About the Play:
Winner of the Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), 2004.
As Morris Panych's comedy Girl in the Goldfish Bowl opens, we hear Iris, a precocious girl of ten, saying: "These are the last few days of my childhood." The death of her goldfish, Amal, she is sure, has been announced by the air-raid sirens during the day's school drill. For Iris, there remain a few more days of life in a universe that is inherently ordered, where the spirit of her departed and ritually interred goldfish can, of course, be re-incarnated in a lost and amnesiac drifter given to rhetorical questions of seemingly deep philosophical import.
Iris's terminally depressed parents, trapped within the nostalgic desires of their own lost youth, are oblivious to how the child's eye view of their daughter works and what it sees. They remember too well their own loss of innocence as they abandoned themselves to the existential chaos of adulthood. The middle-aged family boarder has spent years in a frustrated search for any kind of gratification, immediate or otherwise, at the Legion after a full day's work in the fish cannery.
It is into the goldfish bowl of this dysfunctional family of lethargic piranhas, existential bottom-feeders and aggressive guppies that the audience peers with incredulity, acute recognition, hysterical laughter, and an overwhelming sense of the creative healing power of the imagination.
Cast: 3 women, 2 men.
What people say:
"…beneath the humour and moments of pure farce there is a fascinating study of that sad moment when childhood is lost and innocence is replaced by experience." — John Highfield, The Stage Co. (UK)
"Arguably Morris Panych's best play to date." — Canadian Literature
"An uncommon, quirky blend of humour and compassion…" — National Post
About the Playwright:
Morris Panych was born in 1952 in Calgary. He grew up in Edmonton and has since lived in Toronto and Vancouver. After receiving a diploma in radio and television arts from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Panych continued his education by studying creative writing at the University of British Columbia and then theatre at East 15 Acting School in London, England.
Panych is a playwright, actor and director who has been described as "a man for all seasons in Canadian theatre." He wrote his first play, Last Call: a Postnuclear Cabaret in 1982. He has written over a dozen plays that have been produced across Canada, the United States and Britain. As an actor, he has appeared in over fifty theatre productions and several film and television roles, including X-files.
He has won the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award fourteen times for acting and directing. He has also been awarded five Dora Mavor Moore Award and been nominated three times for the Chalmers Award. Panych has won the Governor General's Literary Award for drama twice. He is also a three time winner of the Sidney Riske Writing Awards.
Panych's plays generally explore philosophical issues such as human relationships, the nature of good and evil, and explore shifting between fantasy and reality. They are often characterized by dark humor.