Drama

One of the pleasures of art, including play scripts, is that they often provide the audience with new ways of thinking about the world in which we live. Many of the plays by English Canadian playwrights that were published in 2017 provide audiences with fresh perspectives on a vast range of issues, including the relation between comedy and tragedy in Kat Sandler's Punch Up, questions of identity and the "true self" in Who Killed Spalding Gray? by Daniel MacIvor, and how you capture the life of someone whom you love and who is dying in Jordan Tannahill's Declarations. Other plays deal with poignant issues relating to the Indigenous population, and some colourfully depict political figures from history. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it does begin to suggest the richness of Canada's theatrical offerings in 2017.

Kat Sandler, in the Foreword to Punch Up, writes, "You can't have comedy without tragedy, and the intersection of the two is where some of the best, the saddest, and the most hilarious works of art live" (iii). Sandler locates Punch Up at this intersection. The play is about Duncan, a somewhat boring man who works at a bread factory. From afar, Duncan sees Brenda and falls in love with her, without ever meeting her. Duncan approaches Brenda, announcing that they are soulmates and that he wants them "to grow old and smile and laugh together" (7). Brenda confides that she can neither laugh nor love anymore, and that she wants to kill herself. Later in the play we learn the reason Brenda believes that she cannot love: each time she has loved in the past, the person has died. She believes that her love is fatal. Although Brenda has told Duncan she cannot laugh, he is undeterred by the apparent rebuff and sets out to prove Brenda wrong. There is a small problem: Duncan is not particularly funny. To remedy this, he kidnaps a comedian, Pat Wallace, who is dubbed "The Funniest Man Alive." The job of the hostage is to teach his captor to tell a joke.

The set-up for the narrative of Punch Up is patently absurd and a long way from the intersection where comedy and tragedy meet. The play moves to the intersection by having Brenda, who is suicidal, agree to come to Duncan's home for "breakfast dinner." The condition of the date is that if Duncan can't make Brenda laugh, then he will help her to kill herself. Before Brenda arrives, Duncan tries to get his hostage to teach him to be funny, but he does not demonstrate the slightest aptitude to amuse others. He thinks that appearing in oversized pants held up with suspenders and sporting a tiny hat on his head will generate a laugh. He tells "knock-knock" jokes, but he mixes up the lines so the jokes have no punch lines. When Brenda arrives, Duncan manically goes through his repertoire of comedy, without success in getting her to smile, let alone laugh. Her assessment of Duncan's attempt to make her laugh is, "Ten minutes of botched knock-knock jokes, a creepy story about someone's hand getting cut off, and an impression of my dead family? IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY?" (58). In a final attempt to be make Brenda laugh, Duncan plants a pie in her face, which does not result in her laughing. She is incredulous – even more so when Pat emerges, and Duncan plants a pie on his face. Duncan "runs off stage" (59).

Alone with Pat, Brenda asks him what makes him sad, to which he replies, "A blender. A fucking blender" (60). He explains that he and his wife speculated what would happen if their furniture and appliances came to life. His wife said that she thought the blender had a sad life because its only function is "to take big things that were once individual, unique items like banana, or oranges, and slash and slice and cut them into little bits and turn them into something else like a smoothie" (61). He explains that his wife put googly eyes on the...