Tale of survival with touch of biting humour
Story is based on singer John Mann’s battle with cancer
Playwright/director Morris Panych is not one to mince words.
“I would have never chosen to write a story about a songwriter with colorectal cancer,” Panych said recently during a break in rehearsals for the Arts Club production of the new play The Waiting Room.
The play is based on singer/songwriter John Mann’s autobiographical album about his journey through cancer.
“That is something John has given me,” added Panych, who has written 30 works for the stage and has had productions of his work mounted around the globe.
“He is kind of guiding this thing. It was kind of a breeze. It just kind of wrote itself in a funny sort of way.”
On at the Granville Island Stage Oct. 1-31, The Waiting Room tells the story of J (played by Jonathon Young) as he makes his way through life and his battle with cancer.
Mann beat the disease, but sadly has since been diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
A veteran actor, Mann, who is also the energetic frontman for the awardwinning Canadian band Spirit of the West, will be on stage with a band (Brad Gillard, Eric Reed, Shari Ulrich) singing songs from The Waiting Room album. To be clear, this is not a musical, but rather a play with songs.
The play began to take form four years ago. It was in the early stages of the development that Panych noticed something was off about his old friend Mann.
“Things began to get weird,” Panych said. “I wanted him to play the lead character. Jill (Mann’s wife Jill Daum) called and said he doesn’t want to act. So I thought, ‘That’s weird, OK.’ Then he came out to visit because I wanted to get a chronology of the events of his colorectal cancer so I could make it into this play, because it is about his colorectal cancer.”
So Mann went to Toronto to meet with Panych, but sadly what Panych got was a different version of his old friend.
“He was kind of like brainless and I was like ‘What is your f------ problem? And why do you keep forgetting things?’ ” Panych said. “This went on for a couple of days and finally Jill called in tears and said, ‘Well, actually, he has Alzheimer’s, and we don’t want to tell anybody.’ Well, I said ‘We are going to have to tell somebody if we are going to do this show.’ ” And so they did. For Panych, this project, which he said he never once questioned because of Mann’s illness, came at the right time in his life.
“It sounded like fun to me. A great project with a great group of people,” Panych said. “So I said, ‘Let’s go for the ride.’ I am older now and I feel projects have to mean something to me and I have to have fun.
“You know, there’s limited amount of time in your life.”
The character J comes to understand that, thanks to the help of a little girl’s ghost (played by Matreya Scarrwener).
“(It’s about) grabbing onto life and shaking it until you can get everything you can out of it,” Panych said.
The winner of two Governor General Literary Awards (for The Ends of the Earth and Girl in the Goldfish Bowl), Panych has a gritty sense of humour and isn’t one to back away from the darkness in a story. He gets gallows humour. “If you ever been to see a Morris Panych play, and know his writing at all or his sense of humour at all, you know you are not going to be in for something is not just going to be a sad sombre look at cancer,” said Young, who, because Panych was the playwright, agreed to do the show without even reading the script.
“It’s going to have a lot of theatricality and absurdity and a lot of dark humour. The situations are pushed to the extremes.”
Because pretty much everyone has either had first-hand knowledge of cancer or known someone who has suffered from it, a lot of the scenarios — good, bad and ugly — in this work will have a familiar ring to them.
“All the indignities of being caught in the medical system are on the stage here,” Young said. “Morris is this really biting funny style that is a perfect fit for this story.
“My character gets to be extremely worried, extremely self-centred and extremely angry and confused and all the while funny in a kind of Louis CK style. … He’s not trying to come off as a perfect human being. He’s filled with dread, and in Morris’ hands, dread is really funny.”
Not a sad story, but rather a story about survival and coping, The Waiting Room — like Mann’s album — is set to be a reminder that life is bumpy but great or ,as Mann says in the song Prayer List:
And The Whole Things Sad, But The Whole Things Beautiful Too.