Twilight ink

Comedy-drama The Daily Miracle captures
the intensity and pathos of a newspaper on
its last legs

PASSENGER ON A SINKING SHIP:
Arthur Holden as Marty the nut-job in The Daily Miracle

by NEIL BOYCE

David Sherman’s The Daily Miracle owes a lot to ’40s screwball comedies—and it’s impossible not to think of movies like His Girl Friday while seeing the Infinitheatre production. And for good reason. A newsroom—with its fast pace and snarky inhabitants—is such fertile ground for comedy-drama.

The story, set in the twilight days of a traditional ink-and-paper newsroom, is filled with dialogue only a newsman could write: “The guy who signs the paycheques gets to choose the news.” And snappy exchanges like, “I love hearing the presses, it’s like being on a big ship.” “Yeah, the Titanic.”

James Lavoie’s clever set in the Bain St-Michel plants us convincingly inside a busy newsroom, with deep rows of desks, chairs and phones hovered over by harried copy editors.

Ellen David is Elizabeth, the screwball “dame” of the piece, a tough, fast-talking, still-hungry journalist. She brings a kid fresh from journalism school to heel, telling her she might want to not focus on her cleavage so much, and urging the young smart-ass to stop using the word “actually,” because, “Actually, it’s quite irritating.”

Carrie, the newbie (Sheena Gazé-Deslande), goes on about New Journalism to anyone who’ll listen. How it will soon be all “personalized content,” where we make our own newspapers, read them on our iPads and blog endlessly about them to one another—a newsman’s vision of hell, in other words. It’s appropriate and richly deserved when, at the end, with their jobs at stake and rumours afloat of the work getting outsourced, the snark doesn’t let up. “What do you think’s going to happen?” Sheena says. Elizabeth snaps back, “I don’t know—why don’t you ask your cell phone?”

Playwright and actor Arthur Holden plays Marty the nut-job, back at work after an on-the-job breakdown. Surrounded by bottles of pills—or hiding under his desk—he’s resigned to his current reality working for what has become a trivial entertainment rag.

Jean-Guy Bouchard’s Roland is a suspiciously eloquent janitor who empties bins and tosses out pithy remarks to the miserable journalists (turns out he was once a typesetter, back in the cast type/molten metal days).

Presiding over them wearily is Benjamin (Howard Rosenstein), editor at the Night Desk, the middle-management wretch who’s supposed to keep it under control and put the paper to bed by midnight.

Guy Sprung has put together a sharp and compelling cast; his brisk direction keeps up critical momentum as the story shifts to the discovery of an internal report listing recommendations to increase the paper’s profits. Among them (here’s the non-fiction part), one central paper for all of Canada—put together in Mumbai, and staff cuts over here of 80 per cent.

Sherman’s text is best when he sticks to newspeak, as the dialogue falls flat when he wedges in a love story, or has Sheena say “Chill, dude” once too often. What he does do well is capture the texture and feeling of the imperilled news biz—the sense, even at this late hour, that the job has the potential for something of substance: Marty taunts his editor, telling him not to publish an explosive story and knowing he’ll wimp out. He drips with sarcasm as he remarks, “Stick to your guns, Ben. Real news in the paper might confuse people.”

THE DAILY MIRACLE TO FEB. 14 AT
BAIN ST-MICHEL (5300 STDOMINIQUE),
(514) 987-1774,
INFINITHEATRE.COM