FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


Marrying youth and experience
Students walk the boards for seasoned professionals
in a celebration of faculty's 30 aniversary
By Lori Montgomery

The Deck
Written by Clem Martini, directed by John Murrell
University of Calgary Department of Drama
Feb. 26 ­ March 8

The Drama Department at the U of C has gone through some tough times lately. A victim - like everyone else in the arts - of plummeting government funding, it has lost some of its most talented faculty and students and been forced to come up with creative solutions to age-old problems. One of the problems: how to give students the chance to work with world-class writers and directors when you can't afford world-class salaries. One of the solutions: bring respected playwright and local theatre veteran John Murrell in for a short time to direct a production of U of C professor Clem Martini's new play, The Deck. Commissioned in celebration of the department's 30th anniversary, the play is a comedy about a family gathering for a reunion. Appropriately, it involves the talents of both students and alumni of the department and Murrell says it mirrors the struggles of the department itself.

"It's about the need to respect and celebrate what has been done," he says. "Thirty years is really a very short time in which a lot has been achieved, mistakes have been made, peaks have been climbed and people have descended into valleys from time to time. But I believe in celebrating the dark side as well as the light side and recognizing that both give you richness."

"Families can go through hard times," Martini adds, "but you don't just say, 'Well, that family was screwed, wasn't it?'"

The combination of students, alumni, and others drawn from the theatre community outside the university is relatively unique, since there is usually a impenetrable wall erected between students and professionals.

"I think if there is a crisis amongst all the crises we talk about in Canadian theatre," Murrell says, "it's the crisis that has developed in the last 15 to 20 years, in which there is no free-flowing conduit from the training years into professional years.... I think that what comes of a playwright of Clem's stature writing a play for largely a cast of students is an understanding that one never completes one's training, no matter how old you get, and you never are too young to teach."

Martini is equally enthusiastic about the chance for students to work with a director of Murrell's stature.

"He represents something very important to Canadian theatre," the playwright says. "His wave was one of the first waves of truly Canadian playwrights who were accepted and embraced in Canada - an opportunity for students to work with someone like John doesn't come along every day."

The reason it doesn't come along every day might have something to do with simple jealousy, Murrell says.

"I blame a lot of it on my generation of Canadian theatre people," he says. "They don't want to know who the next exciting young actor is because they're still trying to be an exciting older actor."

Martini agrees, and likens the phenomenon to a train wreck. He adds that funding cuts play a part here as well.

"The people at the front are smashed against a wall - they see a diminishing number of positions - but you still have this tremendous energy behind them."

"That brings us back to the Sinclair family in Clem's play," Murrell muses, "because that's also, in microcosm, what they're looking at: 'I'm not sure, Grandpa, that you can stay on the deck. I may have to push you off in order to have room for me.' And of course, parents and grandparents are frightened and threatened by that. But there is also a growing understanding that there is room on the deck for everyone and that, in fact, the conversation on the deck will be inevitably richer if you have different generations and different points of view represented."

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