In Development
With the generous assistance of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights we have been workshopping and developing The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz by Armin Wiebe. His novels are well known and loved and we are thrilled to be a part of the development of Armin’s first play.
The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz
By Armin Wiebe
About the play:
A tumult of conflicting desires is ignited when Obrum brings home a broken piano, poison ivy, and a would-be Beethoven instead of a washing machine.
A comic ‘folk play’ with a classical music base, The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz follows a farm wife, a carpenter, a midwife, and a musician as they struggle to find fulfillment of their seemingly impossible wantings, for themselves and for each other, drawing on the means at hand on a homestead removed from the stifling customs of the village.
Using language tinged with the Flat German of The Salvation of Yasch Siemens and Armin Wiebe’s other Gutenthal novels, the characters wrestle with questions as they act on or resist their impulses: Can a man reach to heaven if he never looks to the sky? Can a woman only bake with what a man has to give? Can a woman hunger so much that she will reach where she should not reach? Can a man who hears music in the birds, in the grass, even yet in a snake still ask “matters such a thing”? If people get what they need, if what they get is good, does it still need to bother their heads?
A play with music that may confuse your heart, clapper your bones, and yes, tickle you like maybe a snake in the grass and lift you from bread dough in the pan up to white clouds in the sky…and that’s just the piano. Lurking in the shadows is the mysterious, sinister, possibly pagan companion of Mennonite New Year’s mummers, the Brummtopp.
About the playwright:
Armin Wiebe is the author of three novels set in the fictional Mennonite town of Gutenthal, Manitoba: The Salvation of Yasch Siemens, Murder in Gutenthal, and The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst, as well as the award-winning novel Tatsea, set in the Canadian subarctic of the 1760s. New fiction recently appeared in Prairie Fire.
His work is renowned for the musicality of its dialect and dialogue. For a dozen years an instructor of creative writing at Red River College, he has also served as writer-in-residence at libraries in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Dauphin, Manitoba, and the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba. Wiebe has served on the board of the Mennonite cultural magazine Rhubarb and on the National Council of the Writers Union of Canada.
After spending six years in the Northwest Territories in 1980s, he now makes his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz evolved from his short story, And Besides God Made Poison Ivy.
Click here to find out how to become a production sponsor for Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz.
