FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Theatre by Jeff Goffin PROBLEM CHILD by George F. Walker Produced by ALBERTA THEATRE PROJECTS MARTHA COHEN THEATRE October 24 to November 11, 2000 There is no one quite like George F. Walker in Canadian theatre. In a career stretching back to the early ’70s, his plays have been produced across the country and several have been termed classics. Few people are better prepared to bring Walker to the stage than Alberta Theatre Projects director Bob White – this is the 15th Walker show that White has been involved with during his career, and during his days as artistic director of Toronto’s Factory Theatre in the ’80s, they worked closely on several plays. "I feel it’s the highlight of my career," says White. "To have the lucky chance to work on a playwright over a span of 20 years, to see how his work has developed and what the challenges are he’s responding to now." While some of Walker’s plays are challenging and even threatening to audiences, Problem Child is a comedy that has been well received across Canada. "It’s a funny play but it’s hard to describe. It’s about an ex-con and a reformed drug addict trying to get custody of their child that they’ve lost to the foster care system. Oh, that’s cheery! "It’s Walker’s great gift to create characters that are desperate to get what they need and they’re single-minded about it. All (his) characters possess this ironic sense of the world. Their awareness of their situation contributes to the humour of the play." Problem Child is one of six plays that form Walker’s "Suburban Motel" series, all of which share the same cheap old motel room as a setting. Set designer Judith Bowden has created a fairly realistic set for the play. The room is furnished in Eisenhower era greens and yellows. Bowden laughs when I ask her about the colours she’s chosen. "Pukey green? I don’t know what I would call it. I know part of the appeal of the colour scheme with the green and the mustard is hearkening back to the late ’50s, a period of stereotype happy family. It seemed like a recognizable colour scheme to go back to. It’s all just supporting the storytelling." "I wanted something very simple and very real," adds White. "I said to Judith, ‘I don’t want any expressionistic shit.’ I just want to put the motel room on stage. This motel room is on the edge of the city and it’s slightly run down, but I didn’t want to feel that we’re doing The Lower Depths. It’s a functional motel room that hasn’t had a re-model in maybe 20 years." While the actors may get most of the laughs in Problem Child, according to Bowden, the design not only sets these up, it provides a few giggles itself. "There’s always this dilemma with a show like this. It says in the script ‘dingy motel room.’ If you go with it and make the room seriously dingy, the audience isn’t given an indication that they can laugh. They walk into the space and their initial impression is a very awful motel room with nothing that gives them a giggle. "Now this motel room is still awful, but we’ve deliberately done it in such a way that it still gives people a giggle. Making sure the plastic is still on the lamp. Having bad paintings. Everything that will help make people smile a little about it. The set is the first thing they’ll see so if I can set up that they are allowed to laugh at this stuff, it helps when you’re delivering material that is more satirical or ironic." Bowden also notes that the shape of the Martha Cohen Theatre poses a challenge to make sure everyone in the audience can see the action. "The difficulty in the Martha Cohen is that the sight lines are extremely wide. The theatre’s a horseshoe. The extremes are out here and here and you’ve got to see the window, the bathroom and the bed. "What I was doing was taking a real motel room and bringing it closer to the audience to keep that sense of confinement and stretching it out. So I stretched it out and turned it to an angle in hopes of avoiding a ‘tennis game’ where the actors only have the horizontal to play on." Designers are often the great unsung heroes in the theatre. While actors get to take a bow at the end of each show, even a very successful set design rarely receives attention. Judith Bowden feels it’s all part of her job. "I don’t think that’s a bad thing. My job is to support the telling of the story. I’m creating a world for those characters in what I put on the stage and the pleasure that I get from it is not from knowing that the audience thinks I did a great set, it’s from knowing that the show went well. What I do shouldn’t upstage what goes on in the space. No matter what, the focus has to be on those people telling the story."

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