#morris panych

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

have any of y’all heard of the play 7 stories by morris panych? because i saw it last night and it is WILD

[frontmezzjunkies]

The Tense and Hilarious Withrow Park Spies Strong at Tarragon Theatre, Toronto

#WithrowParkPlay #frontmezzjunkies reviews: @TarragonTheatre's #WithrowPark by #MorrisPanych directed by #JackieMaxwell w/ #BenedictCampbell #CorrineKoslo #NancyPalk #JohnathanSousa #TarragonTheatre #TheaTO

Nancy Palk in Tarragon Theatre’s Withrow Park. Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann. The Toronto Theatre Review: Tarragon Theatre’s Withrow Park By Ross These three lost souls come forward, staring out into the audience in the warm glow of light, searching the unseen horizon with a questioning eye. What are they missing? But then, out of nowhere, there is a knock at the door. Not a light casual one,…

View On WordPress

[frontmezzjunkies]

Stratford Festival Non-Verbalizes a Powerfully Moving Frankenstein Revived

#frontmezzjunkies reviews: #FrankensteinRevived created/directed by #MorrisPanych music by #DavidCoulter based on #Frankenstein by #MaryShelley w/ #LauraCondlln #CharlieGallant #MarcusNance #GarrettMcKee @StratFest #StratfordFestival #CanadianTheatre

Marcus Nance as The Creature and Charlie Gallant as Doctor Victor Frankenstein with Laura Condlln as Mary Shelley in Frankenstein Revived. Stratford Festival 2023. Photo by Cylla Von Tiedemann. The Stratford Theatre Review: Frankenstein Revived By Ross A large circle of light takes over the back wall with a vengeance, highlighting a darkly clad woman in a full-length period dress rising up as…

View On WordPress

[dustlines]

Amitai Marmorstein as Lowell, in Morris Panych‘s The Trespassers (2010). Photo by David Cooper. Source: Belfry Theatre.

Amitai’s looking a lot like a younger Michael Assistent, dreaming of aliens and all of the other fantastical beings he would someday like to meet.

[readingoncloud-nine]

Tales of a Bookworm; Entry #26

The Dishwashers

Morris Panych

In short, The Dishwashers is a two act play set in the basement of the of a restaurant where the three men work day in and day out washing the restaurant's dirty dishes. Before the play takes place, the dishwashers seem to work as a well oiled machine, and if someone didn’t mesh, they got the boot. Then Emmett, the newest dishwasher joins the team. The other two men, Dressler and Moss and now joined by Emmett talk about life, it’s meaning and all it’s obstacles. Dressler talks about the quality of his work over what his work is and buts heads with Emmett who refers to his previous life as a man who dined with the rich and complains about his teetering love life. Moss spends the length of the play wondering where is pay is going, believing that Dressler is stealing from him. Each man is then sent on their own way due to what they believe is fate. Moss passes on after discovering he was fired, Emmett marries his love after quitting dishwashing and Dressler is seen training his newest employee.

Along with being a play write, Morris Panych is also a director and actor. He wrote The Dishwashers in 2005. His other noble works include 7 Stories, Vigil, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, among others. Born in Calgary, Panych was raised in Edmonton and went on to study at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and then later the University of British Columbia. In terms of his personal life, Panych is openly gay and married his partner, Ken MacDonald in 2004.

I was quite interested in the play’s concept, I originally thought it was set durning the depression, but like the timeless effect it has. However I was unaware of the play’s timeline until the end, where we discover that Emmett works for Dressler for 2 years. At first I was interested in Emmett’s character, but he eventually annoyed me as I feel he professionally stepped outside his boundaries, and I respected Dressler’s commitment, but I feel that he was quite stubborn. Over that I feel the play lacked character development and has a flat plot that stories almost left unresolved, but I think I would feel differently if I were to The Dishwashers played out on stage. Overall, the play was an enjoyable easy read that I would like to see on stage.

[aussietheatre]

[popthismag-blog]

Happy World Theatre Day

Depending on how generous one was feeling, I was either a precocious or pretentious kid. I read all the time, sought brochures for myself about transferring to a french immersion school in grade three, and wanted desperately to go to the theatre. When I was 10 or 11, my grandparents bought me tickets to Phantom of the Opera. A little over two decades later, on the other side of actually reviewing theatre as part of my living and understanding that Phantom kinda sucks, the pounding piano chords of the titular number still quicken my pulse. For the last four years, I’ve been truly fortunate to have a chance to write about Vancouver’s theatre community. Have I loved everything I’ve seen? No. But that’s mostly beside the point. Sitting in on rehearsals, coming together for opening night, riveted by a performance that tears your insides up — I was, and am, lucky enough to be a part of it. Sitting in an audience makes you part of a community, no matter how objective a writer might try to be. Ahem. (I tried, I swear, but it’s hard to be remote when you have so much respect for what people are trying to do!) Small, young, emerging companies are among the theatres I’ve championed the most, particularly Itsazoo and Fighting Chance. Again, have I loved every production? No. But I believe very much in their vision and resourcefulness and passion. Imagine what Ryan Mooney could do for Theatre Under the Stars? I imagine the Zoo Crew as possible successors to Electric Company’s kingdom. There’s so much possibility in this city! Morris Panych knows that’s true. I had a chance to speak with the storied playwright/director/actor a few weeks ago, just days after the Playhouse Theatre Company’s jarring, devastating farewell announcement. We lamented and raged, and then moved on to what we were really there to talk about: the stage. The last few minutes of our dialogue meant a lot to me and since there wasn’t room to print it at the time, I wanted to share it with you now. Happy World Theatre Day! Andrea Warner: You’re a playwright, director and you’ve done acting. What brings you the most creative satisfaction? Morris Panych: I have to say writing. It’s the most control. Well, the writing part. The production is the difficult and complex of the three. Unless you’re directing it, then you really do lose control. When you’re actually writing a play, there’s nobody else in the process. They’re all creative in their own way, but they have limitations... I was an actor for quite a few years and I found it very frustrating. That’s probably why I became a director, because I found directors frustrating. AW: How do you step away from the ownership of having written the play and let your actors reinterpret your words? MP: In this instance [Gordon], I’d already sat through a rehearsal of this play with another director, so I had an opportunity to deal with the script and I wasn’t really into changing the script that much. My focus wasn’t split. But sometimes it is. When I’m premiering a play, and I’m directing the play I’d just written, I do find it difficult to focus. Some days I’ll find that I’ve been watching a whole day of rehearsal as a writer. I was lucky in this one that I didn’t have to think much about the script. And there are huge advantages when you’ve written it: you can explain it yourself to the actors, there’s no middle man. AW: With all of your plays having at least one death and covering a lot of dark, and darkly funny, subject matter, is writing the ultimate catharsis for you? MP: (Exhales loudly and humorously) I guess so. I guess it must be! (Laughs) AW: You don’t have a fight club at home or anything? MP: No. I don’t do much else. I do yoga and running and you get some moments of clarity and stuff, but there’s nothing like writing. There are moments when I’m listening to music and I’m taken some place I can’t imagine having gotten there through any other means. But when you’re in that scene, when you’ve found that story, when you’re living with those characters and hearing their voices every morning and you run to the computer, that’s really living.

[lizwenteverywhere]

Super-old review from 2007: 'Benevolence' No Gift for Viewers

Another bit of writing, this one for U of T's 'the newspaper,' for which I wrote theatre and art reviews.    

I suppose I had unfairly high expectations of Morris Panych’s new play, Benevolence.  Two years ago, Michael Redhill’s “Goodness” graced the very same stage at the Tarragon Theatre, dealing with similar themes through a script that was at times provocative, emotional, and deeply moving.  Sadly, Benevolence is no Goodness.  Panych, as writer and director, has chosen to address notions of charity and generosity through lewd humour, shallow characterization, and a script which leaves the viewer completely unsure of Panych’s motivation. 

            The play focuses on the relationship between Oswald, a drab orthodics salesman (played with comic deftness by Tom Rooney), and Lomy (the hilarious, buy slightly unbelievable Stephen Ouimette), a homeless man ‘inspired’ to help Oswald change his life as repayment for Oswald giving him $100.  Thrown into the mix are Oswald’s girlfriend Audrey (Jennifer Wigmore), and Jackie, the prostitute-with-the-heart-of-gold (Gina Wilkinson), although both characters feel like more of an afterthought: while the actors struggle valiantly, neither has enough material to elevate the characters beyond simple plot devices designed to get cheap laughs. 

Early-on, the characters lack chemistry: their dialogue doesn’t spark or crackle—it seems to barely fizz.  While it gathers momentum through the first half, the play feels as if it ought to darken as Lomy’s ‘help’ becomes increasingly dangerous, and as the characters grow more unstable.  Instead, Panych chooses to keep the tone light, with witty repartee full of pop-psychology insights and pithy morality.  Although I knew that the situation would inevitably escalate into violence, the tone led me to suspect that no serious harm would come to anyone, and the shallowness of the characters make it impossible to care what happened to any of them. 

  The second half is where the play’s real problems become apparent: since none of the characters had been well established, it was impossible to read their actions or determine if they were growing or changing.  Rather than exploring the themes of the play, Panych resorts to having his characters out-right discuss them, which leads to stilted conversations with inappropriately-timed jokes, many of which aren’t funny enough to justify their crudeness.  The biggest problem is that the play, as a whole, doesn’t seem to go anywhere—everything still feels very much like a work-in-progress.  It could probably benefit from additional work-shopping, so Panych could take the time to figure out what he’s trying to say, and then create a way to say it without having to resort to exposition instead of action, or using humour (the play does feature some truly funny moments) to disguise the script’s other shortcomings. 

The bright spot in this production was the superbly sleazy set by Ken MacDonald, who turns the interior of a porn theatre into an exercise in audience self-awareness, as the audience is faced with rows and rows of empty, dirty seats, like a mirror which reflects the worst of our world.  The audience is placed behind the movie screen, yet can hear and see the movies being watched, thanks to the sound and lighting design by Thomas Ryder Payne and Andrea Lundy, respectively, who create a brilliantly unsettling environment.  Too bad Panych doesn’t take sufficient advantage of these gifts.

I wanted so much more from this show.  I really wanted to leave questioning the nature of generosity and benevolent acts, forcing myself to re-examine my own responses to the homeless in Toronto, but Panych’s treatment left me confused and uncertain.  I kept wondering why an insane homeless man was such a stickler for grammar, why a seemingly sane man would allow such a ridiculous situation to escalate when it clearly needn’t have, and how such a serious, complex issue could be treated so flippantly. 

Perhaps a more benevolent act would have been to wait until Panych and his cast had a more solid, compelling treatment of a tighter, more workable script.