We accept PayPal, Visa & Mastercard
through our secure checkout.
|
What Lies Before Us
What Lies Before Us
|
Author: Morris Panych Publisher: Talonbooks Format: Softcover # of Pages: 96 Pub. Date: 2007 ISBN-10: 0889225605 ISBN-13: 9780889225602 Cast Size: 3 men
|
About the Play:
Finalist for the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama
What Lies Before Us is a full-length comedy by Morris
Panych. A pair of junior surveyors from the UK and their Chinese cook are
lost in the Rocky mountains in pre-Railroad Canada, but instead of
banding together, they fight about everything. What Lies Before Us is a darkly comic look at
man, mountains and the meaning of life.
What Lies Before Us directly revisits the foundational
existential play Waiting for Godot, locating it in a snowed-in
tent, during the period when the Canadian Pacific Railroad was being
built. It's 1885 and two junior surveyors, Keating and Ambrose, are
stranded high in the Canadian Rockies with their Chinese cook, Wing,
who doesn't understand English. Keating is an optimistic Englishman
who is a staunch believer in God and empire and who can't stand the
more skeptical atheist Ambrose, who had come to Canada to taste
freedom in a way he couldn't in his small hometown in Scotland. Wing
is a reminder of all the Chinese railway workers who died in a
shameful episode of Canadian history. They had been looking for a
pass through which to complete the trans-Canada rail link when they
become lost. Like Beckett's tramps in Waiting For Godot, they are
waiting for someone, in their case, "the Major," an
American adventurer, to rescue them. Of course, the Major never shows
up. The men's discussion of colonialism, women, faith and the future,
descends into petty and hilarious squabbles, and both of them slowly
realizing they're not likely to see the outside of their tent ever
again. They are utterly frustrated in their ongoing attempts to
communicate with Wing, who speaks only Cantonese. Abused and ignored
by the others, Wing is silent until he suddenly gets his say at the
end. Finally understood, translated into English through a trick of
stagecraft, Wing's final speech completely inverts the play with a
devastatingly poignant version of the events we have just witnessed.
What Lies Before Us premiered in 2007 at CanStage's
Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. Since
then the play has been successfully staged at several professional
theatres across Canada.
Cast: 3 men
What people say:
"Morris Panych is…
neurotic, intemperate, ambitious, talented, funny, feared, beloved…
and altogether impossible to ignore." — Toronto
Life
"Panych neatly balances
existential questions with funny dialogue and pleasingly absurd
characters." — Canadian Literature
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.
|
|
|
|