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by Claudia Dey, directed by Eda Holmes

Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

May 15-June 9, 2002

"Schematic Shadows"

Margaret Atwood has said that a small anthology could be assembled of poems about the tragically short-lived poet Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-87).  Now it seems a small an anthology of plays about her is forming.  In 1999 Linda Griffiths presented “Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen” at the Theatre Passe Muraille Back Space.  Now  on the Factory Theatre Mainspace a production of “The Gwendolyn Poems” by young playwright Claudia Dey has opened.  If “Alien Creature” did not capture the poetry of MacEwen, it did capture a sense of her magic and otherworldliness.  “The Gwendolyn Poems” captures neither.  Though the work includes non-naturalistic elements, far too often it plays as a series of drearily realistic scenes that give little clue why its central figure should interest us.

Both Griffiths’s and Dey’s work were inspired, often verbally, by Rosemary Sullivan’s acclaimed 1995 biography “Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen”.  Sullivan shows that MacEwen grew up with a great sense of insecurity, of never being loved.  This led both to  the darkness in her work and to the self-destructiveness and despair in her life.  Dey would like to do the same in her play but so emphasizes MacEwen’s background that the play becomes a testament more to determinism than poetry. 

The play takes the now-familiar form of showing a life flashing before the eyes of a dying person.  It begins with the sound of MacEwen’s friend Mo knocking to get in to see her and circles back to that moment and beyond.  Her life review proceeds in a tedious chronological order from her the publication of her first poem in “Canadian Forum” to her death in a basement apartment in the Annex in Toronto. 

Her mentally unstable mother Elsie, in a finely detailed performance by Barbara Gordon, is made out to be the dominant influence.  Obsessed with chastity and loathing for sex, she wanted MacEwen to be a nun.  The strain of madness, the obsession, the inability to accept pleasure stem from her.  Her father Alick, played with great sensitivity by Jerry Franken, is driven to drink by Elsie’s condition and by his failure to be an artist, a photographer.  These two qualities he passes on to his famous daughter.

The third influence is her first husband, the “People’s Poet” Milton Acorn.  They married when he was 38 and she 19.  As written by Dey and portrayed by David Fox, Acorn is so obnoxious it’s impossible to understand how MacEwen could ever consent to live with such an (apparently) foul-smelling brute.  Since Dey introduces us to Acorn when MacEwen agrees to marry him, we never do know.  After their break-up Acorn tries to have revenge by deriding her poetry and spreading lies about her.  Fox’s performance may be overblown, but he does gives us the sense that under the bluster and outward hatred, there was once a real love. 

Dey’s idea is that MacEwen is haunted by the ghosts of her past.  She shows this rather literally by having them flit in and out evoking guilt (Alick) or hurling criticisms (Elsie and Acorn).  The two most grounded people MacEwen knows are her female friend Mo and her second husband, the Greek singer Nikos Tsingos.  Tamsin Kelsey brings out the compassion and humour in Mo while Tony Nappo shows the growing fear of seeing someone he loves becoming alien.  Franken also plays MacEwen’s doctor, taken aback by a patient so bent on self-destruction.  Kelsey is a treat as an interviewer totally out of her depth when faced with an oracle.  And Nappo, with a swift change of costume and accent becomes MacEwen’s lifelong hero, T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia.       

The peculiarity is that these secondary characters are all more interesting than Dey makes MacEwen.  In Act 1, while Dey is busy establishing rather too schematically her Three Major Influences, MacEwen seem so passive it’s hard to think of her as a major writer much less a visionary.  As MacEwen, Brooke Johnson delivers so many lines in a monotone we don’t see how there could be any passion behind her writing.  In Act 2, however, the further downhill MacEwen slides, the better Johnson becomes, probably because role finally offers some challenges.  Johnson is especially good as the loony MacEwen holding court in a donut shop.

Late in Act 2 is too late to awake our interest.  Act 1 ends with such a powerful image, Alick and Acorn winding MacEwen up in a sheet to form a straightjacket, that Act 2 seems superfluous.  Dey has given us so many clues as to what will happen that there doesn’t seem to be much point to spend another hour watching a woman descend into wretchedness.  And indeed, there is a certain tedium to repeated pattern of drink, quitting drink, visiting the doctor and relapse, real though it may have been.  Ultimately, Dey is too timid with her non-naturalism.  She needs to find not just poetic quotations but a dramaturgy that is poetic. 

Eda Holmes ably directs but the pacing needs to be tighter and the appearances of MacEwen’s ghosts is never as fluid as it should be.  More effective than the text at summing up the paradoxes of MacEwen’s life is David Boechler’s set.  There are three walls, none of them touching, the back with two very tall windows, the side walls with one each.  These are completely papered over with posters and maps, the back wall with Greece, the stage right wall with Israel and the stage left wall with Egypt.  What better metaphor for a poet who wants to shut out the “unwelcome light” of reality with her imaginings reinforced by travel  of fabled lands of the mind.  When transilluminated by  Michael Kruse, MacEwen’s apartment becomes a kind of chapel with these as self-made stained glass windows.  Sand lies in two piles on the floor evoking the summer holidays with her family, sawdust of a cat’s litter box and the dunes of her beloved Middle East.

As with Timothy Findley’s “The Trials of Ezra Pound” last year, insight into what makes a person a poet is impossible to gain from the minutiae of everyday life.  Anyone who already knows about Gwendolyn MacEwen will not gain any new insights into her or her poetry.  Anyone who does know MacEwen will see a dismal life enacted but will not discover what makes her great instead of merely eccentric.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Claudia Dey. ©Christopher Wahl.