What Lies Before Us is a 2007 nominee in Drama for the prestigious Governor General Literary Awards
Funny and absurd dialogue, even when in Cantonese, this is a play with momentum and a brilliant handle on building an arc that is sustained to the very last page. Intelligent and ridiculous, pure Panych. (from the GG nomination citation)
David Storch in What Lies Before Us
Publications
Matt MacFadzean David Storch Wayne Sujo
What Lies Before Us in 2006
gigantic pen from The Overcoat
What Lies Before Us
Two-time Governor General Award-winning playwright Morris Panych has done with What Lies Before Us the almost unthinkable: he has turned Waiting for Godot into a comedy while simultaneously heightening rather than minimizing the profound existential questions it asks. But this play is no mere parody of a theatre classic, nor is it a history play. The roots of this comedy extend to the confrontation of Shakespeares rude mechanicals with their educated betters, and to the fundamentally and hilariously irreconcilable differences between the world views of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The English Mr. Keating and the Scottish Mr. Ambrose are assistant surveyors camped in the Rocky Mountains with Mr. Wing, their Chinese coolie, starving as they wait for the Major, an American adventurer, to show up and lead their railroad survey party in the nation-building enterprise called Canada. Of course, the Major never shows up, leaving the rude and uneducated Keating and the disillusioned and highly schooled Ambrose to engage in an increasingly absurd hair-splitting and sidesplitting dialogue about the meaning of life, and both of them utterly frustrated in their ongoing attempts to communicate with Wing, who speaks only Cantonese. Heightening our sense of the darkly comic is that we know things are not going to end well: Keating is dying of rabies he got from a squirrel bite, and Ambrose is about to succumb to a gangrenous broken leg, which no one can quite bring himself to cut off. Functioning as both a comic foil to Keating and Ambrose, and an incomprehensible chorus to the audience (unless it understands Cantonese), Wing is about to have the last word. Finally understood, translated into English through a trick of stagecraft, Wings final speech completely inverts the play with a devastatingly poignant version of the events we have just witnessed.
Books by Morris Panych
Benevolence
Fastidious and fussy shoe salesman by day, and secretive aspiring film scriptwriter by night, Oswald Eichersens dreams of success are as grandly inflated as his self-esteem is hopelessly deficient. Just outside Eichersens place of work, street person Terence Lomy has sat encamped for two years; an indelible fixture on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign round his neck with the word hungry scribbled on it in a hapless hand. One day, on an irrational impulse, having ignored the beggar for years, Eichersen gives Lomy a hundred dollar bill, setting into motion a series of ironic and completely unanticipated events that will change both of their lives forever.
But its not only Eichersen and Lomy that are changed by this irrational act of generous empathy. Through a hilarious series of bizarre encounters in the porn theatre that Lomy (a beguiling trickster who dares to claim it is actually he who has something of value to offer Eichersen) has chosen for a series of rendezvous with his benefactor, Eichersen finds himself in an unwanted relationship with a reformed hooker, as sexless a companion as his former longtime girlfriend with an irritating fetish for small dogs. As he helplessly witnesses his entire life disintegrate, only to be co-opted and appropriated by everyone around him, Eichersen ends up abandoned and penniless, on the lam for a murder he didnt commit, absurdly preparing a lecture on Benevolence for the sole patron of the dark and dingy theatre of his nightmares.
Full of excruciatingly comic twists and turns of both fate and manipulative, perhaps even malicious intent, this dark comedy of trading places resonates with a cascade of uncomfortable truths about how we see (or dont see) the people we live with every day.
Benevolence premiered at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto on September 24, 2007.
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