Sarah Constible & Ross McMillan Photo: Leif Norman

A winning look at a failing system

Dionysus in Stony Mountain offers an intelligent, provocative and often funny look at crime and punishment in Canada

Idea man. Steven Raztlaff’s Dionysus in Stony Mountain is an intellectually stimulating examination of corrections, crime and punishment.  Read the full reiew

So please – come to the Rachel Browne Theatre at 8PM tonight through Saturday.  Or come to a matinee at 2PM on Saturday or Sunday…at the Rachel Browne Theatre.

You can view the full performance schedule by clicking here

EXPLORING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Our current production, Dionysus In Stony Mountain by Steven Ratzlaff asks a raft of questions about our Justice System and what obligation we owe to others. It also asks the audience to question many of their own moral assumptions about criminalization and incarceration.

It’s a political play and a provocative subject that the community can engage with both inside the theatre and on the street. So we’re hosting a discussion, Salon style, down the street from the theatre at the Free Press Café, with the guidance of an expert panel and an outstanding moderator.

Restorative Justice Panel

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Winnipeg Free Press Café – 237 McDermot Avenue

Moderated by Naomi Levine

The Panel:

• John Hutton, Executive Director, John Howard Society
• Glenn Morison, Chaplain, Winnipeg Remand Centre
• Joan Carolyn, Program Director, CoSA (Circles of Support & Accountability)
• Adam Klassen, Journey to Justice (Mennonite Central Committee)
• Steven Ratzlaff, Playwright
• Wilma Derksen, Founder of MCC’s Victim’s Voice, Victim’s advocate
• Kent Somers, Psychologist, Stony Mountain Institution

Join the discussion!

Dionysus in Stony Mountain runs from March 29 to April 8, 2012 at the Rachel Browne Theatre. For tickets, please visit www.theatreprojectsmanitoba.ca or call 989-2400.

March 27

By Daniel David Moses

Consider how useful a wristwatch that lights up and glows is, if your work takes you, as mine does occasionally, into the darkened auditorium of a theatre. Settled under the blanket of the theatre’s artificial night and focused on the dream world rising on the stage, I can check unobtrusively on time’s passage. If I’m watching the rehearsal of one of my own plays, I want to be certain it’s playing out with as much alacrity as my conceit allows. If I’m attending some other play’s performance, checking the time is a measure of how the play is working for me, fairer to those works, as I age, than the question of when the next bathroom break will come.

In 1987, I was the guest of Spirit Quest, a festival of poets, tricksters and shamans, in Victoria, B. C. I attended, a registered Delaware Indian who’d actually published a book of poetry —the production of my first play occurred the following year— but had nevertheless felt, at moments, still a farm boy, not quite up to membership in even that first exalted category.

I explored the town and found myself in a museum packed with treasures from the history of the Kwakiutl people (the epithet ‘First Nation’ had yet to be invented). There were totem poles, yes, coppers, masks and woven cedar hats, rain capes and button blankets, even an entire Big House taking up an entire floor. I’m from Six Nations, southern Ontario, Iroquois territory, where our traditions centre on the Longhouse or mission churches, more modest affairs, so I was awed by the spectacle, the beauty, and a touch envious of their tradition’s public affirmation.

So the final evening, at the big concert, I was primed. A program of music, poetry, magic and stories so long I would have been checking my watch if I’d had it then, all culminating with all those arts, with dance added, in an excerpt from a Potlatch ceremony presented by the local Hunt family and their Fort Rupert Dancers.

Figures in red and black button blankets filled the stage, a rhythm from drums and rattles filled the air and, though the lights stayed up, in that pattern of swirling bodies, of footsteps and hand gestures, of significant looks, I forgot myself and bodily needs for nearly another hour. That audience of strangers, retirees, artists, bureaucrats, students, businessmen, families, old and young, immigrants and assorted Indians, were around me, equally mindful.

To top the event off, during the closing, those of us who were guests were called up on stage. I found myself, felt myself then and there larger than everyday life, with a button blanket draped over my shoulders, tied snuggly, the twine itching my chin, amazed to be stepping forward, as if guided by that blanket, a moon rising at dusk, to the rhythm of the drum as it resumed.

A scientist installed backstage at a theatre a movie camera capable of recording infrared light. He opened the lens out at the audience and, as a play was performed, caught glimmers of that invisible energy reflecting back from the audience’s glistening eyes. Those lights twinkled with the audience’s blinking, at first as individuals here and there laughed at jokes, at turns of phrase or plot, but then the sparkling came more throughout the auditorium, in waves or unison, as the people, the scientist later surmised, took in each new thought, each new feeling the play provided, took them in all at once, a sure sign they were of one mind.

Among the traditions of the Iroquois is the idea of the Good Mind, a spiritual achievement of people who put their thoughts and emotions in harmony with the flow of the universe and the intentions of the Creator.

In our present-day world where it now seems the Creator, if he’s anywhere at all, is lurking in dark matter, I feel blessed to be able to enter the nights of theatres, to belong occasionally to the make-believe worlds rising in the artificial light on the stage, to uncover, my watch lit up and glowing, signs that point in the direction of that complex and promising consensus.

“They’re too embarrassed to call it a penitentiary anymore. The absurdity of compulsory penance. This institution is an abomination, a scandal, because the debilitating, humiliating treatment is actually the result of good intentions.”

- James Hiebert, Dionysus in Stony Mountain

EXPLORING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012

WINNIPEG, MB – Theatre Projects Manitoba (TPM) is pleased to present a panel on restorative justice as part of our upcoming production, the première of Dionysus in Stony Mountain by Winnipeg playwright Steven Ratzlaff.

Restorative Justice Panel

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Winnipeg Free Press Café – 237 McDermot Avenue

Moderated by Naomi Levine

As unabashedly intellectual as it is dramatically compelling, Dionysus in Stony Mountain explores the binding and loosening of family ties, the warehousing of the mentally ill in Canada’s prisons, mania, and the boundaries of the patient /psychiatrist’s relationship, finally asking “what does it really mean to care?”

“The play asks a raft of questions about our Justice System and what obligation we owe to others.  It also asks the audience to question many of their own moral assumptions about criminalization and incarceration and we believe this provocative subject deserves independent examination by our community.” said TPM General Manager Rea Kavanagh. “We are therefore hosting a restorative justice panel comprised of individuals who can speak to restorative justice experience, principles and practice.”

The panelists are:

• John Hutton, Executive Director, John Howard Society
• Glenn Morison, Chaplain, Winnipeg Remand Centre
• Joan Carolyn, Program Director, COSA (Circles of Support & Accountability)
• Adam Klassen, Journey to Justice (Mennonite Central Committee)
• Steven Ratzlaff, Playwright
• Wilma Derksen, Founder of MCC’s Victim’s Voice, Victim’s advocate

Dionysus in Stony Mountain runs from March 29 to April 8, 2012 at the Rachel Browne Theatre.  Tickets are available on this website or by calling 989-2400.

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As unabashedly intellectual as it is dramatically compelling, the play erupts with Friedrich Nietzsche, exploring the binding and loosening of family ties, the warehousing of the mentally ill in Canada’s prisons, mania, and the boundaries of the patient /psychiatrist’s relationship, finally asking “what does it really mean to care?”

We sat down with Steven to chat about the evolution of his  play, his choice of Nietzsche, his thoughts on society’s vast systems & his compulsion to write about them.

TPM: Friedrich Nietzsche is central to this play on many levels; he’s obviously woven in to the dialogue but also seems to hover over and direct the the action. What compelled you to write a play that takes on his work in this way, in this setting?

SR: He is a very provocative entertaining writer. That appeals to me dramatically. Half of the play takes place in a prison. I suppose part of the reason for that setting is my familiarity with the place. I spent several years visiting inmates at Stony Mountain and did one term as a teacher there. It’s a very bizarre place.

The central character of the play is Heidi, a young psychiatrist, struggling to live justly. She contends with two other characters: James, a prisoner and Eric, her uncle. James is using Nietzsche as a way of healing himself, of freeing himself from moral delusions. He believes that Heidi could also free herself from these delusions that plague our society.

TPM: This isn’t the first time your work has focused on the systems we create, supposedly to create structure, meaning and order in our lives. Is it your intention to have the audience debate their merit, or simply to be more aware of them?

SR: One of the features of our society is the large systems that have evolved to deal with needs: corrections, education, health, welfare. These actually have become monsters that simply grow of their own accord regardless of effectiveness. The people who most obviously benefit from these systems are those who work within them.

I don’t see much hope in changing that. The political discourse in this country reminds me of Sunday School. Successful politicians must demonstrate that they all believe in the same myths. None are willing to take on any of these monsters, no matter how much evidence suggests that things aren’t working out. Aboriginal policy is a clear example of this absence of political though or courage.

TPM: When the idea for the play first came to you, did you have a defined arc, or in the act of writing were you taken in directions you didn’t anticipate?

SR: The play developed in unexpected ways. It originated in my attempt to create a dramatic monologue out of Nietzsche’s writings. He’s such a theatrical writer I felt he could work as a one-man show. That evolved into the character of a manic prisoner, obsessed with Nietzsche talking to a psychiatrist. That’s when the work became particularly interesting for me. The challenge was to create an engaging role within the constraints of the fairly passive psychiatric stance. Much later in the process, while I was struggling with the second half of the play, the psychiatrist began to emerge as the central character.

TPM: You wrote Dionysus in Stony Mountain and performed it in 2009. Is it challenging to let go and appreciate another artist’s interpretation?

SR: This has been a pleasure. I’ve watched Ross doing these roles now in two different workshops and each time he does it I take delight in what he discovers.

TPM: What do you want the audience to walk away with after the performance?

SR: I hope they are engaged and moved by these characters. I hope this play creates some moments for individuals to think outside our banal political discourse. I hope people are entertained by these passionately engaged characters doing just that.

We’ve been excited about this play for some time – we saw it’s first incarnation as a one act play at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 2008 and were captivated.

Three years, several workshops and script drafts later, Ratzlaff’s play will make it’s premiere on Thursday March 29th at 8PM at the Rachel Browne Theatre.

As unabashedly intellectual as it is dramatically compelling, the play erupts with Friedrich Nietzsche, exploring the binding and loosening of family ties, the warehousing of the mentally ill in Canada’s prisons, mania, and the boundaries of the patient /psychiatrist’s relationship, finally asking “what does it really mean to care?”

You can get your tickets here on the website or by calling us at 989-2400.

Join us this Sunday to hear the fabulous news from last year’s10/11 Season.  It’s also a great opportunity to chat with the staff and the Board of Directors about your TPM experiences over coffee and cookies.

Hmmm…cookies and good conversation about theatre…very hard to go wrong with that plan.