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Spotlight On...
Morris Panych on Vigil
By Kim Blackwell
 When
you talk to Morris Panych you feel as if you have to be very ready
-- because Morris is a busy
man, to say the least. The phone is ringing as I wait on the line
for Panych to pick up the other end, the other end being his home
in Vancouver. After three rings the phone is grabbed from it cradle
and a man’s voice impatiently says, “hello.” And so begins
a conversation with Morris Panych about his play Vigil,
now playing at Canadian
Stage.
The first
question is the obvious one, how he came to write Vigil. “A
few years ago I went to the hospital to visit my partner’s mother
who was very sick,” explains Panych. “In the bed next to her
was a woman who was clearly palliative. On one particular day there
were two candy stripers there explaining to this woman, who was
very near death
that her family would not be coming from England to visit her as
she expected. The woman was very upset and I realized that these
two people were completely
unequipped emotionally to deal with this situation. And so the
idea of a play about death and loneliness was born.” Panych pauses
and says with a hint of a chuckle, “And it’s really funny too.” And
so playwright, director and actor are almost perfectly summed up
in the tragic story and the hysterical but touching play that he
wrote as a response,
a play about two lonely people who find each other.
But don’t expect
Vigil or any other Panych play to be a political comment. In Vigil don’t
expect to find a searing condemnation of the health care system
in this country or a cry to families to care for their
aging family members. And don’t expect to be able to specify a place
or time period because that just isn’t how Panych writes. “I
have a limited interest in temporal issues, he says. “I’m looking
for my plays to have a broader reach and to not be construed as
political models. What I’m really interested in is human dynamics,
relationships and interactions between human beings. In the case
of Vigil I wanted to
deal with the universal idea of old age, without specifying a time
and a place for the play to be taking place in. And besides, there
is so much
specific political messaging going on in theatre right now.” To reinforce
this idea he references his recent production of Amadeus at CanStage
in the fall of 2003. “I wanted my production of Amadeus to be about
theatrical ideas more than a historical time piece about Amadeus
and Salieri and their
lives. And so we went with a modern look for the show, especially
the set. When asked if he thinks that this immediacy in a piece
like Amadeus could
confuse the audience, Panych replies, “I always hope to bring clarity
to the things that I do. I never set out to confuse people. But
sometimes I think that artists aren’t credited with putting very much
thought into their choices.”
Panych has directed over thirty productions,
and written a dozen plays that have been produced across Canada,
Britain, and the United
States. He has acted in over fifty plays, and in television series
such as X-Files. He
has won the Jessie Award fourteen times for acting and directing.
He has been nominated six times for Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards,
winning twice, and been nominated three times for the Chalmers
Award. In 1994 he was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Drama
for The Ends of the Earth.
When asked if he thinks of himself primarily
as a playwright, director
or actor the answer comes without any hesitation -- Morris Panych
is first and foremost a writer. He goes on to say that acting,
especially in film and television, has always been a great way to make money
in a short
period of time to finance his writing. And as for directing, according
to
Panych he developed his award-winning directing career inadvertently.
Panych’s
plays have been described as black comedies which swing between
hope and despair. When asked to respond to this Panych says, “I don’t
necessarily agree with that. I think I use despair to find a kind
of hope. I don ’t
think my plays ever use despair as a final answer. Back to top |
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