Henry IV (part I)

So there was this Shakespeare guy who lived a bunch of years ago. He wrote about kings and shit.

Where to begin?  "Two houses, both alike in dignity...." No, that's not right. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer...." No, that's not it either. "The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, shall no more cut it's master." Yes, that's more like it. Greystone Theatre returns to the Bard (the last visitation being The Winter's Tale in spring 2009) with the first part of Henry IV, one of Will's most popular history plays.

Once upon a time, during an extended halftime break in the 100 Years War, a man named Henry Bolingbroke stole the throne from Richard II and became King Henry IV of England. But many were unhappy with this coup and rebellion stirred in the corners of Britain. Meanwhile, the king had a son of a most prodigal nature; he was called Hal and he spent his nights in all manner of cavorting and debauchery, while shirking his princely responsibilities. But once the gallant Hotspur, once a favoured subject of the king, turns his passions toward revolution, Hal must step up to his birthright.

1 Henry IV is the second play in Shakespeare's second "Henriad", which eventually culminates in everyone's favourite Elizabethan action flick Henry V. It is a play of tremendous personality (if not historical accuracy), with memorable characters and an action-packed final act.

The production takes place on a thrust stage, brushing very close to the audience (so close one can almost reach out and touch the ringmail). Nicole Zalesak's set design works in contrasts. The backdrop is an old medieval castle, grey and weather beaten; extending out into the thrust is a very convincing woodgrain pattern floor, looking less like part of the castle and more like the stage. The edges of the woodgrain are rough, blurred, and abstract, giving the sense that this theatrical floor is rising up out of the historical milieu. The royal throne which is betimes the lone furnishing on the stage is simple and not particularly imposing, much like the king who occupies it, but stands in defiant hyperrealism to the weathered backdrop.

I regret that I will not be able to make specific mention of all performers, but with a cast of this size I am forced to take a selection. I will start, logically, with the king. Devin Wesnoski adopts a more classical diction for his pensive ruler, enunciating and lingering over syllables (with a few exceptions). He has a definite stage presence which is at its most powerful when he is doing little. Michael Prebble is a natural fit for Prince Hal. He exudes easy charisma and a thousand watt smile, capturing the vitality of the lad's carefree youth. A lot of his speech and manner is quite — if you'll forgive the momentary break from academic terminology — dickish, but with his comedic timing and darling eyes, he always keeps the audience in the palm of his hand. In later scenes he becomes more contemplative, and shows much greater depth in those moments of pain when he is torn between his calling as prince and his old friends. Rohan Keenan does a strong turn as Worcester (pronounced "Wooster", because British people, man), embodying an intense antipathy toward the king, but always doing so in a reserved way. He never has explosions of temper, but maintains a constant roiling just beneath the surface. Anna Seibel is a scene-stealer in her lamentably terse appearance as the Welsh sorceress Glendower (in a bit of gender-bending from the original text). With a jaw-dropping Welsh dialect, gilded armour, and wild-eyed witchery, she holds firm control of the stage, even against Donlevy's Hotspur. I can't speak much more to the acting, but I will point out a couple other short, but memorable, performances in Ciara Richardson's impeccably Cockney Mistress Quickly and Vernon Boldick's curiously piratey Bardolphe.

But the fact is, no matter how you try to dress up the performance, the main thrust of this play lies 'twixt two things: the loveable rotund Sir John Falstaff, and the fiery Hotspur. Donovan Scheirer hops into Shakespeare's plumpest role, sporting a large beard, an enhanced girth, and a hearty laugh. Falstaff was a very popular figure in Shakespeare's day, and it is easy to see why; he captures the bawdy Elizabethan spirit along with glimmers of the Bard's wisdom. Scheirer is larger than life onstage, taking delight in every dirty joke and having fun with Falstaff's boastful swagger. But he strikes a balance as well; it would be easy to steamroll over Jack's more sombre moments on the way to more laughs, but Scheirer takes time to digest them all. And as the only character in the play who has an actual soliloquy, he has the opportunity to strike real insight, such as in his "What is honour?" passage. He never loses his good humour, he never loses the audience, and he avoids the easy trap of getting lost in himself.

Chris Donlevy in the skin of Hotspur calls to mind Hamlet's famous piece of advice, "Speak the speech, I pray you ... trippingly on the tongue". Rather than being pressed under the weight of the language in the text, he cuts right through it. Every thought and emotion is communicated as clearly as if in an everyday conversation, and the dialogue flows like he has been speaking it his whole life. He does not trip over the elaborate phrasings, perhaps because he doesn't give it undue reverence; he isn't afraid to spit a word out in a furious rage. But the meter of the verse is not lost; it is adapted. As I listened more closely, I found a speech pattern reminiscent of slam poetry, stripping the elegance out of the meter and turning it into something more primal and intimate. Donlevy's characterisation does not hide Hotspur's stubbornness, arrogance, and impetuosity, but he lingers on the pain and frustration, turning him into the play's most sympathetic character. It doesn't hurt that he almost always commands the stage, with his charisma when calm and his atomic temper when not.

Some character dynamics, however, were lacking. Wesnoski's stronger moments were his quieter ones, displaying the reserved emotions of a strong but ultimately passive king. At other points that strength was lost in a flurry of hand gestures and spiking emotion, where it seemed that he and Donlevy were competing for the floor by way of passion — a battle the king was fated to lose. And as much as I enjoyed the intimacy that the thrust stage provided, the side effect was that characters had to move way too much. On one hand I can appreciate the irony that Falstaff, after professing how he can take not another step, is suddenly darting from one side to another in his conversation with Hal, but on the other hand, the movement itself strikes me as artificial, and the scene better served by staying in place. At various points a character will cross to the far side of the stage, utter a line, and then cross all the way back for one final moment, and it gets dizzying.

I attended the play on two nights. The first night was preview, after which, I was told, several cuts were made. I do not think I noticed all of them on second viewing, so I suppose they did their job. The play's opening scene, however, jarred me. A chunk of lines was sliced from the beginning of Henry's opening speech, which upsets me both because we lost some very powerful lines reflecting on England's experience with civil war and because the play now, quite bizarrely, starts with "Therefore". I am not sure what purpose these cuts were meant to serve, but the play did not feel any shorter the second time.

1 Henry IV is a play of language and character, and serves both up in generous portions. While there were a few detractors along the way, it is a tremendous production, with a tight cast, excellent chemistry, and an undertone of Dwayne Brenna's sense of humour. Zounds.

The December Man

December is a bleak time of year. It is cold and white and dark, yet the entire month revolves around this sense of holiday cheer. It's kind of paradoxical, but perhaps it's no accident we choose to set our most profound celebration within our most dismal season.

The December Man is a bleak play. It is a gripping and soul-rending exploration into the nature of hopelessness. Yet, paradoxically, it is also about hope, about that persistent little flicker that soldiers on in the face of insurmountable odds.

Live Five's second show of the season tackles the nebulous distinction between life and living. The plot centres on the events of the "Montreal Massacre" — a shooting spree at the Ecole Polytechnique in December 1989, where Marc Lépine killed 14 women before shooting himself. Our principal characters are an elderly Franco-Irish couple consumed with grief after the suicide of their son, an engineering student racked with survivor's guilt in the years following the massacre. The play is told in reverse-chronological order; each scene takes place several months before the previous one. This technique adds tremendous strength to the narrative structure, because instead of simply seeing their family deteriorate, we see a more tragic picture that layers on dramatic irony while peeling back the layers of history in a constant search for meaning, just as we all do when confronted by tragedy.

There was an intimate house at the showing I attended, and the ushers encouraged us to sit as close to the front as we were comfortable. I ordinarily stay away from the front row, but in this case I decided to take the plunge. Anyone else going to see the show, I encourage them to do the same. This is a play best experienced at arm's length. It is built on tiny moments, and it is unwise to miss a single one of them. These moments start from the very beginning, when we see Kent Allen shamble onstage as the father, Benoit, his face stained in a look of anguish that tells us all we need to know. Their dress is formal, but it is clearly funereal rather than celebratory.

The cast takes on a tremendous amount of stress in order for the emotional reality of the play to land. Aaron Hursh plays Jean, the tragic son, whom we spend three scenes waiting for before he returns from the dead, as it were. At that point we begin to understand the legacy of the play: the sense of haunting torment his parents have been carrying around with them after his death now passes back to him. Hursh plays understated, almost muffled, with a few intense emotional spikes, such as when we see him having night terrors. When we first see him he is dazed and disjointed, not entirely registering the world around him; and as he moves back in time we see an increasing effort to piece his mind back together, while we know that it will never quite happen.

Kent Allen plays a very precarious game, teetering on the edge of emotional collapse without toppling over. He takes on the role of the father, exhausted and defeated, having come from nothing and desiring only to provide a life for his family. Seeing that he has failed to secure that very basic thing, he takes the responsibility for Jean's death on himself. Allen performs this role with grace gravity (not to mention a very natural Quebecois accent), but is not afraid to inject small moments of humour.

The heart of the play, however, is Sharon Bakker, as the mother Kathleen, who is onstage for all but about five minutes of the production. Incidentally, I've already seen Bakker play a grieving mother this season, as Mrs. Gottlieb in Dead Man's Cell Phone. But while the former played to stylistic conventions and overexaggerated emotions, The December Man is painfully down to Earth. I can only marvel at Bakker's emotional availability; she proceeds through the play like an open nerve ending, firing at the slightest stimulus. In the early scenes she hovers constantly in the grips of anguish; in later scenes she oscillates between doting mother desperate to maintain a happy home and those gnawing moments of insecurity about what is happening with Jean. She is a six-sided die being shaken this way and that, but every moment is raw and visceral.

Jenna Maren's set is unusually intricate for the Refinery. It is a very complete feeling living room box set, with sofa, TV, coffee-table, and a Christmas tree from time to time. Then there is the wooden skyscraper model — Jean's last design project — off to stage left. There is nothing ostentatious about its placement, but it always draws our eye. The set needs to be full in order for the play to work. The characters need something solid behind them in order to contrast with the way they are disintegrating. This brings up a curious question about stylistic choice. After all, All My Sons had a fragmenting set existing in tandem with its fragmenting characters; such a decision worked for that play, and the opposite decision works for The December Man. The set remains solid and encompassing as a demonstration of how cruelly impartial the physical world is to the emotional scars laid by the tragedy.

Brian Cochrane may have, at some point, directed a happy play, but I did not see it. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this project makes his last Live Five entry, East of Berlin, look positively farcical. But he does bleak extraordinarily well. He brings Colleen Murphy's script to live in the most primal way, red hot and unflinching. I have been unsettled by plays before, and this was one of the more unsettling (though it's still got nothing on The Pillowman). As I said before, it is a play of small moments, and I can see the level of craft and detail that went into each one.

When tragedy happens, we tend to ask why. Then we don't get an answer and we move on. But for some people those people much more profoundly touched by the tragedy, they can't stop asking. As Benoit and Kathleen search backwards, peeling back the months and the years, attempting to find some explanation for why this happened to them, the play itself worms its way back through time, and at each stop the picture only gets more confusing. But amid that confusion shines one simple truth: that the search for meaning validates our loss. Each of the characters answers his or her own question of meaning, and while the choice they end up with is not a comfortable one for us to watch, it gives meaning to them. And therein lies the hope.

Confession time

So here's the thing: I've had a half-finished Farragut North review sitting her for quite some time, and I was not quite able to bring myself to finish it. Such a predicament obviously makes doing a theatre Blog difficult.

I suppose I was the victim of a two-fold reflexive insecurity. On one hand, I was worried that I'd write up a lame review and people would read it. On the other hand, I was afraid I'd write an excellent review that would sit there utterly ignored except for when my closest friends would glance over it during those times I specifically reminded them it existed. Neither of these insecurities have subsided any, but I decided to suffer through it. Since I suddenly find myself watching three plays in the span of one week, I decided I had to bite the bullet and get back into the swing of things. If nothing else, these reviews should be useful for my own personal development. And I don't need to take it too seriously, because it is, after all, "Just a Blog" (you know, I capitalised Blog back in my first entry, and now I'm just stuck doing it forever).

I'll admit, I had big dreams when I first started planning this out. I imagined being met with overnight success and wild fanfare, and that by this time I'd be able to stroll into any play in the city saying, "Bitch, please, I'm the Prairie Groundling. Impress me." This is obviously not going to happen (but my deep-seated desire to be a theatre bigshot manifested itself when I casually strolled into History of Breathing tonight without showing my ticket, and I didn't even realise it). But theatre in Saskatoon is growing, and it will continue to grow for some time, which means we will, at one point, require a culture of legitimate theatre reviews. I'm not promising to be the saviour to usher in this golden age, but I at least know that in the future I will be able to look back on this Blog and say that I was the guy who did this thing, and that's good enough for me.

But yes, Farragut North. I thought that I could use Live Five as the real springboard for this Blog, but then it occurred to me that I still haven't the slightest clue how one actually markets a Blog. I still don't, but that's a question for another night. I apologise to Charlie Peters, because he was one of the people who initially encouraged me in this endeavour, and I couldn't even give his play a proper treatment. But I will finish the review, as best as I am able, and I will post it here. That much is a guarantee.

See you all tomorrow night.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

"We are in a perpetual state of mourning." This line is uttered in one of the play's monologues, commenting on the tendency of people today to wear black for all occasions. Of all quotations, this is the one that stood out the most to me. There is a truth to it that is apparent nowhere more than in a play that explores our increasingly complex relationship with life and death.

Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone opened the Persephone Deep End series for this year, continuing the tradition of dark, edgy, and slightly experimental theatre. We open with a dead man slumped over in a café, with his cell phone ringing. Kristina Hughes plays Jean, the well-meaning woman who happens upon this scene and, seeing a problem, resolves it the best way she can: by answering the phone. In this small act, she becomes inextricably bound with the dead man, Gordon, becoming his executor of sorts, taking responsibility not only for spreading news of his death through the Cloud but also for the emotions of those close to him. In trying to comfort Gordon's loved ones (so to speak) Jean ends up constructing a convoluted web of lies, fabricating her own relationship with this man whom she really knows nothing about. The dead man's cell phone becomes a crutch for her, an addiction, although she cannot say exactly why.

For the entire duration of the play, I had one lingering question in my mind: Why am I the only one laughing? Indeed, I still can't say for certain, but I will say that I should not have been. Jeffrey Pufahl's direction played up the darkly comic aspects of the script brilliantly, and was assisted in no small part by Kristina Hughes' sense of timing. There is a harsh juxtaposition between the darkness of the subject matter and the hilarity of some of the interactions, but that in turn just makes it funnier. One particular scene where Jean tries to comfort Gordon's family by presenting them with "gifts" that Gordon left them was one of the funniest things I've seen in the theatre in recent memory; the incredibility of Jean's story is made more absurd by how readily accepted it is by everyone else (I was also sitting right in front of Jeffrey Pufahl during preview, so I can only assume that he appreciated my hearty reaction).

Dead Man's Cell Phone is a triumph of modernist storytelling. Instead of trying to probe the human mind in spite of growing technology, it pulls the veil off how our lives (and deaths) are shaped by those devices with which we surround ourselves. Although Gordon expires before the play opens, his cell phone carries on; and because of that lifeline, he continues to live and grow in the hands of Jean, becoming a better person than he ever was before. Through Jean's growing obsession with the cell phone, the play becomes a story about how we strive to connect with people through technology, but those connections are never completely honest. But then the play starts to go somewhere different, and shortly after coming back from intermission I got a creeping sensation that we were headed toward and unsatisfying conclusion. We were. The play spins off into corporate intrigue, then metaphysical moralising. By the time we reach the end, it feels we've come a long way from the theme with which we started. The actors carry through very well, but the script loses direction.

The strength of the play falls on Kristina Hughes as the uptight businesswoman who is drawn into a strange new world. Her well-meaning innocence helps supply a lot of the comedy in the play. Leon Willey plays Gordon, as a limp corpse in the first scene, then later soliloquising in the play's more abstract segments. There is a profound juxtaposition between the two: Gordon the suave, manipulative sociopath, and Jean the awkward but kind-hearted good samaritan. Their differences create a delightful amount of friction when Jean realises just who she's allowed herself to connect to. Willey also plays Gordon's brother Dwight, timid and nerdy; his scenes with Jean supply the plays soft, romanticute moments. Then Natalie Feheregyhazi does a turn as both Gordon's widow Hermia, sullen and repressed, and his waifish French lover. She displays a gift for both dry humour and over-the-top characterisation. The real scene-stealer is Sharon Bakker as Gordon's emotionally fragile mother, who utters the fateful line that I mention at the top of this review. She grabs the attention of the audience with her high, wavering voice, then clamps onto it with her lugubrious speeches, providing the play's deepest emotional resonances.

The sad fact is that the substance of the play felt like two scripts stapled together, but it still succeeds on many levels by the strength of the cast and its biting humour. And even though I don't like how she ended things, I do give Sarah Ruhl credit for jumping into the deep end (see what I did there?) to probe the complex and sometimes damaging relationships with those miniature lives we call cell phones.

All My Sons: Fracture and Rapture

Fragmentation. That's what it's all about.

The thing about walking into a new production is that it comes upon you in stages. More and more theatres are forgoing the practice of drawing a grand drape across the stage, sealing the rapturous world therein until the designated time — and in a black box theatre like the Emrys Jones it is quite impossible. This means that as we shuffle to our seats we are able to cast our eyes on the set, vacant, gloomy, and a bit haunting, waiting to be peopled. And in a theatre this size, there is no way to conceal it from the neutral blaze of the house lights; it is laid bare without the benefit of atmosphere, for us to freely molest it with our eyes. As I think on it now, it is an unsettling thing for the set to be so naked and defenseless, but that is the world in which we live, so the set must be strong enough to withstand it.

All My Sons is a play of juxtapositions. This realisation washed over me as I was contemplating the set before the play began. The first image is that of a cozy backyard, paragon of domesticity from some idyllic yesteryear that we can only describe as after the Great Depression but before the first season of Mad Men. It is bright, cheerful, and serene, with the aft side of a house adorning the upstage wall, giving the impression of a warm and welcoming home within. However, as your vision pans backward, you can see the house lose definition around the edges. The walls don't just stop cleanly and extend into the imagination; they become jagged and uneven, sporting gaps and fissures, with the siding become more sparse as it extends outward until it eventually fades into oblivion. The tiles forming the garden pathway as well break away and recede into a twisted Rorschach shape. And one is left with the impression that one is looking at a deteriorating dream moments before waking. Like I said, fragmentation.

The play, Arthur Miller's first major success on stage, centres on the Keller family living in the aftermath of the Second World War. Joe is an aging tradesman who made a living during the war manufacturing airplane parts. His son Chris is a veteran with big dreams who feels somewhat constrained by his family. His other son, Larry, was a fighter pilot who went MIA during the war and is presumed dead by everyone except Joe's wife Kate, who holds vigil night after night waiting for her lost son to return. At the epicentre of the drama is a spindly tree, planted in Larry's honour, which is snapped in half by a strong wind at the play's opening. This act of God foreshadows the eventual fracturing of their suburban content, as Chris brings in Larry's old flame Ann, with the intention of making her his own wife, something he knows will devastate his mother. And indiscretions in Joe's past which at one point raised accusations of "murderer" will come back to haunt him, and his good-natured charm may not be enough to deflect them.

Contemporary critics regarded All My Sons "a very depressing play at a time of great optimism." I can understand the sentiment — after all, post-war America was buzzing with jingoistic fervour and everyone was looking forward to starting their families in a future that looked brighter than ever. Even those who lost loved ones could still take solace in nobility of their sacrifice. This sense of optimism is captured well in the opening scene, where Joe spends a quiet morning in the yard with neighbours in sweater-vests fluttering around, making the idle chatter of men whose lives have more or less plateaued. The only thing to offset their idyll is the little broken tree at the corner of the stage. The significance of that death ripples outward until soon everything we thought we knew about their situation is peeled away. The hopes and dreams of the characters are flayed, leaving bare their doubts and insecurities, until it becomes clear that there is no hope, even in this hopeful time.

For this reason, I think All My Sons is more apropos today than it was when it was first produced. It is a play that speaks to an age of uncertainty. We no longer take comfort in the justice of our wars, and as Kate Keller curses through the realms of God and Man for having her son taken from her, it is hard not to think of mothers we see every day, losing their children in increasingly senseless conflicts. And thoughts of the amoral corporate imperialism we see every day are stirred when we face the image of Joe placing business interests above the lives of the soldiers flying his planes. This is the world where the codes and beliefs with which people grew up have ceased to have any meaning, so all they can do is keep moving, without really knowing where or why.

Kashtin Moen is a bit of a surprise out of the department this fall. In his mainstage debut, he is adept at capturing the genteel charm of Joe Keller. He displays a very genuine warmth throughout most of the play, but he is also arresting in those moments when he cracks into pain and anger. When he says that all he did was for family, we really believe him. Chris Donlevy provides what you might call the moral centre of the play. As Chris, he is principally a reactionary character, acting as counterpoint to his father's restricted world-view and his mother's pathological denial. He commands a lot of the stage and takes on all the subtle shifts of the atmosphere in general. Jackie Block continues to grow from her Greystone debut last fall. As Ann, she plays a balancing act between homespun nice girl, blushing romantic, fearful sister, and anguished lover. She represents an emotional teeter-totter, bringing us up and down, from her painful memories to her defiant hope for a better future, eventually leading to a heart-rending emotional climax, carrying herself with fragile beauty the whole way. And Anna Seibel, already warm to the Greystone stage, offers another astonishing performance. She is a creature of many layers, and in Kate Keller we see a loving mother and devoted wife, veiling a rage against both Heaven and Earth for their dual roles in taking away her son. She is fearful and hopeful, tormented and brave; she is distant and vaguely mentally disturbed, often allowing her devotion to her dead son to override her devotion to her living son. Anna Seibel brings these things whirling together, bringing the audience to yearn with her, eventually sending them crashing down when she hits her emotional tipping point. Like I said, fragmentation.

The four principal actors are accompanied by a talented ensemble of supporting characters. Mike Prebble as Dr. Jim Bayliss has a natural charisma that allows him to command the attention of the audience. As his wife Sue, Jeanine Thrasher looks very Betty Draper with a fiery eye and an acid tongue. She is a bit of an enigma,  full of passion and resentment wrapped up in a sexy swagger, and Thrasher makes a sharp impression in her time on stage. Jesse Gagnon brings in some much-needed comic relief with his scatter-brained Frank Lubey; he can elicit love and laughter with nothing more than a simple flailing of his ladder. Joanna Munholland is remarkably subdued as his wife Lydia, the quietly dignified housewife; in theory she is the most stable of the characters, but in her interaction with Ann she betrays a confusion of how this life became hers. Vernon Boldick as "neighbourhood boy" Bert can best be described as adorable, brimming with youth and vitality. Then Rohan Keenan as Ann's brother George only appears in one pivotal scene but packs it with a great emotional density. His sullen reserved anger gradually bubbles to the surface in a fiery confrontation with Joe.

In Pamela Haig Bartley's hands, this play unfolds as a very evenly paced character exploration, burning with emotional tension. It raises questions about what we believe and what drives us. There is a sense of profound ennui and crippling uncertainty reminiscent of last year's Three Sisters, with moral conflicts that hearken all the way back to Experiment with an Air Pump. When the play begins, there are certain assumptions made about what is right and wrong that will become shattered by curtain. The play is nihilistic in some ways, systematically breaking down all sense of purpose, but it ends secure in the knowledge that there is nowhere to go but forward, which brings it back to its earlier hopeful stage, albeit in a very twisted way. 

As I look back, it seems to me there are hundreds of ways the production could have gone badly, given the philosophical and emotional depths being probed. But it succeeded thanks to the brilliant chemistry of its cast, which allowed for easier shifts in dynamic, which often happen drastically and rapidly. The cast is supported quite beautifully by Adam Naismith's expressionistic set design, breaking apart, caught in the middle of the vortex. The set is at once very tangible while remaining locked in the imagination, splitting apart just outside the characters' fields of vision. The actors — and set — interact in many different layers bouncing around divers emotions, often simultaneously, until the sense of unity they once had vanishes and we are left with fractured images seeking connection. The story is timeless: a universal tale of regret and fear, set after a period of great confusion (the war) and at the dawn of a period supposedly for happiness and reconstruction, but the truth is there can be no reconstruction because what once was can never be. Parts of the world we knew and the world we hope to have spiral down, but they can never be completely made whole.

Like I said, fragmentation.

All the World's a Stage, and All the Men and Women Precariously Close to Falling in the Orchestra Pit

Saskatchewan is a lot like a stage. It's large and flat and has some impressive lighting effects. Looking at things this way, it makes perfect sense that we are destined for developing a vibrant theatre culture. It's a slow process, of course, and certain, more Moose Jaw-shaped sections are having a hard go of it (keep on chugging, Rhubarb Productions -- unless you've already gone defunct, in which case, RIP, Rhubarb Productions). But here I shall focus on Saskatoon, where I have made my home for the past five years. Our theatre scene continues to grow and flourish, although it is still difficult to find people who really talk about it. And that is what this Weblog shall be about: talking about it.

This Blog was the victim of many a false-start as I tried to get it up and running. At first, I was going to use Fringe as my launching platform; but alas, due to temporal and monetary constraints, I was only able to catch a relatively small portion of the shows going on at the Festival this summer, and it didn't seem like "Ruminations on the Seven Fringe Shows I Happened to See" made for a particularly auspicious premier entry. Then I contemplated using Two Corpses Go Dancing as my starting point, but I'm still so in love with that play that I don't really trust myself to provide a lot of serious critical discourse on it. A month or so ago, at the Live Five Launch party, I decided it was time I seriously pushed forward. Importance of Being Earnest was going to be my inaugural review, but I got held up, principally because I still hadn't thought of a name. But here it is: Prairie Groundling. I spent weeks in solemn contemplation attempting to find a title that could evoke both theatre and Saskatoon in a suitably pithy manner, and this was the best I came up with (really). And now, at long last, I shall launch this Blog in earnest (see what I did there) tonight, as I go to attend the premier of Greystone Theatre's first title All My Sons. Since Greystone Theatre is where I started writing about theatre in the first place, it seems to be an apropos starting point for my Saskatoon Theatre Blog. Later this week I'll follow with retrospective reviews on Persephone's Importance and Dead Man's Cell Phone. These reviews will not be timely, obviously, but my goal here is not to create a lot of "Go see this / Don't go see this" reviews. Rather, I have the simpler goal of creating a world where, if someone wonders if any writing on their production exists, they can find some.

As I said, false starts. I have given myself pause several times wondering if there really is a point to this Blog. No doubt many of the tens of people who stumble across this page will pose the same question: Why Saskatoon. I have answered this question, finally. I know why Saskatoon because today as I was trying to eat my lunch while a co-worker was talking on the phone about how much she hates Saskatoon. As someone who actually chose to live in Saskatoon, I felt slightly offended. Then I felt a surge of pride. Then it occurred to me that no one else was going to write about Saskatoon's independent theatre scene, so why shouldn't I?

I suppose this is not a terribly inspiring introduction, but it's mine. My name is Blair Woynarski, and this is the Prairie Groundling.