About the Plays:

Still Laughing contains three adaptations by Morris Panych:

• The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol: Set in a small rural Russian town where the local officials love to embezzle, cheat, and steal – until news of a surprise visit from a government inspector sends them into a panicked frenzy. A classic case of mistaken identity triggers a hilarious series of events, providing a satirical examination of governments and greed.
• Hotel Peccadillo by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvallières
• The Amorous Adventures of Anatol by Arthur Schnitzler

The universal mark of good satire is still to make audiences laugh at the worst traits in human nature. Here, in his own words, is how Morris Panych updated these three great comedy classics from a century ago:

"The Government Inspector is peopled with the most duplicitous, underhanded, and shifty characters ever to appear in literature; yet, they are funny. I made the lead character Khlestakov and his companion Osip former members of an acting troupe, to open up the fourth wall of the theatre. Inspired by Gogol himself, who has the characters speak to the audience directly in the last scene, this is not really a post-modern indulgence, but part of a long theatrical tradition of direct audience address."

"There are certain literary subjects that hardly change over time; sex isn't one of them. Take Viagra and cosmetic surgery, for example. These are fertile subjects for absurd comedy particular to our time. With Hotel Peccadillo, I wanted to play up, but also comment on the notion of hypocrisy as it relates to infidelity — the play was written a hundred years ago, without the hindsight of Feydeau's own death from syphilis. To that end, I made the author the landlord of his bordello — to include him in the farce, to heighten the irony."

"In changing Schnitzler's The Amorous Adventures of Anatol from a 1902 Austrian play to a 2007 Canadian one, the most important decision I made was to have all the female characters played by one actress. Because of this, the audience becomes complicit in a casting trick: knowing that for Anatol, all women are the same. While it's a truism that much as people appear to change throughout history, their essential human nature does not, in this play Anatol becomes the only victim of our elaborate theatrical illusion."

What people say:

"A summer without a deviceful staging by dauntless extrasensory Morris Panych is … wrong." — Torontostage.com

About the Playwright:

Morris Panych is one of Canada's most significant contemporary playwrights. He has written more than 25 works for the stage and directed nearly 100. He is the winner of two Governor General's Literary Awards for Drama, the country's most prestigious literary honour. He has won 14 Jessie Richardson Awards, three Sidney Riske Writing Awards and five Dora Mavor Moore Awards.