasurably over the last 20 years. I think it had to do with government regulation. The government decided that radio play had to be a certain amount Canadian music.
macdonald: Sixty percent or something.
panych: They decided they needed to expose Canadians to their own people, and sure
enough it had a huge effect.
macdonald: Because Canadian music turned out to be really good.
panych: And the same happened with literature, too. There has been a huge crop of
great Canadian novelists, nonfiction writers . . . but it hasn’t really happened in theater.
It has to a certain degree. We have a lot of really great theaters, but there’s no place that
develops really big plays. But it’s all collapsing in the States too. Nobody is doing really
great new plays. They’re doing commercial musicals.
macdonald: With movie stars. You have to have a movie star in your play. Even for
[2009’s off-Broadway production of ] Vigil they got Malcolm Gets, a television star.
panych: On a day-to-day basis you don’t feel like an outsider because you are just doing
your work, but as a Canadian there is this market that you can’t quite get access to.
macdonald: It makes us very angry because we’ll read a bad review of one of Morris’s
plays and think, “Well, if we could have done it . . .” We know we’ve done a good production of it in Canada, but they’re not interested in us [working on the American production]
at all. This is the first time we’ve ever worked in the States.
panych: It is really difficult to do.
macdonald: The papers and review process. The stuff you have to do to prove that you
are worthy of doing a show here. We’re only able to come because he wrote and I designed
the original production. It’s insane.
rubin: Have you ever considered moving to the States?
panych/macdonald: No.
panych: I like being up there. I like it living in Canada.
macdonald: I don’t want to be a part of the political America. We’re married. Here
an anti–gay marriage bill can be put on the ballot by a handful of signatures and all of a
sudden the entire state is voting for it. It’s ridiculous.
panych: I don’t think that we feel like we live in a better country by any means, because
I really admire the United States. I think it’s the best country in the world in some ways.
It is just when you live outside of it and look at it all the time, to be in it is weird. We’re
outsiders.
macdonald: We know more about you than you know about us. We get abc, cbs, and
nbc news every night. Do you get cbc news? We follow you a lot more.
panych: When I came here to direct this play I was very nervous, partly because it was
a different country and I didn’t know how this country and these people would accept my
being here. But I’m only three weeks into it, and it is like I am working anywhere else.


macdonald: Me, too. I thought,
“Oh, I don’t know how to work with
sets and costumes in the States.”
But I feel like now I could work in
New York. What’s the difference?
It’s just people.
rubin: Is there anything inherently “Canadian” about your work?
Where the plays come from? Where
the designs come from?
macdonald: I don’t think so.
We got an amazing Canada Council
grant in 1991—we both got $18,000
to go to Europe to see theater. We
went to Europe for four months
and we saw 88 plays and it was
pretty incredible. We saw them all
together and I kept a journal. It’s
been a reference point for years.
panych: I’ve always tried hard,
when I’m writing plays, not to idenKen MacDonald (at piano) and Morris Panych in Billy Bishop Goes to War
tify a place.
at the Grand Theatre in 1986. Photo by Robert C. Ragsdale. Reproduced
macdonald: Or time.
from the Toronto Public Library website, http://www.tpl.toronto.on.ca.
panych: But especially a place.
macdonald: [In Vigil,] I don’t
want the newspaper that Kemp reads to say “San Francisco” on it. Morris has a time period
that he kind of likes—late ’50s–early ’60s—in terms of a look, but it’s modern day. Vigil is
taking place now, but you’ll see nothing onstage that couldn’t have been there since 1956.
Same with most of [Morris’s] plays: they have almost a classic American mid-century
look, but it isn’t in Canada, it isn’t in the States, and it isn’t in Europe. It’s just anywhere,
everywhere. That makes it more universal.
for the pleasure of seeing him again
a.c.t. Artistic Consultant Beatrice Basso Interviews Actor Marco Barricelli
M
arco Barricelli has been part
of the a.c.t. family since
making his Geary debut as the passionate Mangiacavallo in The Rose
Tattoo in 1996. The following year
he became an inaugural member of
a.c.t.’s resident core acting company, where he remained until 2005,
directing in the Master of Fine Arts
Program and serving on the artistic
team while taking on a host of powerful roles on the mainstage, including Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen
Ross, Teach in American Buffalo,
James Tyrone, Sr., in Long Day’s
Journey into Night, Leicester in Mary
Stuart, the mad king in Enrico IV,
Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar
Named Desire, James Tyrone, Jr., in
A Moon for the Misbegotten, Valmont
Marco Barricelli outside his Santa Cruz home. Photo by Beatrice Basso.
in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Tilden
in Buried Child, Oscar Wilde in
The Invention of Love, and The Narrator in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (opposite
Olympia Dukakis), among many others. A graduate of Juilliard, he has also performed on
and off Broadway in New York, in regional theaters across the country—including eight
years with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—and on television. Also a director and educator, Barricelli switched theatrical hats in 2008, taking on the role of artistic director of
Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
Barricelli is also the longtime partner of Beatrice Basso, an artistic consultant with a.c.t.
So, we thought, who better to interview him? Basso agreed, and on Valentine’s Day she
cornered him with our recorder to ask him a few questions about returning to a.c.t. to take
on the role of the misanthropic Kemp in Vigil.

how did VIGIL come to you, and what was your reaction to the script?
[a.c.t. Artistic Director] Carey Perloff knew Morris Panych, the playwright, and had
produced his Overcoat to great success at a.c.t. [in 2005]. I remember it was two Januarys
ago. I was in the snow, freezing cold, out in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a staa [Shakespeare
Theatre Association of America] conference. Carey had sent me the play a week or two
before that and said that it was something she was interested in. She was interested in
trying to bring Olympia [Dukakis] and myself back together on a project. So I read the
play, of course, and I just really loved the writing. I thought it was odd and unconventional
and disturbing and funny. But disturbing and funny in the way Pinter can be disturbing
and funny. And it was written very well. The craft of Morris’s writing really appeals to me.
Carey and I had a conversation out in the snow. The problem was, really, calendars and
trying to make dates work. But Carey came up with this very strange and inventive idea:
Morris, Olympia, and myself, and Ken MacDonald, the set designer, would all rehearse in
the fall [for a show that would not open until the following spring]. So we rehearsed for
three weeks and then we put it on ice. Now, five months later, we’re about to start up again
with an abbreviated rehearsal process.

how can a play stay with you for all those months when you’re
not rehearsing?
This is unique in that I have most of the language in this play. I never shut up. It’s a series
of scenes that are basically monologues. So it’s a different kind of learning process, because
you’re not responding to cues. It’s self-generated and you have to find that in yourself.
I’ve had the opportunity in my career to repeat roles. They’re different productions, but
I’ve come back to do the same role. I always feel good about coming back to it because the
preliminary work is done: you’ve gone through all that thought process, so you can then
start the second time at a different level with a different understanding of the character.
Plus, you as a person have grown. You’ve gotten older. Things have happened in your life,
and all that stuff hopefully informs your work somehow.
When Carey proposed this odd rehearsal process, I thought it might be a good thing for
this play. It lends itself to somebody working on it alone, unlike a typical piece of theater
where there’s a lot more dialogue involved. And, I thought, even if it’s only five months,
maybe coming back to it later . . . there’s a process of osmosis that happens, and even
though it may not be in the forefront of your mind every single day (like it is when you’re
in a regular four-week rehearsal process), it’s always there with you. You see something
and it reminds you of a moment in the play, or you hear something and it reminds you of
something your character says. It’s always with me. I never leave it. If I have long drives, I
speak the words out loud and I hope they’re going to be there.
you mentioned that in this play you talk quite a bit more than
olympia. this experience seems to echo an older canadian
experience you have shared: a.c.t.’s production of FOR THE PLEASURE OF
SEEING HER AGAIN .
Even though Vigil is a series of monologues, it’s very much a dialogue: I am very dependent
on Olympia. It’s not like a one-man show or anything like that. Olympia and I did the
opposite in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, years ago [2002], written by the brilliant
[Quebecois playwright] Michel
Tremblay. Olympia and I had a
very special time with that play.
That play is very sweet and full
of a real sort of pure sentiment
about a man finally finding a
way to thank his mother for
everything she gave him, which
influenced his artistry and
his career. It was a very good
experience for Olympia and
myself. We did that play both
at a.c.t. and at Williamstown
in Massachusetts. Of course,
we worked together on Hecuba
years before that [1995, 1998],
so we have a long history
together. In For the Pleasure,
Olympia had the bulk of the
language and had a lot of long,
long speeches to learn, as I do
in this play. So it’s Olympia
and myself again, but this time
the tables are turned.
Olympia Dukakis and Marco Barricelli rehearsing For the Pleasure of Seeing Her
Again at A.C.T. in 2002. Photo by Kevin Berne.

when you agreed to take on this project, you had recently started
your new job as artistic director of shakespeare santa cruz. it was
at a time when you wanted to concentrate on being an artistic
director and you were doing very limited acting jobs. what made
you think, “okay, this is a project i want to act in”?
It’s back at a.c.t. on the Geary stage. I still think the Geary is one of the most beautiful theaters in America, and it’s a real privilege to play there. There was the chance to be
around all my friends at a.c.t., with whom I’ve spent a large portion of my career. There
was the chance to work again for Carey, who has been very important in my career, not
only with all the shows I’ve done at a.c.t., but with Carey herself. Carey and I have worked
on 16 plays together in our careers. Not many actors have a chance to work so exclusively
with one director.
Then there’s the fact that, of course, I like the play and I responded to the oddness of
it. I want to say “creepy,” but that’s not the right word. It’s kind of disturbing. I was laughing while I was reading, but it was disturbing laughter, and I like that kind of theater: it’s
playing two levels at once, which I like. Then there was a chance, of course, to work with
Olympia again, and who’s going to say no to that, right? And there was the chance to
actually work with Morris. Morris, who wrote it, was also directing it, and I thought that
would be a very interesting experience and not something I’ve done a lot of in my career.
Interesting and also intimidating, in a way, because Morris has directed this play before (to
great acclaim), and has played my role before (to huge acclaim), so I have to admit that, as
wonderful as it is, it’s very intimidating at the same time.

how has that been in the rehearsal process?
Oh, he’s a really mean bastard. He’s very mean to me. He makes me feel inadequate and
insecure all the time. [Laughter] No, Morris is very great and wonderful. I only worked
with him for three-plus weeks in the [fall segment of the] rehearsal process, but I already
know Morris is the kind of director that I would love to work with again, any time. There
are a few people that you meet along your career and you think, “Yeah, I like working with
this person, but I could take it or leave it in the future.” But Morris is one of those guys
where you really feel like you’re in good hands. I have an enormous amount of trust in
him, not just because this is his play, but in his eye as a director. He’s very astute. He’s one
of the good ones.
what in the character you’re playing speaks to you, and what
scares you?
Oh god, what doesn’t scare me? Everything, every syllable of it scares me. What speaks to
me? I think that people think that actors by nature are such gregarious, outgoing, social,
wonderful people that everyone loves and loves being around, etc., but I’ve never felt that
way. I don’t think I’m as extreme as this character, Kemp, but there is an element of me
that feels like a real outsider, and certainly a loner. I know that that’s true about me. He’s
somebody who is always on the periphery. He had a desire to be part of the group, to be
part of “something,” but he doesn’t really have the ability to do that. He’s one of those
people who’s been marginalized all his life. And there are reasons for it. He, obviously, as
we hear through the course of the play, had a very strange (to put it lightly) upbringing: an
odd relationship with his mother and even odder relationship with his father. This is a guy
who’s been alone his whole life. He’s one of those people that nobody really notices. He
works at a bank, and, as he’s sitting at his desk, he has a huge, rich life going on inside his
head about everything that’s going on with everybody else at the bank. Everything that’s
going on in the world. It’s a vibrant, active life, and he’s full of opinions about it, but he has
nowhere to put it. He doesn’t share it with anybody. He claims that he doesn’t like people,
yet he has a desperate need for relationship. And I don’t mean a sexual relationship; I mean
any kind of relationship with anybody. He’s alone.
For me, the play is about disenfranchisement, and tremendous longing and tremendous
need being fulfilled in ways that are the least expected. It’s about two disenfranchised,
lonely people finding . . . I want to say finding comfort in each other, but it only comes
through misguided attempts and failure and . . . I don’t know: you’ll have to come and see
for yourself, and make up your own mind.
i was just thinking, when this play came to you, you were dealing
with having discovered that you had cancer and the beginning of
chemotherapy. now that you’ve talked about kemp’s solitude, is
there some connection there because of the weight of that kind
of experience, that brush with mortality?
I don’t know. There might be. If there is, it’s probably unconscious, or subconscious. [Kemp
is] somebody with enormous needs, as I had when I was going through chemo. But ultimately, at some point, there’s an inability for anyone to really help you. So you are really
alone, in a sense, even though I had my partner, I had my family, I had my friends, and all
of that. It is a very singular experience in all senses of that word.

Kemp has this enormous need for help, but he doesn’t have the tools. He doesn’t have
the ability in life to connect with anybody. Even if someone were to offer help, he would
not know how to accept it. He would probably say that it has to do with other people,
but, I think, looking from the outside at him, it would be his inability. And we all know
people like that. There are people you see and you know that they’re alone, and part of you
wants to reach out to them, but the other part of you knows that this is just a very strange,
odd person, and you’re not sure you want to open that Pandora’s box of trying to relate to
him. I think Kemp is, in a way, his own worst enemy. Having cancer informs absolutely
everything in your life to a certain extent, so to say that it’s not informing the way I think
about this character would not be true, but I don’t think it’s conscious.

the other big adventure in your life since you left a.c.t. has been
becoming an artistic director, which is something you had wished
for for quite some time. what are your favorite things about
being an artistic director, and what are your favorite things
about being an actor?
My favorite thing about being an artistic director is being a producer: to bring the right
people in on the right project at the right time. To be able to stand in the back of a dark
theater and watch the show that you brought to these people unfold onstage. To watch the
people become enchanted with something that maybe they had not expected or had not
known previously. That’s pretty great. I really love that.
I think my favorite part about being an actor is rehearsing. I love the rehearsal. I love
the rehearsal a lot more than I love the performance, I have to admit. I love being in a
room with other actors and with a director that you like and respect and trust. Whatever
that process is of trying to find the zone where you’re suddenly in a moment that actually surprises you and is not expected. There’s that moment of letting go—when you’ve
worked so hard and you’ve done whatever the research is and you’ve learned the words
and you’ve become intimate with the script and the text—and then all of a sudden you let
it go and something happens between two people or inside yourself that’s surprising and
unexpected. You’re connected, somehow, to the material, to the language, to another person
onstage, to the audience. You feel all of it at once. If you’re in a rehearsal room, it’s with
everyone in the room. If you’re onstage acting, it’s with an audience. But it happens much
less in performance. It does happen, but you can’t count on it really. It doesn’t happen with
any regularity in performance.
do you find yourself using different sides of your mind when you
do one or the other?
As an artistic director the scope of your vision is much wider, and there are a lot of factors
to take into account. It’s just nonstop; there are lots of fires to put out every single day. It’s
managing a group of people. It’s managing a business, even though it’s a not-for-profit
business. In my particular case it’s managing a university system. There are all those things
you have to think about.
As an actor, of course, you don’t. It’s a much narrower focus. I’m certainly focused on
people: I’m focused on the people I’m onstage with or in rehearsal with, etc. But as an actor
if I’m doing a scene and I think, “You know what I need in this scene? What I need is a
huge vase that I can smash.” And you want that and try to see if there’s a way to make that
happen. As an artistic director, if an actor needs something like that, it’s not just, “Well,
it would be the best thing for the scene,” but, “Can we afford it? Do we have the people
to make it? Do we have the material to make it? What from our budget is going to go to
balance out this new element that we have to bring in? Is it going to be possible? And if
it isn’t going to be possible (which more often than not is the case), how am I now going
to approach this actor and keep him happy but tell him he can’t have what he wants?” So
there is that kind of negotiation. I learned in my first year that being an artistic director is
not about building a vision as much as it is about managing compromise.
so have you become a less demanding actor because you understand
more of the other side?
I don’t know if I’m less demanding, but I’m a whole lot more understanding. If somebody
tells me no, I get it. I really understand why we can’t have that chandelier to swing from,
and I won’t ask again.
and what about being an actor for so many years has informed
your approach to being an artistic director?
All artistic directors should be actors. It’s about empathy, but it’s more than that: it’s a real
understanding, not an intellectual understanding, but a real profound understanding of
what is going to be needed in order to set the tone for these artists to do the best work that
is in them. I just feel like I know that innately. I can’t always provide it because of whatever
restrictions we have, but sometimes I can, and I love that part of it. I love opening the door
to watch an artist perform to the best of his or her abilities. I think more actors should be
artistic directors in this country. Frankly, I’m sorry that there aren’t more of them.

playing in a.c.t.’s attic
An Interview with a.c.t. Properties Supervisor Ryan Parham
by dan rubin
T
he story of Vigil takes place in the cluttered attic bedroom of a poorly maintained
home belonging to Olympia Dukakis’s character, the aged and ailing Grace.
Playwright Morris Panych explains: “As Grace got older and her world started to close in
on her, she just went farther up the stairs” until she could not ascend any higher. She surrounded herself with a personal history to which she is no longer contributing. We asked
a.c.t.’s properties supervisor what goes into creating the clutter of a retired hoarder.
with a set that is so full of stuff, where is the line between prop
design and set design?
As with any show, sets is still in charge of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling pieces, doors,
windows, things like that. Any item you would put into a moving truck when you change
residences: that’s considered a prop. That’s a good way of thinking about it. It can even
come down to lighting fixtures and rugs and pillows. Food, dried goods, canned goods,
bicycles.

so it’s not simply that if it is static onstage it’s part of a set, and if
it has the capability of moving it’s a prop? what is the bed in VIGIL?
The bed would be a prop. Any sort of furniture piece is a prop. The lines can get a little
bit blurred, like they will get blurred with The Tosca Project coming up [in June]. There
is a huge 15-foot-long bar, and that’s in set world (I imagine . . . I’m hoping), because it
is more of a permanent fixture of that room. But then with something like that there is
definitely a lot of coordination between sets and props: sets will build that Tosca bar, and
then props will dress it out with the bottles, the beer tap system, the espresso machine, all
the glassware and barware. There’s collaboration: sets will make the base structure of an
item and then props will take over and dress it out or trim it out.
is there anything like that in VIGIL ?
I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty straightforward. All the items onstage are furniture items.
This is Grace’s attic, where all her leftover junk from all her life—including photo albums,
an accordion she played when she was eight years old, newspapers and magazines—they’re
all in this room. It’s all her possessions, and that definitely falls in props’s world.
when you have a world defined by a specific character’s stuff, do
you have long conversations with the director about that
character? for example, how do you know grace played an
accordion when she was eight?
Sometimes I would have that conversation with the director, but with Ken MacDonald
designing . . . [he and Morris Panych have] been talking about this play for years, so he’s
the go-to guy. They’ll talk about what items are actually in the space and then, when I
come on board, I get more involved with the actual actor usage of those items. Like, Ken
and Morris will create this stack of trunks near the window that Marco [Barricelli, who
plays Kemp,] needs to climb up. They just want a stack of trunks. I come in and say, “Well,
we probably shouldn’t put the wicker trunk on the bottom. We should probably use a
metal trunk.” That’s how I get involved: helping them physically shape a world that will
withstand theatricality.
tell me about the “death machine” that kemp builds for grace when
he grows impatient waiting for her to die from natural causes.
It’s based on a photo [from a past production], because Ken and Morris have done this
production numerous times before, though there are only a few elements that are constant:
they love the fact that it is made out of one of those portable commodes that invalids
would have in their room. So it is on a castered dolly with a portable commode. There’s a
big lever. Because it is so huge, it of course doesn’t fit through the doorway into this attic
space, so the crossbar is lowered. It comes into the room. It’s raised up. There’s a jerryrigged counterweight system.
do we see kemp bring the machine in?
Yeah, we see him bring it in, set it up, hook up the jumper cables to the battery. Really the
constants are: the commode, the hangman structure, the car battery, and there’s a frying
pan [activated by] a big switch that will allow it to drop. Kemp gives Grace the choice:
she could die an electrical death or from a massive blow to the head. Other than that, the
machine is made from basically whatever you can find in the props shop, junk stores, refuse
places, as far as gearing it out, making it look like it was built by someone who has never
really built anything before.
do you have any idea what those elements are going to be?
We’re still at the research stage, but we have the battery and the commode and some
random pulleys, ropes, and levers and stuff like that. This week we are actually going to

Sketch of the “death machine” for Vigil by properties supervisor Ryan Parham

be working on the frying pan. It’s a cast-iron frying pan that swings down, and it’s supposed to look like it hits Marco in the head and knocks him onto the bed frame, which is
then electrocuted. We can’t use a real frying pan, because if it does actually make contact
with him it would do some damage. So we’re going to be researching and doing some
experiments as far as what kind of rubber or silicone or foam we can use that will give the
appearance and have the rigidity of a fry pan, but if it does make contact it’s not going to
do much damage.
is the selection of materials you use the primary precaution you
take with something like this, or are there other failsafes in the
apparatus itself to prevent injuries?
It definitely has to be designed to operate the same way every time. The actor has to be
comfortable enough to know what to expect. With something like the death machine, you
don’t want any improvisation. Technically it would fall under stage violence, so it is highly
choreographed and metered out, as far as the actor counting off his steps, timing it to make
sure that all safety precautions are
met and everyone is in control the
whole time, no matter how out of
control it looks.
going back to how you
create the world: my
understanding is that
grace basically stopped
leaving her house after a
certain time and stopped
accumulating new stuff.
I think that’s right. The items are
definitely dated. The newest items
we’re using are from the late ’70s,
early ’80s. The building itself is
pre-’50s. Ken and Morris came out
here [to the a.c.t. scene shop in
the Mission] and had a field day
of just pointing and pulling: “Oh!
Give me one of those! Oh, give me The “death machine” in Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company’s 2007
that! Give me this!” We’d give them production of Vigil. Photograph by Ken MacDonald.
truckloads of junk, and then they
would start shaping their world in the rehearsal room. There is definitely editing that goes
on. They have probably gotten rid of some items, but for the most part it’s been, “Well, if
we’re not going to directly use this, we’ll just add it to the pile in the back.” Amazingly
enough, they are pretty much using everything they pulled in one way or another.
did you have to go out and get anything for this show?
We had to get the accordion. And newspaper: she has piles and piles and piles of newspaper, which gets tricky because, when she was collecting newspapers, they were all black
and white, but there’re really no black-and-white newspapers these days except obituaries
and classifieds, and the audience can really recognize those sections. So you start delving
into foreign newspapers or black-and-white tabloids or making black-and-white copies of
newspapers and wrapping colored newspaper in black-and-white pages to add bulk. If the
papers are just sitting there it is a lot easier; it’s the ones that they actually open and fold

and show the audience that are a build-it-from-scratch project.
The rest of it: we have a lot of junk in our storage. We have the busted bentwoods and
the crutches and the punched-out paintings, the gramophone, the chandeliers, the armchairs that are missing a leg.
so this is like a.c.t.’s attic.
Pretty much. Subscription holders should be able to recognize tons of items from previous
productions: “Oh, that’s the hall tree from
Little Foxes!” There’s a trunk in there that
was in the first two previews of the first
run of A Christmas Carol. A purple armchair from American Buffalo. The gramophone has been in a lot of things; it is
one of the workhorses of a.c.t. The bed
frame might be from Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, but we are busting it up and breaking bits off and scratching paint on it.
The bedspreads are actually the curtains
from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof had lace panels over floral print
curtains, and Ken saw the curtains and
said, “Oh, these are horribly beautiful.
Let’s get them up there!”

after a show, it all comes
back to the prop shop?
Rehearsal props for A.C.T.’s Vigil. Photo by assistant stage manEverything has a home back in stock.
ager Danielle Callaghan.
We’re pretty much stuffed to the gills
right now, so when we have a production when we actually have to buy a new item we have
to be pretty judicious about what we then have to get rid of. We only have so much room.
But some items you just hang on to for coolness factor—like the golden city of Troy from
War Music. We still have that.
the old and the lonely
by dan rubin
P
laywright Morris Panych has been fascinated by death since he began writing plays.
In 7 Stories, his first play, the nurse of 100-year-old Lillian converses with a suicidal
man (simply named Man) while he stands on the ledge outside her apartment window:
“Where’s the nobility in watching people hang on to the last shred of a meager existence?
Hooked up to every imaginable medical apparatus. Jumping is the only way to go these
days, otherwise you run the serious risk of a protracted survival.” One might view this
caretaker as callous if her elderly ward did not share similar views:
lillian: When you’re a hundred years old you’ll understand everything. And
then you’ll die.
man: Why wait?
lillian: Something interesting might happen. But then again, it might not. I
think you should jump now.
man: You do?
lillian: If that’s what you want to do, I think you should do it.
man: There really is no reason to live, is there?
lillian: Not really.
As seen here and in Vigil, Panych is intrigued by the vacuous period of life created by
modern health care’s delay of death. As reported in a 2009 study by the Pew Research
Center entitled Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality, 39 million Americans are
over the age of 65. This demographic currently composes 13% of the population, up from
4% in 1900. This number will get a bump in 2011, when 76 million baby boomers turn 65,
and will rise to 20% by 2050.
Interestingly, Panych’s Lillian has lived a good decade longer than the average person
desires to live: 89 years, according to the study. Only 8% of those asked have a desire to
pass the century mark. This might be because one in six adults over the age of 65 are lonely.
One in ten say they feel like they aren’t needed. Statistically speaking, however, they’re
about as happy as everyone else, and, Growing Old in America finds, “older adults report
experiencing [negative benchmarks] at lower levels (often far lower) than younger adults
report expecting to encounter them when they grow old.” That is to say, it’s not as bad as
we think it will be.

Outliving one’s partners and peers is an unfortunate yet predictable circumstance that
makes maintaining meaningful connections more of a challenge, but loneliness, regardless
of the period of life in which it occurs, is a frequent theme of Panych’s plays, which are
populated with socially inept loners. John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist and psychologist at
the University of Chicago, would argue that the playwright’s focus is right on time: as a
society we are suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.” A 1985 survey asked Americans
how many confidants they have. The most common answer was three. In 2004, however,
the most common answer (from 25% of those asked) was zero. Technological social media
such as Facebook, twitter, and mmorpgs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing
Games) can be useful connectors, Cacioppo acknowledges, but they are simultaneously
dangerously supplying “a façade of being connected . . . [that] can make you lonelier.” And
loneliness leads to unhappiness. Cacioppo writes:
In surveys to determine the factors that contribute most to human happiness, respondents consistently rate connection to friends and family—love,
intimacy, social affiliation—above wealth or fame, even above physical health.
This should come as no great surprise. We are social animals, descended from
a common ancestor who generated all the other social primates. It may well
be that the need to send and receive, interpret and relay increasingly complex
social cues is what drove the evolution of our expanded cerebral cortex—the
reasoning part of the brain. After all, it is our ability to think, to pursue longterm objectives, and to form bonds and act collectively that allowed us to
emerge as the planet’s dominant species.

This may be why Panych’s protagonists are rarely successful. Connections between characters are made accidentally, usually despite their best efforts to avoid them. These bonds
last just long enough for the characters to realize the benefits of companionship, before
their new friendships dissolve and they are plunged back into isolation. In 7 Stories, Man
takes Lillian’s advice and jumps, but his umbrella opens and he glides to the building across
the street. He jumps back to his original ledge in hopes of telling Lillian of his adventure.
In the brief interim, however, she has died. Man is alone once more. At least Lillian is not.
SOURCES Monte Burke, “Loneliness Can Kill You,” Forbes (August 24, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009, http://www.forbes.
com/forbes/2009/0824/opinions-neuroscience-loneliness-ideas-opinions_print.html; John Cacioppo, “Epidemic of Loneliness,”
Psychology Today (May 3, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/loneliness/200905/
epidemic-loneliness; Morris Panych, 7 Stories (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990); Paul Taylor, project director, Growing
Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality, Pew Research Center (released June 29, 2009), accessed February 9, 2009,
http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/736/getting-old-in-america.
the “perfect existential country”
A Brief History of Canadian Theater
by dan rubin
“It appears that the cultivation which we imported and consumed, much as we
import and consume fig bars, is not adequate to sustain the spirit in times of
stress. And it is a crisis of spirit we are experiencing as we slide through the
millstones of history.”
—George Ryga, author of the groundbreaking
1967 Canadian play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, in 1977
“Canada is the perfect existential country, because it’s constantly searching for
answers.”
—Morris Panych, 2007
I
ris, a precocious ten-year-old, opens Morris Panych’s 2003 award-winning hit, Girl in
the Goldfish Bowl, by announcing to the audience, “I live in a country where nothing
happens. In a town where nothing happens. In a house, where nothing much has ever
really happened. Until now.” In a sense, all of Panych’s plays could start with a similar
statement. Nothing of much significance has happened to the characters who populate
these dramas, until, that is, the curtain rises. The plays attempt to capture these abnormally
interesting moments in these otherwise boring lives—moments with which these characters are ill-equipped to deal because their circumstances have never before pressured them
to define themselves. Panych’s characters often have hopes about who they will become
and regrets about who they have been; they rarely have any concept of who they are. When
they do happen to be living examined lives, they are usually suicidal. In this way Panych’s
characters aptly dramatize Canadian culture’s ongoing quest for definition.
For much of its history, Canada had no independent identity. In the late 1960s, when as
a people Canadians finally began looking in the mirrors their playwrights had been trying
to hold up, they were not entirely impressed with what they saw. But they didn’t turn away,
and over the last 40 years the country has begun to support a class of playwrights who
continue to hunt for a national character. In doing so, these artisans have had to overcome
200 years of tradition of Canada defining itself only by comparison to what it was not: it
was not Great Britain, it was not France, and it was not the United States.


In 1760, after 150 years of French dominion in Canada, the British arrived, quickly took
over, and began their occupation. In order to indoctrinate the local Frenchmen—and to
keep their own troops entertained—amateur garrison performances of Shakespeare and
hits from the Restoration implemented the tradition of cultural colonialism. As English
Canada spread out and grew prosperous, foreign touring companies delivered melodramas
and classics to fire-prone opera houses, prominently built in the center of every major
town. Local actors were restricted to supporting roles; Canadian voices were discouraged.
World War i momentarily silenced all theater, as Canada was asked to play a significant
international role for the first time. The country came out on the other side of the Great
War with a sense of national pride and a desire for a national identity. This desire had been
growing since 1867, when the British colonies remaining in North America were united
under the British North American Act to become the Dominion of Canada. A number of
Canadian voices emerged, but despite this moment of cultural celebration, the “establishment of Canada, moulded [sic] by its long, colonial past, endorsed the familiar British,
or embraced the ubiquitous u.s. cultural exports as it had always done,” writes historian
Brian Kennedy. Writer Robert Fulford, one of Canada’s best-known cultural journalists,
remembers this period: “My generation of Canadians grew up believing that, if we were
very good or very smart, or both, we would some day graduate from Canada.”
During the first half of the 20th century, Canada continued to bring in shows from
abroad and lacked major professional theaters of its own. Between the 1920s and 1950s,
the craft of making theater was preserved by amateur groups called Little Theatres. These
companies, however, were not enough to support Canadian writers, who found work with
the Canadian Broadcasting Centre (cbc). Established in 1932, the cbc began broadcasting radio plays in 1936. Between 1944 and 1955, the cbc’s two radio play programs received
ratings bested only by hockey game broadcasts. Indigenous drama could be heard over the
airwaves, just not in the theater.
Hardships for playwrights were not limited to English Canada: in Quebec the
Francophone theater similarly suffered. Since the defeat of the French by the British in
1759, the French-speaking province’s cultural identity as a whole struggled to survive on an
otherwise English-speaking continent. Additionally, theater was bound by the Catholic
Church’s demand that dramas preach Christianity, as well as by the state’s crippling censorship. As a result, only histories and religious dramas came out of Quebec until the mid
20th century. Unlike English Canada, however, this region, by virtue of speaking a different language, could still boast a stronger sense of identity than the rest of the country,
and important playwrights—Gratien Gélinas, Marcel Dubé, and Michel Tremblay—did
emerge starting in the late 1940s.
The Massey Commission Report of 1951 brought significant change to the theatrical
landscape of the country. As had happened with the First, the Second World War brought a
wave of nationalism. In its wake, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent created the commission
to make recommendations on how to best encourage cultural fields “which express national
feeling, promote common understanding, and add to the variety and richness of Canadian
life, rural as well as urban.”1 The report’s findings articulated to politicians what was already
obvious to artists: “Canada . . . was losing its culture, its arts, its artists, and its scholars to
its friendly neighbour [sic] to the south,” summarizes theater scholar Don Rubin. Out of
the report came the Canada Council of the Arts, entrusted with doling out federal subsidies
for professional theater projects and the construction of regional playhouses. “Suddenly,”
writes Rubin, “major cities across the country were producing the classic plays from world
dramatic literature with professional companies. Actors were being developed, designers
were appearing, and newspapers even began hiring full-time theatre critics.”
Even then, however, artistic directors were frequently hired from abroad and, not
familiar with (or not confident in) the local writing pool, programmed their larger spaces
with British, Irish, and u.s. hits, regulating their annual token Canadian offering (if they
had even that) to smaller second stages. Canadian playwrights were still dependent on
shoestring-budget “beggars’ theatres” for productions.
The profession continued in this way until 1967, when the country’s centennial celebration renewed cries once again for a national identity that was something more than their
colonial identity. In November of that year, at the Vancouver Playhouse, came George
Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a play “which ostensibly anatomized Canada’s treatment of
its minorities . . . [and showcased] Ryga’s earlier preoccupations with the dehumanization
of Western man in general and Canadian man in particular,” Rubin explains. The piece
was a blow against what Ryga called the “transplanted English and American theatre of
illusion to which a small percentage of our population—notably, those who have never
known the biting eloquence of unemployment or enforced welfarism—cling like aging
wolves to an arthritic moose.” It also celebrated what Ryga saw as the evolution of a
national literature:
A qualitative change is taking place in the language of our theatre. The common speech of people, carefully studied and reproduced, is now being elevated
into theatrical poetry. Regional speech mannerisms are no longer treated as
aberrations—they are examined and integrated into emotional lines not previously explored.
1. Report of the Royal Commission on the National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1951), xi.


Rita Joe was a cultural turning point, but theaters did not begin producing indigenous
work overnight. In 1970, the seven major regional theaters produced the work of a total of
two Canadian playwrights. The national fervor surrounding the centennial was a momentary blip on the public’s radar. Wasserman writes, “Modern Canadian drama was born out
of an amalgam of the new consciousness of the age—social, political, and aesthetic—with
the new Canadian self-consciousness. Since the larger theatres were generally unsympathetic and unaccommodating to both these forces, an even newer Canadian theatre had to
be invented, an alternate theatre.”
These alternate theaters refused to let the 1967 impulses fade. In Toronto, Factory
Theatre Lab set out to prove that “there was no lack of Canadian playwrights; they were
just waiting to be discovered and encouraged,” writes Wasserman. Theatre Passe Muraille
gravitated towards local subject matter and collective creation. And Tarragon Theatre,
founded in 1971, cemented Toronto’s position as the Canadian center of new work by balancing artistic and commercial success and bringing Canadian drama into the mainstream.
In Vancouver, Tamahnous Theatre provided a home for progressive new work, including
a special brand of small-cast musical, establishing a groundwork for works like Morris
Panych and Ken MacDonald’s 1982 cabaret Last Call!
The government grants that had helped the regional theaters prosper provided the
financial infrastructure for new companies, which sprouted up everywhere in 1971 and 1972
to fulfill the national interest in homegrown work, but the financial disparity between the
regional theaters and the alternate theaters was still striking. In 1971, a group of playwrights
met to consider “The Dilemma of the Playwright in Canada,” which resulted in a number
of recommendations, the boldest of which was a call for a 50% Canadian content quota for
all theaters receiving government funding. Theaters resisted, but after the controversy went
public, the Canada Council politely suggested to its recipients, in a nonbinding manner,
to do more Canadian plays. By the 1972–73 season, nearly 50% of the plays produced by
subsidized theaters were Canadian. The theaters also began to commission new plays by
local playwrights. “One lesson of this era,” writes Kennedy of the state of playwriting in
Canada following the centennial, “is that any national drama is limited only by the extent
to which the country encourages and financially supports its native talent. If writers can
make a living in theatre, or at least be assured of a venue for their work, then the way each
writer chooses to interpret the Canadian reality—his or her choice of dramatic style and
structure—has no limits.”
In English Canada, Ryga’s Rita Joe and Fortune and Men’s Eyes—written by John
Herbert in 1965 but only popularized in Canada in the 1970s after its success in New
York and London—became the first true classics in the dramatic canon. In Quebec,
Michel Tremblay, who shocked French-Canadian audiences with his frank working-class
drama Les belles-soeurs (The Sisters-in-Law) in 1968, by 1972 had written his grand 13-play
cycle spotlighting the culturally and sexually marginalized of Canadian society. Since the
late ’60s, Canadian theater has brought forth a substantial body of plays. In 1973, David
Freeman’s brutally naturalistic Creeps helped launch Factory Lab and Tarragon Theatre,
which are still dedicated to fostering new work, and set the tone for much of the Canadian
work of the decade. Also a 1973 trendsetter, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt, by Rick Salutin, captures the power of collectively created docudramas. In Wasserman’s anthology he acknowledges the works of Sharon Pollock, James Reaney, Michael Cook, George F. Walker, David
Fennario, David French, Erika Ritter, John Gray, and Eric Peterson as “representative of
the primary patterns into which modern Canadian drama has shaped itself.” “Probably the
strongest impression made by Canadian plays through the mid 1970s was of a theatre of the
underdog and the outsider,” Wasserman writes. “The dramatic focus is on the losers rather
than the winners, the victims (or the process of victimization) rather than the victors.”
Morris Panych continues this trend today, but has pushed away from the naturalism of
the ’70s. His characters are not just outcasts; they are hyperbolically peripheral, even to
their own lives. He seems to be asking how much longer Canadians are going to cripple
themselves with a national pastime of reclusiveness. How much longer will they suffer
their own insecurities? Panych’s dramaturgy suggests that Canada’s national character has
been identified; now it is time for it to grow.
SOURCES S. M. Crean, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture (Don Mills, ON: General Publishing, 1976); Ken Gass, “What Is a
Canadian Play?” in The Factory Lab Anthology, edited by Connie Brissenden (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974); Brian Kennedy, The
Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid: A Compact History of Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004); Don
Rubin, “Creeping Toward a Culture: The Theatre in English Canada Since 1945,” Canadian Theatre Review 1 (winter 1974) 6–21;
George Ryga, “Contemporary Theatre and Its Language,” Canadian Theatre Review 14 (spring 1977) 4–9; ibid., “The Need for a
Mythology,” Canadian Theatre Review 16 (fall 1977) 4–6; ibid., “Theatre in Canada: A Viewpoint on Its Development and Future,”
Canadian Theatre Review 1 (summer 1974) 28–32; Jerry Wasserman, Modern Canadian Plays, revised edition (Vancouver:
Talonbooks, 1986).

questions to consider
i. Why doesn’t Grace speak for the majority of the play?
2. Why did Kemp idolize Grace when he was young?
3. What reasons does Kemp give for coming to Grace’s home? Are there other reasons
that are left unsaid?
4. Do Kemp and Grace ever find comfort in each other?
5. What do you learn about Grace from the clutter in her attic room? For returning
patrons, what props do you recognize from past shows?
for further information
Cacioppo, John T. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York:
w. w. Norton, 2008.
Kennedy, Brian. The Baron Bold and the Beauteous Maid: A Compact History of Canadian
Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005.
Panych, Morris. 7 Stories. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990.
——. Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003.
——. The Dishwashers. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.
——. The Ends of the Earth. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993.
Rewa, Natalie. Scenography in Canada: Selected Designers. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004.

Rubin, Don. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Toronto: Playwrights Canada
Press, 2004.
Taylor, Paul. Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality. Pew Research Center.
Released June 29, 2009. Accessed February 9, 2009. http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/736/
getting-old-in-america.