Stage ‘activation’ of Alice Munro
San Francisco theatre company Word for Word performs famous Canadian author’s texts without changing a word
The theme song from the TV show Bonanza jolted out to the darkened theatre, startling the audience gathered to watch Stories by Alice Munro performed at the Isabel Bader theatre Thursday night.
When the lights lifted, a man was sitting in a brown wooden chair with a table beside it, apparently watching the ’50s show on television. A woman in very conservative and frumpy housewife attire — tweed skirt, silky pussy bow blouse, sensible shoes — was holding an iron.
“The solution to my life occurred to me one night while I was ironing a shirt,” she declared clearly to the audience. It was the first line from Munro’s short story “The Office.” And that is what gives this production its unique take: the “script” is the story performed onstage by a variety of actors without a single word changed from Munro’s text.
The production, by the San Francisco company Word for Word and brought to Toronto by producer Sara Schwartz Geller, is an “activation” (their term) of two of Munro’s short stories, “The Office,” from her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, followed by “Dolly,” from her last collection, Dear Life.
They’ve been doing this for 20 years or so, having brought stories by writers including Sam Shepard and Elizabeth Strout to the stage. They work with an ensemble cast; some playing characters in the stores, others bringing scenes to life.
All of the words in the story are spoken verbatim, so we get moments where the actress performing the Mrs. Malley character in “The Office,” for example, says, “She and her husband lived in this apartment . . .” referring to herself in the third person.
Nonspeaking cast members are sometimes used to illustrate scenes with live action; for example, when “china deer heads, bronze horses” and “model ships” are described, the rest of the ensemble becomes those objects.
Or in “Dolly” when the main protagonist (Munro’s first-person characters aren’t named, so in the cast lineup she is simply The Woman) says, “I saw a scarf in a window, and I thought that I should like to go in to buy it, that it would be good for me. But when I picked it up I had to drop it. Its silky feel made me sick,” a member of the ensemble poses like a mannequin in a shop window with a scarf over her outstretched arms and shoulders.
In “Dolly,” the humour shone out so much more than it did on the page; the nuances of inflection, the gesture of an eyebrow, a knowing sideways glance to the audience can convey humour more boldly than we perhaps might read internally. But as Douglas Gibson, Munro’s longtime editor, pointed out later in a conversation, people are often surprised when they hear Munro herself read by how much humour she injects into the inflection.
The performance was followed by an onstage discussion with Gibson, cast members Sheila Balter (the woman in “Dolly”), Susan Harloe (Gwen in “Dolly”), Jeri Lynn Cohen (the protagonist in “The Office”), producer Geller and Marilyn Her- bert, founder of Bookclub-in-a-Box.
Using stories written at the beginning and near the end of Munro’s career is clever, with the potential to illustrate her growth as a writer or the way she portrays women characters. But this was left unexplored as the conversation was less about Munro and more about the process of bringing the story to stage and the importance of book clubs.
Clearly the reading experience is different from the seeing experience in watching a short story come to life onstage. In their discussion, the company referred to whether a story will “activate” well or not. It seemed a strange way to refer to a story; there are lots of ways of activating a text: simply reading it is one, acting it out is another. It’s a matter of imagination and personal interpretation.
Which is, really, the crux of this. Stories by Alice Munro was an odd combination of populism, theatre and much-loved literature. Some Munro readers will likely enjoy the show; many won’t. The show was in Toronto for five performances with shows at 2 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, and now moves on to France. Go to storiesbyalicemunro.com or phone 416-978-8849.