QUONTA Festival 2014 # 4: Eight Angry Men

First of all, for those not in the know, QUONTA is the regional association of community theatres in Northern Ontario.  Every year the regional body co-sponsors a community theatre festival in conjunction with one of its member groups.  I was involved for years as member of two different member groups from Elliot Lake, and as an elected member of the QUONTA Board.  I love attending the annual Festivals to see what my old friends in the north are up to, theatrically speaking.


This is the last of 4 write-ups of the 4 plays produced this year.


Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Directed by Joshua Bainbridge
Presented by Gateway Theatre Guild, North Bay


Tonight we saw another 3-decade old play, and one of the rarer phenomena in community theatre -- a performance with no female characters (rare because many/most community theatre groups have a preponderance of female members!).  This is a play that stirs up strong and varied emotions in audiences, as I have often read over the years and as I saw for myself during intermission and at the green room party afterwards.


(Side Note: the post-show parties have been one of the highlights all week of this beautifully organized Festival!)


Having heard so much, so often, I was naturally intrigued by the opportunity to encounter the play first-hand.  I must confess, though, that I experienced a violent negative reaction to the script, such a reaction as I can rarely if ever remember having before.  Please mistake me not -- I am no prude, and I do use certain expletives from time to time, as many people do.  In this play, though, there are whole stretches of dialogue several pages long where every second or third word is either "fuck" or "shit".  I know well that there are people who talk like this.  I have met some of them in my time.  And my observation is that a person whose every other word is one of these two expletives is probably too limited in vocabulary to know what else to say.  I would not willingly choose to spend any amount of time with a person like that in real life, and two solid hours of a whole group of them simply transgresses my limits of endurance.


I was most vividly reminded of a Robertson Davies character who said, to a foul-mouthed younger person, `Talk shit and your life will be shit."  That certainly proves true of almost all the people in this circle of angry, hopeless men.


From a writer's point of view, I can only think of 2 explanations for this limitation of vocabulary, and realism is not one of them.  The theatre is not real and no amount or excess of gritty, back-streets language can ever make it so.  No: I would have to classify it as either "poverty of invention" or else as a desire to shock.  I doubt very much that the former could be true of an otherwise skillful writer like Mamet; given the 1983 date, the latter motive seems to me to present distinct possibilities.  All the same, I have a terrible time sorting out my comments of the staging and production from my extreme dislike of the material -- and I'm very glad that I am not the adjudicator of this show!


Well, here goes.  The lights came up on a dimly-lit bar and restaurant.  The program specified a Chinese restaurant.  The set displayed two large opened fans on the wall above the bar.  This was certainly the right motif for a Chinese restaurant, but the dim bronzey light on what looked like bare hardwood wall and décor were all wrong.  To me it resembled the bar of a 1960s steakhouse.  Not only was it very un-Chinese, it also forced the audience to strain their eyes to see clearly.  Along the bar at the back stood a group of men, backs turned to the audience.  They never moved, or only very slightly, as each awaited his turn to enter the action, but their very stillness -- abetted by the reddish lighting -- meant that they were able to pull focus onto themselves very effectively.   I kept expecting a stripper to pop up onto the bar at any minute.


This play opens in the middle of a long sequence of difficulties for Shelly Levene, played by Verlyn Plowman.  Only gradually do we discover the source of his problems -- namely, his steadily declining results as a real-estate salesman.  His great antagonist is John Williamson, the young manager of the office, played with icy conviction by Morgan Bedard.  The second half of this argument was staged on the otherwise blank front strip of stage which was plainly meant to represent a street.  As the scene unfolds, it becomes obvious that Levene is in grave danger of being fired, demonstrated by his increasing rage and increasingly frantic attempts to coerce/induce/bribe Williamson into giving him better contacts and prospects to work.  Right away here I started to disengage, because his anger seemed two-dimensional -- I wondered why he didn't show more fear of his impending firing.


The third scene got even tougher, as it began with a dialogue right upstage by the bar, a dialogue largely lost on most of the audience because the set was simply placed too far upstage and the actors were trapped behind the proscenium.  In a cavernous auditorium such as this, that's a serious handicap to those following the play.  As soon as the action moved downstage, voices came through much more clearly, but a great deal was lost during those first couple of minutes.


The second act was set in a much better space, a tacky, trashy, elderly office with missing drywall at the corners and old, banged-up wooden desks and tables.  The furniture took up a great deal of space and forced actors to work on an hourglass-shaped piece of floor, roomy at front and rear but narrow in between.  The set was still a long way upstage, but as this scene was more brightly lit the distance mattered less.  Also, I think the performers were now getting the feel of the hall and projecting more consistently and appropriately. 


Most of all, the characters were becoming more believable here.  The timing of the rapid-fire overlapping lines (a Mamet signature) became much crisper and the text clearer as a result.  Most important, Plowman's performance now developed additional dimension and scope, partly with a little assistance from the script.  The climactic scene where he first dominates Williamson into submission and then, in a sudden reversal, gets discovered by Williamson as the perpetrator of the robbery in the office, was stunning.  And after he got knocked onto the floor in struggling with Williamson and began to plead for his job, his future, really for his life, his character suddenly and unexpectedly became sympathetic and I felt truly sorry for him -- for a moment.


I`m sad to say that this was as close as I ever got to enjoying the play.  I can certainly admire the undoubted pluses of this production, but I would willingly go through life without ever having to watch this particular script in performance again.


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FINAL NOTE:


As much as possible, I tried to post these blogs before taking in adjudicator John P. Kelly's very fine private adjudications of each show, entertaining and informative in equal measure, and thought-provoking with it.  I know he sneaked into my thinking once or twice nonetheless!