Keywords Actors, Theatre Born in 1952 Directors & Producers, Theatre Playwrights

Panych, Morris

Panych came to public attention for his two-hander (a play for two actors) Last Call: A Post-Nuclear Cabaret (1982), which he wrote and in which he starred. The show was revised for CBC television, bringing Panych to national attention. He has since gained world notice; his play Vigil (1995, renamed Auntie & Me) played in London's West End in 2003 and in Paris in 2004 as well as in the US and in more than 30 Canadian cities. What many consider his first major play and one of his best, 7 Stories (1989), was staged in Japan in 2003. The Overcoat (1997) toured Canada after its 2001 Vancouver Playhouse remount, and has since toured the US; it has also been adapted for video by Principia Productions (2001, directed by Panych) and broadcast on the CBC.

Panych's plays reflect a humorous, dark world full of absurdist allusions. While an early play like The Story of a Sinking Man (1993) seems too directly imitative of Samuel Beckett (a man slowly sinks out of sight into the stage floor as he meditates on life and his own psychoses), the majority of the plays bring marvelously fresh and quirky observations of an existential and neurotic world, and there has been a clear maturation in style and subject through the work. Panych has, some critics contend, a tendency to bypass character development by resorting to one-liners, preventing deeper engagement. Later plays like Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, however - while no less funny than the quick-paced earlier work - show Panych more in control of his characterizations and exploring more than surface oddities. In a CBC interview in 2004, he pointed out that what fascinates him is the daily struggle of ordinary people with life's bizarre minor annoyances rather than the major social or political issues of the moment (as, for example, in the monologue Earshot, 2001, about a man driven almost mad by neighbouring noise filtering into his tiny room).

Although Panych is interested in the small and particular, he also repeatedly explores the large theme of death. In Vigil a man visits his apparently dying aunt (though the ending surprises). In 7 Stories, a Chaplinesque man aims to throw himself off a building ledge while observing the hilarious, shallow urban lives of the building's tenants; he is saved from physical death by a flight into a metatheatrical universe, a movement into art itself, where he "forgot my own story."

A similar but less positive end seals the fate of another nameless man in Panych's The Overcoat, his hugely successful reinterpretation of two short stories by Russian dramatist Nikolai Gogol. Co-conceived with Wendy Gorling, this wordless show eludes genre, becoming something other than (and, in fact, more than) ballet, movement theatre, mime or drama. Using characteristic filmic allusions and based in music by Shostakovich, the piece concludes a series of wordless shows built at the highly regarded Vancouver theatre school, Studio 58. Without words, these shows tap directly into the theatrical and performative, allowing the spectator to recognize - or miss - the sources, and to understand Gogol's simple narrative of a character's hopeless desire to be loved by the totalitarian society that rejects him - or to "write" another plot line onto the visual action. The play is set in an unnamed, apparently eastern European city (as is Panych's favourite of these movement shows, The Company, 1995). Panych's settings are generally undefined and somewhere at The Ends of the Earth (1994, the title of the play that earned his first Governor General's Award). His plays are set in psychological and always intensely theatrical locations, thanks in no small part to stunning set designs by Ken MacDonald.

Since 2000, Panych has directed extensively: opera, contemporary and period drama, as well as his own work. He has also acted on television (notably, The X-Files), and continues to write, the activity that most interests him. Indeed, his announced goal is to achieve his best writing. Multi-talented, driven and highly self-critical, Morris Panych will certainly continue to evolve, but he has already attained a significant place in Canadian theatre.

Panych, Morris
Actor, director and playwright, Morris Panych (courtesy Arts Club Theatre Company).

Author REID GILBERT

Links to Other Sites
Morris Panych: Sage of majority
A news story about the theatrical career of Morris Panych. From the "National Post."

Theatre review: 7 Stories at CanStage
A review of a revival of Morris Panych’s play "7 Stories" from the National Post.