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.