In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ideology as Behaviour: Identity and Realism in The Drawer Boy MARLENE MOSER In the postmodem era, death and sickness have become metaphors for the crises of the master narratives of religion, politics, and even the idea of a uself." While some embrace the metaphor for the liberating possibilities for subjectivity it may provide (Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic being the poster child of postmodemism), others still seek to find the cure for the sickness, the cure (like the crisis) being inevitably linked to narrative. One of the most popular recent plays in Canada, The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey, provides a case study for this condition, not only because sicknes.s, narrative, and identity are intimately linked in the action of the play, but also because of the metanarratives that the play and its productions engage. In The Drawer Boy, the mental illness of Angus, one of the main characters, is both telegraphed by his symptomatic behaviour and demonstrated by his inability to recall and order his own personal narrative. The main action of the play is Angus' cure. This cure, in which he achieves a more fixed and coherent sense of self, is brought about through a process of education in which Angus learns to read realist narrative and theatrical conventions. By engaging with a particular kind of theatre, Angus comes to identify cause and effect relationships and a psychological depth to character. In other words, Angus learns to read in the way that a Method actor reads.' The conventions of psychological realism, as realized in this play, demand that the audience also acquiesce to a hegemonic understanding of self as stable, truthful, and whole. While this "truth" is authorized, however, another truth is compromised: authenticity. The Drawer Boy takes as its point of departure The Farm Show, a collective creation from the t970s, extremely influential in establishing an identity for early Canadian drama within the documentary and collective traditions. For this play, actors from Toronto went to live with farmers near Clinton, Ontario for six weeks and interviewed them. The actors then produced a show about their engagement with the farmers' lives, which they performed for the comModern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 231 232 MARLENE MOSER munity. Healey's play imagines the experience of Miles Potter, borrowing the name of one of the original actors in The Farm Show. In The Drawer Boy, Miles lives with two farmers, Angus and Morgan. He comes to observe and participate in farm life and brings back his stories to the collective for development into the show. One of the farmers, Morgan, is sceptical of Miles and his profession. He takes advantage of the naiVe young actor by making him perform a variety of ludicrous farm chores, such as washing gravel and getting up at 3:00 a.m. to "rotate the crops." The other farmer, Angus, is childlike and simple. His odd behaviour is translated as a kind of sickness. He can do complicated sums but can't remember stories, or things, or people he's just met. Miles, for example, has to keep explaining who he is and why he happens to be in their kitchen. The symptoms of Angus' sickness appear with increasing regularity : he engages in strange, unexplained behaviour - he smells bread baking when there is none; he gropes about the kitchen, looking for something. Morgan is able to calm Angus by responding to his odd behaviour, getting him to make a sandwich or soothing him with the repetition of a particular story. Realist conventions of acting come to play an important role in bringing about Angus' cure. From early in the play, it is clear that Miles takes a psychologically realis.t approach to acting. W.B. Worthen, in Modern Drama and the Rhetoric a/Theater, describes this approach, characteristic of the Method, as being "imbued with [the] values of 'truth,' interior fidelity, subtextual vitality , and character coherence" (62). Miles follows these principles in the first acting he undertakes in The Drawer Boy, although the object of his impersonation is unusual: he works from inside out in becoming a cow, much to the delight of the audience. Miles's questions indicate his predisposition to a psychological...

pdf

Share