The Last Dog of War at Theatre Projects Manitoba
By Joff Schmidt for CBC Manitoba
Theatre Projects Manitoba kicks off its 20th season with a winner from Linda Griffiths… and it should be as big a hit for TPM as last season’s production of Griffiths’ Age of Arousal was. Read Joff’s CBC theatre blogspot on The Last Dog of War…
By: Kevin Prokosh for Winnipeg Free Press
4 stars out of 5
THE mission for actress Linda Griffiths in her new dramatic monologue was to reconnect with her Second World War veteran father and get him to his squadron’s last RAF reunion in England without starting a Third World War.
The Last Dog of War, which opened the 20th season of Theatre Projects Manitoba Thursday night, is a compelling, deceptively simple telling of the Griffiths’ 2005 overseas journey that was almost as risky and flak-filled as his 1940s bombing sorties to Berlin. The dark-haired Toronto actress, best known for writing and performing the national hit Maggie & Pierre, ascended the stage pulling her wheeled suitcase and off into the wild blue wonder she piloted her audience/passengers on an entertaining 75-minute flight of fancy.
November 4th 2009
TPM’s The Last Dog of War brings the personal side of battle
by Amanda Lefley (Volunteer)
Performer Linda Griffiths brings a personal story with her Last Dog of War.
The Last Dog of War, a one-woman show written and performed by Montreal-born playwright Linda Griffiths, will be running Nov. 5-14 at the Costume Museum of Canada on Pacific Avenue, courtesy of the Theatre Projects of Manitoba. Read more…
This preview article appeared in Volume 64, Number 10 of The Uniter, published November 5th 2009.
There are many reasons why plays have been written for Theatre Projects Manitoba over its 20 years, and a threat of physical violence is one of them.
Rick Chafe was a fledgling fringe festival playwright in the mid-’90s when TPM artistic director Bruce McManus strong-armed him with a demand for a script, or else. The result was his first full-length work, The Last Man and Woman on Earth (1998), a dark comedy in which Chafe explored large questions in his personal life. That play gave him the confidence to adapt Homer’s Odyssey and to pen his most successful work Shakespeare’s Dog, which debuted in 2008 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and subsequently at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and earlier this fall in Calgary.
“I don’t know if I would have even wandered down that path if it wasn’t for Bruce telling me he’d beat me up if I didn’t give him a play,” Chafe says.
Michael Nathanson did not encounter such coercion when TPM founding artistic director Harry Rintoul came to him in 1990 and promised the theatre would produce his next play. That turned out to be To Kill the Weatherman (1991), an important stepping stone for Nathanson, who was recently nominated for a 2009 Governor General’s Award for drama. After Weatherman, Nathanson directed The Resurrection of John Frum by Vern Theissen, another local playwright wannabe who won a GG in 2003.
“It was the great luxury of knowing our work would be done, that there was a theatre in Winnipeg that absolutely believed in us as playwrights and gave us early opportunities,” says Nathanson, WJT’s current artistic director.
As TPM begins its 20th season tonight with Linda Griffiths performing her solo work The Last Dog of War, its production history reads like a who’s who of Winnipeg theatre. Most were unknown quantities when TPM first focused the spotlight on them. There’s a lot more independent made-in-Manitoba work currently on the boards but that was not always the case.
“For a long time, Theatre Projects was the only company consistently commissioning and producing new Manitoba work every season,” Chafe says. “So it was putting a lot of playwrights’ work up in front of a non-fringe audience for the first time and doing the same for a lot of actors and directors and designers and technicians.”
TPM was born in 1990, the dream of playwright Harry Rintoul, who saw the deep need for a company dedicated to staging plays written and performed by Manitobans. The last troupe to try it, Agassiz Theatre, had closed in 1989. This time the theatre community fell in behind Rintoul, who died suddenly in 2002.
“There needed to be a place for Manitoba artists to get their feet wet,” says TPM’s fifth and present artistic director Ardith Boxall. “It was necessary then and still is.
“The problem with doing developmental work is that it’s not sexy. No one is throwing corporate sponsorships at you.”
Last season TPM played to 1,734 people, with the most popular production being Age of Arousal by Griffiths. Its 2009-10 budget is $210,000, a total that includes a new creations grant received to support next spring’s première of North Main Gothic by Winnipeg’s Carolyn Gray (The Elmwood Visitation).
“If Harry was alive today he would be excited,” says Boxall. “I think he would say we’re kicking ass.”
Getting such a prominent Canadian theatre figure as Griffiths (Maggie & Pierre) back here twice in one year is a coup for TPM. Last March she was here for a public reading of The Last Dog of War, a true story of a trip the Toronto actress/playwright made with her father to England for the last reunion of his Royal Air Force squadron. When she offered to take questions from the audience the first one was, ‘Can you read some more?’
“We had to find out how the mission ended,” says Boxall, who is staging Last Dog cabaret style at the Costume Museum of Canada, 109 Pacific Ave. “We thought it would be appropriate around Remembrance Day.”
kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca
The Second World War serves as a backdrop for the conflict between a father and daughter in Linda Griffiths’ The Last Dog of War
Jared Story
Familiar battles take the stageWith Remembrance Day approaching, it’s fitting that Theatre Projects Manitoba’s first production of the season is The Last Dog of War, running Nov. 5 to 14 at the Costume Museum of Canada.
Written and performed by Linda Griffiths, the play tells the true story of a trip to the U.K. she took with her father, a Second World War veteran, for the last reunion of his Royal Air Force comrades, the 49th Squadron, Bomber Command. Set against the battle between Allied and Axis powers, there is another conflict in this tale - that between father and daughter. But don’t expect some clichéd coming-together type tale.
“I was determined it wasn’t going to be a sentimental story and yet, of course, there is an emotional level there, but there was no attempt at the beginning (of the trip) for it to be any kind of working out,” Griffiths says. “I went for my own reasons and then things happened by accident, as opposed to this tearful joining together of father and daughter. It’s not a sentimental story but it doesn’t mean there isn’t emotion in it.”
Griffiths, under the direction of Daniel McIvor, has been honing The Last Dog of War for four years now. The Montreal-born, Toronto-based playwright, whose Age of Arousal played at Theatre Projects Manitoba last season, says she developed the play “on its feet,” meaning she’s taken an improvisational approach. In fact, when she first performed it she had no script, rehearsal, no preparation whatsoever beyond a few ideas, a time frame and a few cues. The idea was to keep the emphasis on storytelling, something Griffiths says audiences have related too.
“What I’ve been really interested in is the range of ages that respond to the play,” Griffiths says. “For instance, I did a show for the Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto and that audience was mostly above 65. They relate to the Second World War stuff. I actually talked to a woman who told me she was one of the people in the basement when my father was bombing Berlin! I thought, ‘This is my optimum audience for it.’ But then when I played it for students, they’ve reacted at least as well or better to the show. I think it may be because part of the story is about very young people who went to war, and they are imagining what that may be like.
“How I know that the audiences are responding across age lines is there is a lot of laughter in the show. There are a lot of laughs, even if I don’t necessarily go for them. Relationships between parents and children are funny; the personalities, the classic clashes. That’s part of it, and part of it’s the characters that emerge, myself and my father, a couple of very stubborn people.”
THE LAST DOG OF WAR
Theatre Projects Manitoba
Until Nov. 14, Costume Museum of Canada
Local actor/playwright Ross McMillan tackles a familiar subject in his latest work, The Daffodil Man
Barb Stewart, Uptown
Theatre Projects Manitoba is producing a brand new play by acclaimed local actor/playwright Ross McMillan called The Daffodil Man, as part of its yearly In the Chamber series. The series, which features a work-in-progress by a local writer/performer, has come to be known as a source for challenging-yet-entertaining new works - and challenging-yet-entertaining work is something for which McMillan is known.
McMillan, who is currently featured in a recurring role in the CityTV comedy Less Than Kind, is no stranger to the fringes of Winnipeg theatre, with previous works such as Washing Spider Out and Harry S. Rintoul Memorial Award-winner The Ingrates (named best new Manitoba play at the 2007 Fringe Festival). The Daffodil Man should prove no exception to his past artistic explorations mining the depths of the human psyche, with hilarious consequences. This time McMillan turns the tables on himself for his art, with the help of co-star Carolyn Gray.
“The Daffodil Man is a Winnipeg actor/playwright named Ross McMillan who is a self-important nobody. I’d like to think that with the character I’ve taken aspects of myself and magnified them grotesquely. That’s what I’d like to think,” laughs McMillan.
Why, you may ask, would an actor/playwright put himself in such a dangerous position of self-exposure? For McMillan, the answer is found in the marrow of truth one hopes art can uncover about one’s self.
“I really believe that’s something that artists willfully forget, that one of your options, always, is actually to tell the truth about yourself. I think we go into a sort of amnesia about that, but I think once in a while it’s refreshing to actually say, ‘Well what would it feel like to actually tell the truth?’ When I watch a movie or read a book or see a play where that’s what’s going on, I know I find it a very powerful thing. And so I hope audiences will. Although, as I say, I’ve couched this shameful self-exposure in sort of comically exaggerated terms, as a way of protecting myself and as a way of thanking the audience for being there.”
McMillan’s comedic strength goes one step beyond entertaining an audience; he also uses comedy as a device to ask more of them than straight-forward drama probably ever could. It’s a sort of comic hyperbole that snares audiences into thought-provoking entertainment, the kind one would be hard-pressed to find on any other theatrical stage.
“The characters are eccentric, almost to the point of madness, and the reason I do that, I guess, is that I feel it’s great for comedy - but I somehow feel driven as a playwright to dare the audience not to take the characters seriously. To say, ‘Yeah they’re larger than life so you don’t have to take them too seriously,’ then over the course of the play force the audience to indeed take them seriously.
“Without Theatre Projects I would probably be unproducable,” laughs McMillan.
THE DAFFODIL MAN
Theatre Projects Manitoba
May 7-9, Gas Station Theatre
Theatre Projects Manitoba’s Age of Arousal offers up a hilarious look at love, lust and sexuality in 19th-century England
A-
AGE OF AROUSAL
Theatre Projects Manitoba
Until March 29, Rachel Browne Theatre
Linda Griffiths’ uproarious take on the Victorian era, Age of Arousal, has found a perfect home with Theatre Projects Manitoba.
Loosely based on the George Gissing novel The Odd Women, the play is a subversive, slightly surreal tale of lust, love and feminism in late 19th-century England which the cast and crew have artfully crafted into a delightful mix of comedy and pathos.
Set in an age in which women vastly outnumber men, Mary Barfoot (Patricia Hunter) and her lover Rhoda Nunn (Krista Jackson) run a school to teach women secretarial skills in order to support themselves. Enter the Madden sisters: the two spinsters Virginia and Alice (Carolyn Gray and Maggie Nagle), and the beautiful young shop girl Monica (Erin McGrath). Add Mary’s dashing cousin Everard (Eric Blais) to the mix and all hell breaks loose.
Rooted in sublime performances, especially those of Hunter, Gray and Nagle as women all on the edge of oblivion as far as the world is concerned, Age of Arousal turns the morals and repression of Victorian England upside down and sets them ablaze. In Griffiths’ hands this could barely be a more raucous and subversive romp.
While all of the characters struggle with their own inner passions, Griffiths cleverly allows us a first row seat into their psyches with her creation of ‘thought speak,’ in which the characters’ innermost thoughts are blurted out seemingly uncontrollably. Though it is not always a perfect device - there are occasions when characters’ voices are overlapping to such an extent it’s difficult to hear what is being said - but overall it’s illuminating and often downright hilarious.
The implementation of ‘thought speak’ also adds a pleasingly visceral element to the proceedings. The characters are often at odds with themselves within the realms of the inner/outer world, and the brute force of the tug-of-war between inner passion and outer duty is fascinating. It also leads to some exuberantly physical and comic performances, most notably by the marvelous Gray, whose tortured Virginia is an absolute wreck who transforms into a whole new person. Nothing or no one in this play is set in stone - sexuality, desire and passion are almost living, breathing elements which transform from moment to moment.
Leanne Foley’s design for the show, including the set and costumes, carefully bring about notions of the Victorian age, bustles and all, but yet, as with the characters, things are not quite as they seem. The design evokes the era while keeping it fresh and modern.
Special kudos must go to Eric Blais, the lone male in the production, who manages to be both dashing and sympathetic and not get lost among the whirling force of female passion. Blais is a brave man to undertake the task, which includes having to fake a pelvic exam with the luminous Hunter, and both manage to make it seem perfectly casual and absolutely hilarious.
Age of Arousal is a gorgeous melding of old/new, political/personal and passion/ repression into a heady mix of wit and intelligence. It’s a delight to watch.
- Barb Stewart
By: Kevin Prokosh, Winnipeg Free Press
Photo Caption: Krista Jackson, Patricia Hunter and Maggie Nagle snap, crackle and virtually pop out of their corsets.
The Victorian era was no time to be a lady.
Women were expected to be weak and helpless, their raison d’etre only to marry. That they largely outnumbered men in 1885 London meant these unpaired females were considered redundant.
Through five of these spinsters, Toronto playwright Linda Griffiths chronicles the awakening of the feminine consciousness in her randy costume drama Age of Arousal. Far from being expendable, this quintet are funny, hot to trot and, with a little prodding, ready to change the world.
Despite being set 125 years in the past, Age of Arousal is decidedly modern in how it attempts to reconcile feminist doctrines with traditional marriage and vexing sexual desire.
Griffiths has been absent from local stages for almost two decades and her agile writing, vivid characters and bawdy humour remind Winnipeg audiences what they’ve been missing.
Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about such a base subject as sex, but through Griffiths’ hilarious use of thought-speak — the actors voice their uncensored thoughts — Theatre Projects patrons learn that didn’t stop its subjects from being obsessed with it.
Mary Barfoot is an aging suffragette who was jailed and brutally force-fed to end hunger strikes. She and her lover and protegé Rhoda Nunn run a school for secretaries. They believe female emancipation will come through typing and shorthand. The destitute Madden sisters, Alice, Virginia and Monica, are new students, intimidated and reluctant to touch their “ferocious” type machines.
“Type, damn you! Type,” Rhoda commands them. “It’s the way to liberty.”
Another kind of liberty arrives in the handsome form of eligible bachelor Everard, an ex-doctor who is also Mary’s cousin. He immediately catches the eye of the ripe, young and willing Monica, but becomes drawn to the independent spirit and intelligence of the modern woman represented by Rhoda. He is attuned to the reform in the air and the coming ascendancy of the opposite sex.
“Men aren’t afraid of women, really, only of women in groups,” observes Everard to a gale of laughter from Thursday’s opening night throng.
To her credit, director Ardith Boxall accentuates Arousal’s many passions, as does the captivating female cast, outfitted in designer Leanne Foley’s elaborate frocks. Each performer fully inhabits her character and exposes the internal doubts and discord hidden away behind the flowery façade of Victorian propriety. As the suffragette icon Mary Barfoot, Patricia Hunter deftly communicates the anxiety that comes from advocating for the freedom of woman but not for her woman. Krista Jackson is impressive as Rhoda Nunn, a conflicted lady tentatively straddling the sexual divide.
Carolyn Gray and Maggie Nagle well play the two old-maid Madden sisters, who feel invisible and of little use to society. Gray’s Virginia is a loopy lush who yearns to escape to Berlin where she can smoke, wear men’s clothing and look like Oscar Wilde. Nagle’s Alice slowly throws off the shackles of her repression and is resurrected by her Remington typewriter. Erin McGrath sizzles as the lusty Monica, whose sisters dine on her unbridled desires.
As Everard, Eric Blais has the most fun, given that he finds himself in compromising situations with three of the women. Blais comes across as a metrosexual in the making.
Griffiths has the last laugh with the parting joke about the inevitability of gender equality in the early 20th century. “In 30 years, it will all be accomplished.”
kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca
Age of Arousal
Theatre Projects Manitoba
To March 29 at Rachel Browne Theatre
Tickets: $15-$20
Four stars out of five
