Theatre Review: Apple (Vern Thiessen)

Thiessen, Vern Apple (2006)

We saw this play in Elliot Lake, played by the Gateway Players of North Bay, offered as a 2007 Quonta entry.

The adjudicator's remarks were a model of constructive criticism. He was able to lead the production team into recognising their mistakes, or questioning their choices, without in the least putting them down. His remarks about acting were entertaining and instructive. He was far, far kinder than I would have been – he obviously loves theatre, and theatre people, and that love was contagious. By and large, the adjudication rescued a rather dreary evening.

The Gateway Players did a valiant job, and during the adjudication explained why they thought it was a good idea to interrupt the play with frequent blackouts for scene changes, why the lighting was too dim, why the set was a mix of abstract and realistic scenery. One thing the adjudicator did not ask was why the director thought that the actors should speak their lines in very measured, and often obviously portentous tones. The actors worked hard, and did a very good job with a very thin script. The director used music (mostly songs by Peter Gabriel) to bridge the scene changes and provide atmosphere. These would have worked better if we had not been distracted by the busyness of the stage hands.

Overall the production was a good deal less than the sum of its parts. I agreed with all adjudicator's judgments except one: he claimed this was a brilliantly written play, but I think the script was bloody awful.

It seems Thiessen has a reputation for brilliance: http://moderntheatre.suite101.com/article.cfm/this_apple_is_delicious is a laudatory review of the Toronto premiere of this play. But if this play is evidence of Thiessen's normal standard, his reputation is undeserved. The characters are cardboard, possessing only enough features to propel the plot, which reminds me of a TV movie of the kind made to provide a "vehicle" for a fading star.

Oh, yeah, the plot: Dysfunctional marriage between bland husband Andy and driven real-estate-agent wife Evelyn. Husband has been fired from his government job, gets no sympathy from bitchy Wife, and offers none in return when she complains about her job. He meets medical student Samantha in the park, has affair with her – she has an orgasm the first time they're together. Wow! Student has no goals in life, just wants to enjoy the moment. Wife is engaged to sell Student's condo (inherited from her mother). Neither knows they have a man in common. Then Wife develops breast cancer. Husband now has a full-time job: to care for Wife. The intern handling her case for the specialist is – the Student! Husband breaks off affair. Husband and Wife reconcile (and have orgasmic sex on stage to prove it.) Wife dies. Husband and Student meet in park again, she wants to get back together with him. He refuses. The End.

But why should we care for these people? Just because someone has lost a job or develops a fatal disease is not enough reason to feel any more than an abstract compassion for them. We have to believe their lives matter to them, but how can we do so when so little of their lives is revealed? I suppose the wife's acceptance of her mortality, her reconciliation with her husband, his devoting himself to her and giving up the sexy student, are all intended to show how the smell of death can be morally therapeutic. Or something like that. There are repeated references to living in the moment. The characters remark on the beauty of the park, the sunlight, the air, in identical phrases, etc and so on and so forth. The adjudicator claims the script was written like a piece of music, by which he presumably had these repeated motifs and their variations in mind. I found the language flat and uninteresting – the repeated references to the beauty of the park became irritating to me. "Beauty" is a word that fails to convince me.

The characters are flat, they engaged neither my interest nor my sympathy, despite the actors' skill. For example, the husband claims to have loved his government job, but we never know why – beyond making that claim, he says nothing about it. So on what grounds should I believe that he loved his job?

Thiessen has a knack for using incomplete phrases and sentences to express social awkwardness, but that has limited use in a play that supposedly explores how and why people make the choices they must make. He also suffers from the regrettably wide-spread notion that scattering fuck yous about makes dialogue more realistic, since such strong words must express rage, mustn't they? Well, no, actually. The phrase worked best when Andy and Evelyn used it good-naturedly to express affection.

Thiessen has another gimmick: at intervals, the student appears dressed in doctor's whites, and lectures about the progress of cancer. I suppose the technical, medical language is intended to comment on the action, and to heighten the reality and emphasise the emotion of the dialogue. Unfortunately, Thiessen didn't bother to get the facts right - the student tells us that cancer "invades" the cells, which is an elementary error. It put me off, so I was not disposed to look kindly on the superficial characterisation, the sophomoric assumption that a life-threatening situation is in itself enough to evoke pity and terror, and the attempt to heighten realism by using foul language and explicit sex. There were quite a few funny bits, but neither the script nor the direction indicated that they were intended as such.

BigDog, an animoid robot

Just check it out. There are seven videos in all.

http://gizmodo.com/368651/new-video-of-bigdog-quadruped-robot-is-so-s

Cute li'l beastie, eh?

Solar Power and subsidies

An article in today's New York times reports on thermal solar power plants being built in the SW states. Costs are high, compared to coal fired plants, and a subsidy is provided:

"The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

I don't know what else Mr James said, but his comment is disingenuous. Coal and other fossil fuels receive subsidies of all kinds. The oil and coal companies receive tax rebates to compensate them for the diminishing supplies of coal and oil. The power companies receive rebates for building the plants in the first place, and more rebates for installing pollution control equipment. And everyone involved externalises the costs of whatever pollution remains after scrubbing, and of course the cost of CO2. Externalised costs are indirect subsidies. We all pay for them one way or another.

No one knows exactly what these subsidies amount to in cents/kWh, but there's no question that it's high. One thing is for sure, though: power generated from fossil fuel is not priced to reflect its actual costs. If it did, solar power would look a lot more attractive, and there would be a lot more effort to conserve power. There's not much point in increasing electricity supply if there isn't also an effort to cut electricity use.

The illustration used to help the reader understand the potential of solar thermal power is also interesting: "A megawatt is enough electricity to run 1,000 room air-conditioners at once." One of the things that struck me when I visited south Texas some years ago was the lack of insulation in most of the homes. Proper insulation would cut power consumption for air-conditioning by a third or more. The use of ground effect heat pumps would cut the remaining power demand by 75%. These two modes of conservation should be heavily subsidised. The payback in dollars for each installation would be ten years or less. The payback in energy savings would be substantially less.

Update 2020-03-03: The efficiency  of solar power cells has increased  substantially, They now convert a higher percentage of solar energy into human-usable energy than plants do. Dow has developed a method of painting solar cells onto any surface, which could make just about any surface available for generating power. The other problem of solar (and wind) is storage of surplus power. Betteries, heat sinks, and pumping water back into reservoirs are all feasible, Denmark has become the first country in the world to eliminate all fossil fuel power plants. Oil prices remain low, while extraction costs continue to trend up. Without subsidies the oil business would have folded long ago.

9/11 Conspiracies

     Try the following link: Prison Trains

     Funny, eh?
     Then look at the comments. While most people see the humour (such as it is), a few earnestly propose or point to what they believe is the truth: that 9/11 was "an inside job", conceived to provide excuses for the reduction of civil liberties and engagement in foreign wars.
     Well, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade centre did provide those excuses, on which the Bush administration has acted with too many signs of glee. Not that they wouldn't have used some other excuse if 9/11 hadn't happened. They have been trying to find an excuse for a pre-emptive attack on Iran (also a former ally in the Middle east, by the way), citing Iran's nuclear weapons program as reason enough. A number of factors, which I needn't enumerate, have prevented them from acting on this excuse.
     I don't think there will be a strike on Iran in the foreseeable future. The next President, Republican or not, will have enough problems to deal with, without adding a gratuitous one.
     The ancient Chinese are said to have cursed their enemies with "May you live in the most interesting of times." We do live in the most interesting of times. But then, we always have.

Theatre Review: The Drawer Boy

The Drawer Boy, by Michael Healey. Gore Bay Players, Gore Bay ON, June 27 2007.

Two bachelor farmers, Morgan and Angus, friends since childhood, live together. Angus has been damaged by war. Morgan tells him the story of how they met two English girls, Sally and Frances, brought them back to Canada, and lost them in a car accident. This story fills in the gaps in Angus's memory, for five minutes or so. Myles, a young actor, asks to stay with them in order to learn about farming, as his collective' is 'writing' a play about farmers. This affords an excuse for a number of more or less corny jokes about how the uncouth farmer takes in the sophisticated city slicker.

But Myles overhears the story, and uses it as his scene in the play. Morgan and Angus see the rehearsal, and when they return from the theatre, Angus remembers not only Myles but the story as well. His memory seems to be restored, until Morgan has to admit that he made up the story. The injury that robbed Angus of his memory also made him moody and depressed, until Sally and Frances left them. Not much of a story, really, but Healey presents and reveals it layer by layer until we are left with what seems to be the truth.

The three actors did a creditable job, making us believe their characters and the gradual unfolding of Angus' and Morgan's history. Myles was played a little too much on one-note, but then he's not a complex character. Naive and trusting, he accepts Morgans deceptions and tricks at face value, and thinks he can somehow cure Angus. He almost succeeds, too. Morgan was more subtly portrayed, and he is a more complex person. Who would have thought that the boy who loved action and adventure, who went to war because he wanted an adventure, would be so sensitive to his friend's needs, and invent such a tale to comfort him? Angus was the most difficult character to play, as his memory loss and repetitive compulsions tempt the actor to caricature, but this did not happen here. The transition into apparently full recovery of memory, his realisation that his memories are false, and that the truth would hurt, and his relapse into the forgetfulness that keeps him happy, were very well done. The set was a simple, semi-abstract portrayal of the kitchen and porch. Lighting shifted attention to the two acting areas, and colours, though simple, effectively signalled shifts in time. The music (what play these days doesn't use a soundtrack as a movie does?) was blessedly unobtrusive, and served more to reinforce the mood than guide it.

All in all, a very good production. Walter Maskel can be proud of his cast and crew. Marie and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you get a chance to see it, do so.

Book Review: WLT, A Radio Romance

WLT: A Radio Romance by Garrison Keillor (1991)

I vaguely recall negative reviews of this book when it first appeared. It didn't conform to the cosy, down-home image that Keillor's fans had formed of him, based on his Prairie Home Companion tales. It's raunchy, rude, and cynical, yet underlying it is the streak of melancholy that also supports PHC.

Keillor is a master of the deadpan style that make horrors and ecstasies equally mundane - in this, he belongs with Raymond Carver and like-minded writers. The plot line that holds these rambling chapters together is Francis With's rise in radio and his eventual jump to TV. He renames himself Frank White, cultivates a resonant voice, makes himself an indispensable factotum to the station's owners, and after a bizarre road trip (designed to jettison an out-of-date Gospel music group from WLT) walks into a TV studio and starts talking. In the last chapter, told from the point of view of a muck-raking biographer, we learn that White married his sweetheart, had three children, and became the grand old man of television news. Hence the romance of the sub-title: Keillor's novel is a melodramatic fantasy. But despite the weirdness, the story has the ring of truth. That's the secret of Keillor's success as a raconteur. His husky, slightly bemused voice makes us believe even the most bizarre incidents and improbable coincidences. But unlike well-crafted novels, life does consist of bizarre events and improbable coincidences.

If you want to pick a nit, this book at times seemed to go on too long. ***

Book Review: The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

Davies, Robertson The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Here, Marchbanks (or Davies) restrains himself a little compared to the second book, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks. But in both he expresses himself forcefully on the absence of a Canadian sense of pleasure. According to him, Canadians cannot abide mere fun, let alone culture (a much more strenuous pursuit.) Although there have been changes for the better, we still have a lingering sense that something advertised as good for you cannot be and must not be pleasurable. It was Presbyterians that set the ground-rules for social and cultural life in this country, and many of us suffer from a lingering hangover of puritan megrims. Only the terms of opprobrium have changed: these days, the blue meanies oppose the arts not because of their putative immorality but because of their supposed impracticality. Significantly enough, the Harperites are willing to fund children's sports via a tax break for family expenditures on hockey and other forms of mayhem, but not for music lessons. Like many money-mad people, they confuse price and value, and worse, have a very limited knowledge of the market that they profess to admire and understand.

Marchbanks' struggles with his furnace form the leitmotif of his life as described in these diaries, and his repeated bouts of one or another kind of mild illness form the accompaniment. His casual mentions of daily triumphs and defeats remind us that in many ways our life has become more comfortable in the last 60 years. But it hasn't, therefore, become better. There's more to the good life than creature comforts.

The quotable bits in this book tend to be small paragraphs. Robertson has mastered the art of the long slow curve and the sudden break (he does not, however, use any baseball metaphors or allusions.) He tends to use the semi-colon where most writers would use a period, so that his sentences seem to be lengthy. But here and there one finds a sentence that can be quoted without context. "If man has conquered the air merely to fill it with bombs and illiteracy, we might as well discount this civilisation, and try another." "New York, I perceive, contains almost as many rogues as Toronto." "If we were all robbed of our wrong convictions, how empty our lives would be."