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Slow train running

Despite a crippling illness, political playwright David Fennario keeps marching on

by AMY BARRATT

He took his name from “Pretty Peggy-O,” a traditional song you may know from the Bob Dylan version that goes, “As we marched down to Fennario...” David Fennario has been marching—sometimes in a wheelchair—for various lefty causes ever since.

Fennario was already an established and well-respected playwright when he appeared on our cover in 1985. Ken Morrison’s story focused on the play Joe Beef and made much of the fact that the playwright was now rejecting the mainstream Centaur as “too middle-class” and “a bad fit” for his work.

It was then-Centaur artistic director Maurice Podbrey who had “discovered” the young writer in the early ’70s and steered him toward drama, a form which Fennario has admitted to knowing not the first thing about at the time. “I thought plays were something people wrote before they invented television,” Fennario says in the monologue Banana Boots. Centaur produced the premieres of his plays On the Job (’74), Nothing to Lose (’76), Toronto (’77), Balconville (1978) and Moving (1982).

After Moving, Fennario had returned to his roots in Verdun-Pointe-St-Charles to develop new work with the Black Rock Theatre group. Joe Beef was the first Fennario play to break the theatrical fourth wall and have actors directly address the audience. Subtitled “A History of Pointe Saint Charles,” it had a cabaret atmosphere, using singing and dancing and whatever else it took to get across its workers’ rights message.

In recent years, whenever Fennario mentioned Centaur, he made it sound as if the reason he wasn’t being produced there was a matter of not being asked. So artistic director Gordon McCall (who has been there since ’97) went ahead and asked him. In fact, McCall commissioned a play that would revisit the characters and setting of Balconville, 25 years later. That play, Condoville, recently opened Centaur’s season of Montreal Stories.

Asked about his apparent on-again, off-again relationship with the Centaur, Fennario explains: “Some of the plays I’ve done, like Joe Beef: A History of Pointe Saint Charles, Banana Boots or more recently, Perimeters, are obviously pieces that were designed to be done by activists as a means of mobilizing people on particular issues. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t be done at the Centaur, but I doubt whether they’d sit comfortably on the stage. Other plays like Balconville or Condoville were designed to have wide appeal. So it’s not a question of one or the other but using theatre as an entertaining way of making people aware of alternatives.”

Early in 2002, the playwright fell ill with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a nervous system disorder that put him in a wheelchair. Although unable to write or type with his own hand, Fennario nevertheless managed to produce Skeleton Staff, a reflection on our ailing health care system. He also ran for the UFP in the 2003 provincial election.

Three-and-a-half years into his illness, Fennario is still struggling with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy. (“Try saying that three times fast” he quips).

“Still the slowest train in town but moving on,” is his poetic description of his progress.