If the content you are seeing is presented as unstyled HTML your browser is an older version that cannot support cascading style sheets. If you wish to upgrade your browser you may download Mozilla or Internet Explorer for Windows.

Panych, Morris

CTE photo
Morris Panych

Playwright, actor, and director Morris Panych is a man for all seasons in Canadian theatre. He has directed over 80 productions, and written two dozen plays that have been produced across Canada, Britain, and the United States.

Panych was born in 1952 in Calgary and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. He received a diploma in radio and television arts from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and then studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia (BFA, 1977), and theatre at East 15 acting school in London, England. He works primarily in Toronto and Vancouver.

His first play, Last Call - A Postnuclear Cabaret premiered at the Tamahnous Theatre , Vancouver in 1982, and has been produced indepe ndently across the country, including, most recently by the Globe Theatre , Regina (March 2003), directed by Ruth Smillie. It was also adapted as a television show by the CBC as Last Call - The Television Show. This apocalyptic musical co-starred Panych and Ken MacDonald, and MacDonald also wrote and played the music. MacDonald's set designs have been an important element in many of Panych's plays.

As artistic director of Tahmanous, Panych co-wrote two more musicals with MacDonald: Contagious (1984), and Cheap Sentiment (1985); and both Panych and MacDonald performed in Simple Folk, Songs of a Generation (1987), which toured to the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver produced 7 Stories, followed by The Necessary Steps in 1991, and The Ends of the Earth in 1992. Earshot premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in 2001, and was remounted in a joint production by Vancouver Playhouse and Alberta Theatre Projects in 2002. In 1995 Vigil premiered at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, and won Vancouver's Jessie Award for best play. Vigil has been performed in over thirty theatres in Canada and the United States , including the Tarragon in 1996, the Phoenix in Edmonton in 1996, in San Diego in 1997, and in Washington to sold-out houses. In 2002, under the title Auntie and Me it played at the Edinburgh Festival, and in January 2003 open ed at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End with Alan Davies as Kemp and Margaret Tyzack as Grace. Panych wrote and directed Lawrence and Holloman for the Tarragon Theatre in 1998. In 1998 he co-created and directed The Overcoat, a physical theatre piece in which choreographed movement and music function in place of dialogue. This production toured across Canada. Panych also directed the television version of The Overcoat. His play, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, premiered at the Arts Club Theatre in 2002. The Dishwashers also premiered at the Arts Club Theatre, and What Lies Before Us at Canadian Stage in 2007 (dir. Jim Millan.)

Panych has acted in over fifty plays, and in television series such as X-Files. He has won the Jessie Award 12 times for acting and directing. He has won Toronto's Dora Mavor Moore Award for The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl and a Chalmers Award . In 1995 he was awarded the Governor General's Award for Drama for The Ends of the Earth, and in 2004 for The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl.

Panych's plays for young people - Cost of Living (1990), 2B WUT UR (1992), and Life Science (1993) were produced by Green Thumb Theatre , and have toured extensively. They are published under the title, Other Schools of Thought.

The plays of Morris Panych are characterized by existential themes and "theatre of the absurd" style and sensibility. They typically set their interrogations of the meaning of life in culturally and nationally neutral locales, and they pose broad philosophical questions on human interaction and isolation, on the nature of good and evil, and on the relationship between fantasy and reality.

All of Panych's plays are black comedies that oscillate between hope and despair. In Vigil a solitary young bank employee impatiently awaits the death of a silent, bedridden old woman, whom he believes is his aunt, filling the time with ruminations and recollections, and one-liners on mortality. In a programme note for the West End production, Panych dedicates the play "to all who have died and all who've not yet got around to it." According to Times critic Benedict Nightingale, the impression of a "laugh-riot for masochistic no-hopers en route to the Netherlands with their suicide-packs" is mitigated by the suggestion "that months of sitting beside a supposed death-bed creates a bond, even between a silent aunt and the young man who has desperately built a Heath Robinson euthanasia machine to hasten her demise" (www.timesonline.co.uk/article /).

Lawrence & Holloman (1998) explores the relationship of two antithetical personalities - one an optimist, the other a pessimist and nihilist. Holloman's name alludes to the title of T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Hollow Men," which delineates the modern world as being without values, without conviction, ending "not with a bang, but with a whimper." In Panych's play, however, Holloman's life does end with a "bang": he is accidentally shot by Lawrence after he has failed at an attempt at suicide. His nihilistic interpretation of life as a joke is in one sense validated, but Lawrence's final words - that there is some meaning, "a brilliant complex kind of logic" -- is also ironically demonstrated, in that all of Holloman's efforts to destroy Lawrence have resulted in his own destruction. Holloman's testing of Lawrence with a series of disasters also recalls the trials of Job; in this light, then, the disasters can be read as tests of the human spirit.

The Ends of the Earth is a more ambitious investigation of the meaning of life in terms of a journey, again by two men with very different outlooks. One is paranoid, convinced that the other is spying on him, and flees to "the ends of the earth" in an effort to escape him. There they encounter two mysterious women in a rooming house that teeters on the edge of a cliff, who assume various roles to test their ability to survive.

In the monologue Earshot, a man without any perceivable vocation or occupation, isolated in his room, protests against the noise from neighbouring rooms which infiltrates his space, and threatens to drive him mad. Only when he begins to sympathize with the grief of a widow next door, does he begin to experience a reprieve from the torture of the outside world.

Girl in a Goldfish Bowl is set in a Steveston Cannery on the West Coast, the home of a dysfunctional family which the mother continually threatens to leave. The point of view is that of the ingenuous, ebullient young daughter who imagines that her dead goldfish has metamorphosed into a young man from the sea who will save them all. He doesn't.

Panych's plays are published by Talonbooks.

Sources:
Christopher Banks and Associates, "About the Playwright," Earshot programme, Alberta Theatre Projects, 2002.

Jerry Wasserman, "Morris Panych," Modern Canadian Plays Vol. II, 4th ed. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001.

Anne Nothof, English 431 Study Guide, Athabasca University, 2003.

Last updated 2009-06-08