THEATRE: Stealing in Steel Town

Playwright Morris Panych on working with SideMart Theatrical Grocery as they ready his latest play Gordon

DOWN AND OUT IN THE HAMMER: Graham Cuthbertson and Annie Murphy in Gordon
Photo by Alexander Russ-Hogg

Prolific playwright-director-actor Morris Panych has already won the Governor General’s Award for Drama, twice. Now collaborating with SideMart Theatrical Grocery, a company whose work he’s never even seen, he laughs, “You know, this is a huge act of faith for me.” As the Montreal company ready his new play Gordon for the Segal, I reached Panych in Tadoussac. He’s on an idyllic workshop retreat, helping to prepare a French-language version of his play Vigil for Théâtre Rideau Vert.

Set in Hamilton, Ontario, Gordon follows a trio on a crime spree who hide out in a rundown house in an abandoned neighbourhood. When the old man who owns the place comes home, things, as one might imagine, take a turn. “I wanted to write this play for about 25 years,” says Panych. “It’s inspired by a story my mother used to tell about a half-brother of hers and his son.”

Driving through Hamilton, Panych found the setting he needed to complete the work among the beat-up neighbourhoods in the shadow of Stelco. “It’s like a half-world,” he says. “This lost social group who were eaten up by a big corporation, spat up, and left. It could be anywhere: Pittsburgh, Detroit—whole sections of east Montreal are like that too.”

Panych first heard about SideMart when they staged his play Dishwashers in a restaurant in Montreal in 2007. “I was curious about how they were doing it, so I sent my spies—I have a few in Montreal—and they said it was really good.” While both were at Stratford last season, Panych sought out SideMart’s Andrew Shaver for a read-through of his new play and learned more about the group. “I liked Andrew’s reading,” he says. “He told me more about his company and said he was interested in the script, it just kept growing from there.

“The other thing too,” Panych adds, “is that Andrew’s a young director, so it was an opportunity for me to sit in on rehearsals and guide him a little bit on the script. I think men­toring is too big a word for what I did, because he knows what he’s doing. Maybe there’s a word one step down from mentoring—cheerleading or something.”

Panych worked with SideMart on and off for four weeks, alternating rehearsals with a brief teaching gig at the National Theatre School that paid for his airfare (“Because SideMart has exactly zero money”) and allowed him to bring his partner and collaborator on many productions along to help out, multiple award-winning set designer Ken MacDonald.

It’s a significant step for the company but Panych says, “It was important for me too. I almost always direct my own premieres. I don’t really want to, but I’ve never found a satisfactory arrangement where I could concentrate on the script and have somebody else take care of the staging. This was kind of perfect.”

Panych regrets missing their recent remount of Haunted Hillbilly in Toronto, where there were line-ups around the block for their sell-out run at SummerWorks. But after run-throughs, he thinks the production will be an inspired one, and has great confidence in the company, even though, as he joked about his recent NTS class, “I really have no patience for young people.” ■

GORDON OPENS THIS SATURDAY, OCT. 2 AT THE STUDIO, SEGAL CENTRE FOR PERFORMING ARTS (5170 CÔTE-STE-CATHERINE), TICKETS: (514) 739-7944, INFO AND TRAILER: SIDEMART.CA

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