Review - The Drawer Boy - Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Michael Healey, directed by Nina Lee Aquino

Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

March 6-25, 2018

Miles: “We’re here to get your history and give it back to you”

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, Theatre Passe Muraille has revived what may be its greatest hit – The Drawer Boy from 1999 by Michael Healey. Except for boasting a more diverse cast than the original, Nina Lee Aquino’s direction finds nothing new in play and misses some of its points. Nevertheless, if as well acted as this, this production proves yet again why The Drawer Boy has become one of the most acclaimed and performed of all Canadian plays.

Michael Healey’s play is based on events in TPM’s history. For its 1972 project The Farm Show, director Paul Thompson and a group pf actors actors went from Toronto to live with farmers near Clinton, Ontario, to discover the challenges of country life and to devise a show collectively based on what they had learned. In The Drawer Boy we follow the city-bred actor Miles (Graham Conway) as he tries to get to know the two elderly bachelor farmers Morgan (Andrew Moodie) and Angus (Craig Lauzon) whom he’s been assigned to observe.

At first Morgan, the more reserved of the two, is unwilling to have his privacy disturbed, but he softens when he thinks that the show will communicate to city folk how hard the working life of farmers is and how little compensation they receive for their labours. Of the two farmers, Morgan is in charge because Angus suffered brain damage when the two were in England during World War II. Angus has lost his short-term memory and his memory of the past, but still retained his uncanny gift with numbers and enjoys his pastime of counting the starts in the night sky. Angus and Morgan were boyhood friends with Angus being called “the drawer boy” because his skill at drawing was thought to make him an architect one day.

One ritual that has evolved in the farmers’ household is for Morgan to tell Angus the history of their life together, how they went to war, how they met two English girls who wanted to marry them, how Angus’s accident occurred, how they had a double wedding and how their wives were killed in a car accident. Miles overhears Morgan tell this story and immediately co-opts it for the play. When Morgan and Angus go to town to see a rehearsal of the show, Morgan is furious that Miles has stolen his story without his permission. On the other hand, Angus is overjoyed to see Morgan and himself portrayed on stage and the experience begins to trigger the return of his memory.

There is a very funny sequence in Healey’s play where Miles tells Angus the plot of Hamlet, a story that really fires Angus’s imagination. While the mention of Hamlet is comic it also serves the function of reminding the audience of the function of the play-within-a-play in the tragedy. To find out whether Claudius is guilty of murdering his father, Hamlet has the visiting players perform a play wherein a brother poisons a king to gain the crown and his wife. Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (Act 2). In a humbler way the same thing happens when Angus sees themselves portrayed on stage. Seeing the play gives him his first chance to look at himself and his relationship with Morgan objectively, without Morgan’s constant filtering of information so as not to upset him. The question is whether the return of memory will he harmful, as Morgan claims it will be, or is the return of memory a good thing even if it causes pain?

The aspect of The Drawer Boy that stands out more now than it did originally is the issue of the appropriation of stories. Yet, that is what The Farm Show was based on and was thought to be a good thing. As Miles says, “We’re here to get your history and give it back to you”. Today this sounds presumptuous, but there is nothing Aquino can do to give this a contemporary spin because it is explicit in Healey’s play that this is a positive action and the play shows that it ultimately has positive results. And, indeed, The Farm Show itself had positive results by becoming an iconic Canadian play that found its heroes in ordinary Canadians.

Aquino may have chosen a multiracial cast for her production but that does nothing to change the relationships among the characters. Graham Conway is very funny as the naive city boy Miles, who knows only about acting and nothing about hard manual labour. Although Miles is repeatedly made to look like a fool by Morgan, Conway shows that beneath his wimpy exterior is a will to succeed and to take on Morgan’s work demands as challenges.

Aquino has Andrew Moodie play Morgan as almost unalterably grim and angry except when it comes to caring for Angus’s terrors. Moodie does let us see that Morgan’s patience with Angus is often close to fraying. What Aquino misses in Morgan is his sense of mischief that was so evident in the first production of the play. Seeing that Miles knows nothing about farming, it was obvious in that first production that Morgan was making up ever more outrageous stories about farm life to see when Miles would finally stop believing him. Morgan’s story that dairy cows live in constant fear of being killed for not producing enough milk is the first tall tale Miles swallows whole. In the original production Morgan’s explanation of crop rotation got a huge laugh, but not here. That is because Aquino seems not to see that Morgan is testing Miles’s credulity. As a result Moodie delivers all of his lines to Miles in exactly the same gruff tone without any hint of a semi-serious, will-he-take-the-bait tone such as Jerry Franken gave Morgan in the first production.

Craig Lauzon, however, gives a wonderfully warm performance as Angus. Before we learn about Agnus’s past we regard him as a simpleton whom Morgan is protecting. After we learn about the past and see demonstrations of Angus’s mathematical prowess, we start to wonder whether Morgan has not become over-protective. Miles’s arrival and actions finally bring this to the fore. One of the most cherishable moments in the action is Agnus’s childlike giddiness at seeing himself and Morgan portrayed on stage. Joy is a difficult emotion to conjure up on stage, but Lauzon not only shows Agnus wholly imbued with it but fully transported by an emotion Agnus hasn’t likely experienced for more than 20 years. Lauzon’s perfectly judged escalation of emotion makes it completely plausible that Angus would seize on the last time he was that happy and that that emotion would bring back the memories associated with it.

Joanna Yu has designed so many fine productions in the past one wonders why she has made this one so unattractive. She has the two locations of the action, the kitchen and the back porch, but renders the first realistically and the second non-naturalistically. The backdrop for both areas shows the outline of the house but is covered in scribbles and dashes of paint. The point is likely to reflect the confusion in Angus’s head and the subliminal conflict between Morgan and Agnus. At the end a projection of architectural plans with straight lines covers up the chaotic scribbles we have had to look at for almost two hours. Since Angus is the “drawer boy”, Yu could still have created a non-naturalistic set by sketching in all the background elements only to have them become more naturalistic by the end. As a side note, Aquino or Yu could have insisted that Graham Conway let his hair grow out enough to have a recognizably1970s hairstyle.

The best news about the TPM revival of The Drawer Boy is that it demonstrates without doubt that a play we thought was a masterpiece in 1999 has lost none of its power. The action may be embedded in a particular time and place but Healey has managed to create a story that transcends those specifics to deal with the creation of art and the salutary effect it has both on the creators of it and on those who experience it. I hadn’t seen The Drawer Boy since the 2001 revival. It was a joy to see it again.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.

2018-03-07

The Drawer Boy