The Overcoat Words on Plays (2005) - American … · slowly deteriorates. ... to piano concertos by...

created by morris panych and wendy gorlingadapted from “the overcoat,” by nikolai gogolmusic by dmitri shostakovichgeary theateraugust 25–september 25, 2005

The CanStage production of The Overcoat is produced byCanStage, The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, andGlynis Henderson Productions.

WORDS ON PLAYS prepared by

elizabeth brodersenpublications editor

jessica wernercontributing publications editor

margot melconpublications assistant

a.c.t. is supported in part by grants from theGrants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fundand the National Endowment for the Arts, whichbelieves that a great nation deserves great art.

The Overcoat

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O R Y T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director

P R E S E N T S

© 2005 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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table of contents

1. Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Overcoat

3. Creating The Overcoatby Rosie Shaw

5. Morris Panych on Creating The Overcoat

6. Brief Biographies of Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling

7. An Interview with Morris Panych on The Overcoatby Jessica Werner

15. An Interview with Wendy Gorling on The Overcoatby Jessica Werner

20. Morris’s Codeby Alec Scott

26. A Brief Biography of Nikolai Gogol

28. Apotheosis of a Maskby Vladimir Nabokov

32. “The Overcoat”: An Excerptby Nikolai Gogol

37. A Brief Biography of Dmitri Shostakovich

39. Music in The Overcoatby Composer Dmitri Shostakovich

40. Ruined Choirs: Shostakovichby Alex Ross

46. Cautionary Tale of the Coat That Speaks for Itselfby Robin McLean

49. Say It without Words

50. Questions to Consider

51. For Further Information . . .

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characters, cast, and synopsis of THE OVERCOATThe original production of The Overcoat, produced by The Vancouver PlayhouseTheatre Company in association with Studio 58/Langara College, opened in Vancouver,British Columbia, on October 20, 1997.

characters and cast

the man Peter Andersonoffice worker, whore, fabric worker Victoria Adilmanlandlady’s old mom, tailor’s assistant,

inmate, office worker Manon Beaudoininmate, sweatshop runner, office boy Matt Boistailor, bartender, doctor Mark Christmannnew girl Judi Closkeyoffice worker, whore, fabric worker, nurse,

boss’s wife Diana Coatsworthoffice worker, fabric worker, whore Monica Dottorlandlady Tracey Ferenczarchitect, sweatshop worker, police constable Peter Grieroffice manager, tailor’s assistant, inmate Colin Heatharchitect, sailor, sweatshop worker, inmate Ryan Hollymansweatshop worker, waiter, bike guy Matthew Hunttenant, orderly, butler, sweatshop worker Darren Hynessecretary to the head of the firm Cyndi Masonhead of the firm, police chief, inmate Allan Morganarchitect, thug, fabric worker Graham Percyinmate, office boy, sweatshop runner, waiter Avi Phillipsoffice janitor, orderly, fabric customer Derek Scottthug, sweatshop foreman, waiter, party guest Sal Scozzariarchitect, sweatshop worker, sailor, inmate Courtenay Stevensinmate, fabric worker Brahm Taylor

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OPPOSITE: Photo of Peter Anderson in The Overcoat by David Cooper

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synopsis

Atall, wispy-haired Man rises from his bed and prepares for another hollow day.Donning his tattered, threadbare overcoat, he sleepwalks past the lascivious advances

of his Landlady and an uninspiring breakfast, through a chaotic commute jammed withfellow travelers on a crowded train, and arrives at his office. At work, the Man—a giftedand obsessive draftsman at an architecture firm—is cruelly tormented by his colleaguesand tyrannical boss, who ridicule and bully him, mocking his painfully obvious yearningfor the beautiful blonde Secretary and stealing and mangling his carefully crafted draw-ings. Amid the camaraderie of his officemates, the Man is a lonely island unto himself,finding sympathy only from the timid New Girl, whom he barely notices.

As the Man’s empty life creeps forward, his troubles worsen as his wretched overcoatslowly deteriorates. On his way home after a particularly frustrating and humiliating day,he spies a tailor’s shop and decides to see what he can do about his coat.

The Tailor disdainfully discards the old rag and summons his sweatshop minions to create an entirely new coat for the Man. They swirl about him, taking his measurements,swathing him in fabulous fabrics, and ultimately set about sewing like automatons. TheMan gathers together his meager savings and soon finds himself the proud purchaser of afur-collared, mauve-hued, floor-length, fit-for-royalty garment. When he arrives at workthe next day in his spectacular new overcoat, he is greeted by envy from his co-workers andpraise from his superiors. Their newfound respect for this previously marginalizedemployee garners the Man an invitation to a party at the Head of the Firm’s mansion.

Unaccustomed to admiring attention, the Man gets drunk at the party on merrimentand wine. Stumbling his way through a nasty neighborhood on his way home late thatnight, he is lured into the company of sailors, whores, and thugs; in the confusion of thesinister nightlife, thugs beat him senseless and a trollop makes off with his brand-new coat.

The Man awakens the next day to the harsh reality that his treasured new coat is gone.He is haunted by the events of the night before. He visits a police station looking for helpin retrieving his prized coat, but is rewarded only with bureaucratic frustration as he isshuffled from one desk to the next, until, finally, the Chief shreds the Man’s complaint.The defeated, coatless Man returns home, shivering through the falling snow of wintry St.Petersburg.

Falling into a deep depression at the loss of his coat and the popular, successful identityit represented, the Man refuses to sleep and eat and does not return to work. A visit fromthe Doctor seals the Man’s fate as he is escorted to a mental ward. As his fellow inmatesclose in on him, the Man is finally offered the security of a jacket of another kind.


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creating THE OVERCOAT

by rosie shaw

The concept of creating a story

through music usingthe movement of bod-ies rather than wordswas brought to life byrenowned Canadianartists, teachers, andco-creators MorrisPanych and WendyGorling. Panych is anacclaimed playwright,director, and actor,and is the recipient of

many awards, including Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award fordrama. Gorling, a graduate of l’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, is a director, choreographer,actor, and movement teacher.

Panych and Gorling have been collaborating since the early 1990s, when Panych beganwork on a commission for Studio 58, the theater school at Vancouver’s Langara College.He was asked to create a play for students to perform, and came up with the idea of word-less theater—a movement piece set to music. Gorling, the school’s mask and mime teacher,joined the project and a beautiful partnership was born. Not quite dance, not quite mime,and certainly not your average theatrical pieces, the main purpose of their hybrid produc-tions was to teach students to build a strong relationship with their bodies and tell a storythrough movement alone.

The first show was Nocturne, set to the music of Frédéric Chopin, arranged by JeffCorness. The production was an instant success and Studio 58 requested another. Scenesfrom a Courtroom was their next project, set to music by Francis Poulenc. The Company, setto piano concertos by Sergei Prokofiev, was their third collaboration and the closest to TheOvercoat in style and theme. Set in a small-town factory, The Company explores the miseryand desperation of an ordinary worker at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Photo of the cast of The Overcoat by David Cooper


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Panych was reading Nikolai Gogol’s writings at the time their fourth work was commis-sioned. He already had a love for and familiarity with Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, so he putthe two together and the seed for The Overcoat, a loose adaptation of Gogol’s 1842 short storyof the same name, was planted. In Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” the Man becomes a ghost at theend, returning to haunt his village and steal people’s coats. In Panych and Gorling’s stageadaptation, the Man does not die, but ends up wearing a completely different kind of jacket.

The story and movement follow the musical score. Panych put markers in the sheetmusic when specific points in the plot were to occur (e.g., the scene in which the Man getshis new overcoat), and Gorling came up with the core movements and choreographic style.Then, scene by scene, in collaboration with the company, the entire work was created.Rehearsals began with the actors listening to each piece of music with the plot progressionin mind, and so the play unfolded moment by moment, movement by movement. Becauseit was an interactive exercise, the original cast members were integral to the creation of thepiece. Many of those actors feel a great sense of ownership and have stayed with the playas it has traveled around the world. The production that appears at A.C.T., produced byToronto’s Canadian Stage Company (CanStage), Hartford (Connecticut)’s BushnellCenter for the Performing Arts, and London-based Glynis Henderson Productions, fea-tures eight original cast members (Peter Anderson, Judi Closkey, Peter Grier, Colin Heath,Cyndi Mason, Allan Morgan, Courtenay Stevens, and Brahm Taylor). The latter two werestill drama students at the time of The Overcoat’s original 1997 premiere in Vancouver; allof the cast members in this production have been with the project for more than five years.

With 22 actors, 85 costumes, and a two-story, 20-ton set, The Overcoat is one of thebiggest Canadian productions in history to go on tour.

The Overcoat has played to sold-out houses in Canada, England, Australia, NewZealand, Norway, and the United States. Wordless physical theater “translates” well, mak-ing it conducive to foreign touring. The production is a multicultural creation to beginwith, created by Canadians using a Russian story and score. Body language is universal,and the story, about the fallacies of the human condition, is timeless. The monotony ofroutine, the lure of material goods, and the cruelty of class structure are felt all over theworld and can be expressed powerfully without using words.

The cbc (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) made a film version of The Overcoat,which was nominated for nine Gemini Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the EmmyAwards) and an honorable mention at the Prix d’Italia. The stage production has receivedoverwhelming critical praise and many awards, including six Jesse Richardson TheatreAwards and numerous Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto’s equivalent of the TonyAwards).


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morris panych on creating THE OVERCOAT

This is the fourth movement piece that Wendy and I have choreographed together.What began as a student exercise to find dramatic expression in the body has con-

tinued to develop into this theatrical hybrid. Once the main idea is set, we allow, as muchas possible, for the music to tell us the direction the story will take. In the past, we haveworked without a set story, but here, working with an existing text made it much more dif-ficult, while at the same time, a little easier. With The Overcoat, I was inspired by theGogol story, which I happened to be reading at the time of the Vancouver PlayhouseTheatre commission. The tale is packed with dramatic potential as well as great visual andstylistic possibilities.

The choice of music was easy; and aside from my familiarity with, and love of,Shostakovich, obvious. First, the dramatic Slavic character of the music really fits, but asimportantly, the many layers of the orchestration allow for lots of movement interpreta-tion; and there is generally a good strong beat, which means the actors can count it.

Wendy and I enjoy collaborating together because I like the large choreographic picture and Wendy loves detail. We cross back and forth together quite freely, while try-ing to allow the actors full participation in the process. In this regard, Peter Anderson andColin Heath, particularly, have contributed a great deal to the piece, detailing much oftheir own movement.

We are thrilled at the opportunity to tour this work and showcase the considerable talents of Canadian designers and actors internationally.

“the music moves the story,and the stillness finds the heart.”

—Wendy Gorling, co-creator of The Overcoat


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morris panych is probably best known for his work onThe Overcoat, which he co-created and directed withWendy Gorling. He adapted the play and directed it forfilm. The production has now toured to Britain, Norway,Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Otherwork includes several productions for Tarragon Theatre(notably his own plays, the most recent of which was Girlin the Goldfish Bowl, winner of Canada’s prestigious DoraMavor Moore Awards for outstanding production anddirection, as well as a Governor General’s Award for play-writing). Directing credits for CanStage also includeHysteria, Amadeus, Sweeney Todd, Vigil, and, most recently,Take Me Out. In Vancouver, he has directed more than 50

plays, including a celebrated adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid and an award-winningproduction of She Loves Me for the Arts Club Theatre. When Panych is not directing plays,he is writing them; so far he has penned more than 20, many of which have gone on pasttheir initial productions to national and international success—most notably Vigil, whichto date has been translated into ten languages and received highly praised productions inLondon’s West End (Wyndham’s Theatre) and in Paris at Théâtre La Bruyère. He has alsodirected television (“Da Vinci’s Inquest”) and opera (Susannah and The Threepenny Opera,both at Vancouver Opera).

wendy gorling, as a director/choreographer, has cre-ated physical theater pieces with Morris Panych, as well asmovement for such plays as Equus, The Taming of theShrew, and Greeks ( Jessie Award). As an actress, some ofher favorite shows have included Blithe Spirit, The Visit,Ends of the Earth, 7 Stories ( Jessie Award), and TheImaginary Invalid. In the film of The Overcoat, she playedthe Landlady. Gorling is a well-known teacher and gradu-ate of l’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She teaches at Studio58, where she has trained young professionals for 26 years.She is married to David Cooper, renowned theater anddance photographer, and has a teenage daughter, Emily,who keeps her young and sometimes frantic.


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an interview with morris panych on THE OVERCOAT

by jessica werner (august 2005)

i’d like to start with the initial challenge placed before you ofcreating your first project without spoken language [NOCTURNE,1989]. i’m curious about why you and wendy [gorling] were inter-ested in exploring theater without words.Of course, I can’t speak for Wendy, but for me, it was kind of an accident. I had to do aproject with the students at Langara College. I had intended to write a play because I’m aplaywright, but the deadline sort of came and went and I didn’t have anything, really, so Imade up this idea that I would just do a movement piece to music. Finally I hit on thisidea that I would do a piece with them in which we would do some cohesive and reallyclear storytelling with just their bodies, to this music. Wendy happened to be working atthe school, and they came to me and said, Why don’t you work with Wendy? She’s greatwith movement and she’s a great resource. It was a great partnership from the beginning.

you’ve spoken before in interviews about words feeling limitingat times, and i find that an intriguing contradiction coming froma writer. before embarking on these movement pieces, were youalready feeling like you wanted to push beyond text-based plays?Well, not just that, but I also have plays in which some characters don’t speak. I have oneplay [Vigil] in which one character doesn’t speak for the entire play. So I was already inter-ested in this notion that one could be on a stage and not say anything. The Overcoat was alittle bit different. This was truly an experiment. This wasn’t anything I ever seriously con-sidered would be a legitimate theatrical thing. From the onset, I thought of it as somethingI was doing with the students. But it became so popular, and it became this thing that wasso interesting and intriguing to watch, that we just fell into it and we weren’t experiment-ing anymore. It was something that actually worked.

is the training at studio 58 particularly movement based?No. It’s just part of the program. I think I was lucky that they had the vision, or the where-withal, to do that with the students and not insist that I use text. That would have com-promised the idea completely. Even when we were working on The Overcoat, we still had


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people in the company say, “Can’t we use a few words?” And we’d say, “No, that’s not partof the exercise.” I mean, of course you can use words, but then the whole thing becomessilly, and then the audience is thinking, Why only a few words?

in my interview with wendy she said something interesting about that,that if there was a spot that absolutely needed words, you would haveput them in. i took that as her way of explaining how right and naturalthis felt, rather than as an exercise in limitations.I totally disagree with that [laugh]. I wouldn’t have put them in. Because then it would havetaken away the meaning of the project. It would have been suddenly, Oh, here’s a placewhere we failed!

i suppose it would be like adding sound to a silent film.Yes, exactly. To me, where silent film fails is when they put all that stuff at the bottom, thespoken word, and then you think, Well, I’d like to figure that out for myself. Part of thefun of watching [The Overcoat] should be that you’re making up the dialogue in your head.You know, how when you’re reading a novel, you make up the look of a place or the soundof people’s voices. It’s part of what makes it so personal to you, because it’s like a dream.

so you do think it asks an audience to engage in a slightly differ-ent way?In a very different way. You notice them leaning forward and really paying attention in avery engaged way. You can’t sit back and close your eyes. And you could in some plays.

it sounds like this was a much more improvisational developmentprocess than is usual.Oh, completely. It was a complete accident, step by step. And I don’t mean that to dimin-ish it. I am trying to be realistic about how this thing, how artistic things are created. I don’tthink things are created by people who set out exactly to do that thing. If that were true, itwould negate process. A lot of things happened in rehearsal that changed our minds, thatmade us go in a slightly different direction than we thought initially we would go in.

i find that interesting in terms of creativity in general. evenwith something that ends up very polished, it seems that if you’renot open to those accidents in the creation, in the writing or


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revision or rehearsal, then you can’t get to that successful placelater.Absolutely. The most important thing for me to do is to leave well enough alone before Istart rehearsal.

what do you mean by that?I just let my ideas sit in a place where I’m not imposing them on the project just yet. It’s badenough that you have to plan how your set’s going to look and what your sound might be,which gives you fewer opportunities to add new ideas. I’m getting that way to some degreewith my playwriting, too. For example, I’m working on a play right now, and there is thischaracter who’s in and out of the play and he doesn’t say very much, and I wish I didn’t haveto write that in right now. I wish I could wait and do that in rehearsal. But even now theproducer’s saying, “We need to know, is this person speaking?” I will just arbitrarily putsomething in, but frankly, I wish there were some things that could be left to rehearsal.

maybe silence itself implies a mystery that can be disturbing topeople, can make them uncomfortable.Absolutely. You know, in his own way, someone like Pinter was working with silence,because he works with the idea of unknowns, which I find intriguing.

i’m curious about something in your director’s note: “workingwith an existing text made it much more difficult, while at thesame time a little easier.”Normally with these things—if you can say “normally” since Wendy and I have only donethree other projects like this together—the idea was that I wanted to take a piece of musicand pull out of it a story, and pull out of it action. I wanted to find a way to feel my waythrough the music and create a physical score that was a story that could be followed. Andhaving entirely to do with the music, so in a way you would be responding to the music ina way that you would if you were dancing. Well, that was a difficult thing to do, but in theend whatever we created came completely and fully out of that music.

and yet you added the complexity of using the music to give younarrative cues, not just dance/movement cues.Right, and the Shostakovich music was very interpretive. The music wasn’t written tounderscore anything, so we had to allow ourselves some interpretive quality to the pieces


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that we did—for instance, if there was a dream sequence, or if something would happenthat wasn’t necessarily part of the narrative, but more a kind of thematic element.

did you select the shostakovich first, and then decide on thegogol?I don’t really remember. I was reading Gogol and listening to Shostakovich a lot. I had justfinished cutting up his music for another show I’d done, and I was completely crazy aboutit. So when it came to putting the piece together, I found that I really wanted to work withShostakovich music. So I guess I could say that Shostakovich did kind of come first. Itseemed such a perfect fit with this story.

what was it about gogol, or about this story in particular, thatattracted you—as a reader, and also as a director? Its absurd nature. There is in it my favorite combination of pathos and humor. And thereis a sad, clownlike figure at the center of it, which is something I love. And a lot of reallydark ideas. I love Gogol’s writing because it is uncompromisingly bleak—and funny.

i don’t know if you’ve read the essay nabokov wrote on gogol, inwhich he describes gogol’s writing as achieving “the suddenslanting of the rational plane of life.” i thought that mightalso be a good description of what attracted you.I’m not Nabokov, so I might not put it that way, but yes. Gogol does skewer reality, butthere is something very uncompromising about the twisted nature of life. And yet it is alltrue. It all seems so true and so human. At the center of it there is this tragic, actuallytragic-comic figure. He’s pompous and silly and pathetic. That is wonderful material. Also,we had this natural fit with the actor Peter Anderson. He had been around for quite sometime in the [Vancouver theater] community; I had directed him in The Comedy of Errorsand The Imaginary Invalid and 7 Stories, another one of my plays. Peter is one of myfavorite actors, and I knew about his physical background, and I thought he’d be the per-fect person. We knew that from the beginning.

so how did the changes come about in terms of what you alteredfrom the story, in terms of setting and other details?I think the first thing we changed was the ending. I predicted that Gogol’s ending [withthe Man killed and haunting St. Petersburg as a ghost] wouldn’t work theatrically.Dramaturgically, I couldn’t see it working. It hasn’t got any emotional impact, and it sort


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of drifts into weirdness. We didn’t ever question that decision; I think everyone just wentwith me on that and we moved on. We needed something really strong and cohesive foran ending, and that just didn’t seem to be it. I’ve never felt that with adaptations one hasto be religious in keeping with the original.

you’re more of the school that an adaptor is creating an entirelynew work.Yes. The minute you say, “We’re doing Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’ but without any words,”the expectation surely has to be that you’re going to do something with it that isn’t just thestory. Otherwise it would be so weird and would probably not work.

you made the central character an architect, and the historicalsetting was pushed forward?Those evolved very, very quickly from this one central idea. There was an explosion of ideasright from the beginning, and then I made everybody hold off until we started rehearsalwith the actual choreography and the actual carrying out of the individual scenes. We didn’tplan any particular movements. I did go home every night, before each day of rehearsal,and I would think about how a scene could be shaped. It became apparent to me afterabout two days that I had to come in with something. There were too many people in theroom, there were too many heads. So I had to really take charge and say, “ok, this is whatwe’re going to do tomorrow, and you can disagree or argue with it.” It was fertile ground.It was one of the most exciting rehearsal periods I’ve ever been involved in. No one backedoff. Everyone was contributing, and everyone was working their ass off to get that thingup. And coming up with really interesting ideas, so we knew we had something from aboutthe first week. Then it just became a race to the finish line. And everybody, I mean theprops people, everybody, had to come up with stuff, instantly, as we kept changing, addingthings. One of the biggest things was the decision to put everything on wheels. We didn’tdecide that right away. That came as something that had to be done on the fly. There’s thiswhole choreography of movement, of furniture, that is just extraordinary. I wanted every-thing to be motion. Everything. It also helped, frankly, to move the play’s action so it was-n’t slowed down by a bunch of people moving furniture off the stage. It all became part ofthe action.


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is it a very different show now from what you did in 1997? or doesit feel different to you, now that the actors have lived in it?For me it feels like the actors have achieved a really deep maturity. Something I can’t evenexpress in words, it’s just something I feel when I watch it, with Peter particularly. Thereis such a relaxed, and yet intense, understanding in what he’s doing for his own part. Andthere isn’t a note in the music he doesn’t know. I used to have to tell him, “Find the note.”Now I find myself saying things to him like, “You’re too much on the note. You’ve got towork a little bit off the note.” He knows it now so profoundly that he can play with it.

there is a difference between wanting to really feel music inyour body and take your cues from it, as opposed to timing every-thing exactly to the music, as in silent films, which could seemfalse or overstated.Yes. We have been criticized about that, and when I looked at that, I thought, That is true,we are too on the money. So I started to work with trying to get people a little bit off themusic. This is really more a Peter thing than a company thing. The company is workingoff beats and counting, and they’re not dancers, right? So they don’t really count bars,they’re not that kind of people. They are actors and they’re trying to be believable charac-ters in a scene in which music is guiding them, so they have to follow it and follow it pre-cisely, otherwise they get lost, get off, or the movement doesn’t mean anything. I mean, itis true that you can be too on the money with the music, but on the other hand, if you domovement and you’re not a dancer and it’s not on the money, then . . .

then, what IS it?Right, what is it? In London, it was so ridiculous, some of the critics even said, “Well,they’re not dancers, so what are they?”

it seems that one basic choice you made was that this productionwasn’t going to be naturalistic. have you gone more or less inthat direction since this piece?Well, I’m less afraid of it. I’m more confident that it works so I can move further in thatdirection. Since I write plays that are not very naturalistic, now I find I have to force theactors to be very, very real. Sometimes actors read my plays and say, “Oh, it’s a crazy play,I have to be crazy.” And that is just so wrong. So, for The Overcoat, the thing that works,for at least Peter’s performance, is that he is so naturalistic—but he is doing it in such anunnaturalistic way, since he’s doing it to music and he’s not speaking.


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that seems right, in terms of the story. the story itself isn’t nat-uralistic, but the man at the center of it is a very ordinary, veryreal guy, in a human dilemma that feels totally real.That’s why we liked the idea of doing this particular story so much. It fits in with a pat-tern of almost circuslike unnaturalism. One of the hardest things we had to do, lookingback, was auditioning, because we didn’t even know what we were looking for. From thevery beginning, with this show . . . you had to be a believer. The first time we rehearsedthis play, when we were just creating it, we had a lot of days when people would just scratchtheir heads and say, “This isn’t going to work.” To which the response was, “Well, actually,you’re just going to have to have more faith than that.”

i can see how it might be scary for actors, though, who aregrounded in their training and experience in reading text, and infinding psychological motivations.When you see them on that stage, you will think that they look very confident in whatthey’re doing. But that was not always the case. When we first created this piece, peoplehad no idea what the audience would make of it.

were you thinking consciously of silent films? were you watchingthem, thinking of their aesthetic, the way they use movementand music?That was something that came into it, certainly, and no one ever questioned the idea thatthat was part of what we were doing. We start with credits. It looks like a silent film. Andit’s of that era. So that wasn’t an accident, just we didn’t want it too much to be like that.It was one of many things. But it’s certainly the reason why we chose that period. It seemedto look right, and it had that kind of Charlie Chaplin/Modern Times feel.

and why did the man (akaky akakyevich) become an architect,instead of a copyist?I know there is a reason [laugh]. Ken MacDonald, who is my partner and my legal spouse,and I work so closely together that sometimes I can’t remember why it is we came up withthis idea, but it has probably for sure to do with the design elements. And why he was anarchitect was that it allowed us to do something a little more interesting with the move-ment in the office. I didn’t really understand the world of civil servants; it sounded like itinvolved a lot of files, which is interesting and Kafkaesque, but I couldn’t see us being asdramatic physically, as I could with desks and drawings.


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and drafting makes sense, in terms of how he spends his days,still this laborious, detail-oriented toiling away.It’s specific, and mindless, and there is still this huge hierarchy, like in the office in Gogol’sstory. I’m just ignorant of the whole system of civil servants in Russia. When you readabout it, it’s insane, with 14 levels of servitude. I think a modern audience wouldn’t get that.There are certain choices you find yourself making because it’s a movement piece, and alsobecause it’s better addressed in that way, but also because you know you won’t be able tocommunicate very well [in the usual ways, with talking], so you end up making those kindsof, I guess they would be called compromises, but really they’re choices, about how yourthing is going to be constructed. The thing with The Overcoat, or with all things like it, bywhich I mean things of this nature which are really unique, you either embrace them oryou don’t. As with a Robert Wilson piece, if you get hung up on thinking, It’s so slow, well,then you’ve lost the point of it. And with this, if you go in thinking, They don’t speak, well,that’s exactly what it is, so if you’re not going to get your head around that, no amount ofdazzling choreography is going to change your mind. And there isn’t really any dazzlingchoreography. I think what’s dazzling about it is the sweeping nature of the storytelling,and the way that it moves. It just goes. It’s like a machine itself.

Photo of the original cast of The Overcoat by David Cooper


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an interview with wendy gorling on THE OVERCOAT

by jessica werner (july 2005)

do you think of this piece as a play?Oh, yes. It’s a play without words. Or, more importantly, it’s a play beyond words. If youthink of heightened experiences in your life, sometimes words don’t really capture them,but the movement and the breath and the visual are all that is necessary.

how do you think that eliminating spoken dialogue from the theatrical storytelling process affects the actors and theaudience?I think it encourages them, because they have to go inside the actor’s story much more,number one, and number two, the audience can’t look away from the stage. And, three,because we have added very haunting music and been very specific about which piece ofmusic goes with a particular part of the play, they are hearing the emotion with theirhearts, because the music is played . . . loud would not be the right word, but it is [large]enough that it fills the cells of your body. Shostakovich’s music is very adept at telling stories, and there are many different layers within the orchestration. We built the play withthe music. The music is really the third author.

i was intrigued by the comment in the directors’ note that youand morris panych “allow, as much as possible, for the music totell us the direction the story will take.” that is quite differ-ent from the conventional process of adding a score to a the-ater production at a later stage of development. for you, what isit like to work from the score and the narrative first?It’s a wonderful challenge. All of this started by us taking on the challenge: Let’s do a playwithout words. In fact my second project with Morris Panych [Scenes from a Courtroom] wasa courtroom drama. We had to ask ourselves, how can you dramatize a courtroom, all theintricacies of the arguments, without words? We liked the challenge. Once we had the basicscenario of our adaptation of the short story “The Overcoat,” we sat down in Morris’skitchen and listened to all our Shostakovich cds. We listened to the Piano Concerto no. 1

with a solo trumpet, and we thought, Ah, the vastness of this music is perfect for the office,


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so there we had our office. Then, for the beginning, we listened to slower music and foundthat the Jazz Suite no. 1 was perfect for an introduction. That’s when Shostakovich becamepart of the playwriting team, because we could not cut any of the music. So then we had tolisten very carefully to the office piece of music, the Allegretto from the Piano Concerto no.1—I can’t remember how many minutes it was, maybe 11 minutes—to give us ideas of whatwe could do in the office. We had a certain plan, but that could only go for a certain num-ber of minutes. Then we had to listen again to the music, and think, Hold on, can you hearthat horn? Maybe that is such and such. So the music offered us the nuances of the plot.

let’s say you’re in the room with the actors, playing a piece ofmusic . . .We allowed anything to happen. Certainly we were delighted when the actors improvised,when they gave us ideas. We started with a very simple story, and then the music would letus know when something specific needed to happen. So, whether it was Morris or me orthe lead, Peter Anderson, hearing that piece of music in a different way or on anotherlevel—as there are so many levels to classical music—we could hear when it seemed veryobvious what had to happen, when the music suddenly slowed down, or a horn could beheard over the strings, for example. And so we would try out a basic idea without themusic, and then we would replay the music and the actors, having a basic scenario, wouldthen help to put it to the music.

i know these were actors, and not dancers, but were they actorswith particular talents or training in movement? They had to have a musical ear. They had to be able to hear music, in other words, to beable to hear the full bar beat, the half-bar, to be able to walk normally to the music, not todance to the music. They also had to be the type of person who could be creative within themusic and the movement. So, the hard part—well, in many ways it was lots of fun—was inthe audition process; we had actors come and show us a two-minute piece set to music.

It was a question of finding out who could ferret out the story within a piece of music.Who would have the stakes equal to a strong piece of music? Music is all about passion, isn’tit? Whether it’s the passion of anger, or passion of love, or passion of sadness, or passion ofthe soul. So if an actor in the audition process could unlock the story within a piece ofmusic, we knew they would be able to handle the largeness of what we were about to do.

i was taken with this quote from an interview with peter ander-son in which he said, “the impulse to communicate comes before


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words.” i like the idea of being human before text and language isoverlaid on us.I think movement is the language of the soul. Because it comes from an impulse deepinside. We don’t have to go through the process of figuring out, What is the best word?What is the best adjective to describe this? It’s done impulsively. If I’m at the hospital wait-ing to find out whether my husband has pulled through a heart operation, I look at thedoctor as he’s coming down the corridor, and I look for his movement, for his breath, forphysical indicators of his emotional state. And I’m willing to bet I would know the answerbefore he could say, “He’s okay.” Because he would move at a different pace than if he werecoming to tell me that my husband is in a coma or that he’s died.

when i watched the cbc film version of THE OVERCOAT, i was soimpressed by peter anderson’s degree of expressiveness, even withhis facial expressions—although those probably come throughmore in the film than in a large theater . . .They are still there onstage. As in the film, he is often alone onstage. So we have built inliterally when he breathes in and when he breathes out. Or I could say in another way, themusic has told us when he breathes in. The music breathes in and breathes out.

are there any specific influences on your work, or on this piecespecifically?Morris and I influenced each other. We both love larger-than-life reality onstage. Thiswould be classified as “physical theater.” We like finding the physicality of theater, asopposed to having people sit in chairs and argue and contemplate and philosophize. Andmy training—I hate to use that four-letter word, but I guess I have to—is as a mime. Butit’s not the North American version of mimes from the ’60s and ’70s, like Marcel Marceau.It’s instead the physical theater of many styles of theater in our history. Basically, my visionof mime is anything that imitates life, so my own studies have been to go into mask work,commedia dell’arte, pantomime, clown work, which use the body, focus on the body to tellthe dramatic story.

the aesthetic of this piece seems to have been most influenced bysilent movies. was that something you and morris were aware of?Yes, certainly. And Peter did a lot of looking at Buster Keaton. What we took from [silentfilms], or acknowledged was our interest and their interest combined, is the fact that wordswere unnecessary. It’s not that we’re trying to create a whole new language of theater. It’s


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that we felt words were not needed. If they were needed, we would have put a word or twoin. Because we never wanted the audience to have one moment of discomfort, of notunderstanding what was going on.

more than a few critics have remarked on the bold and risk-taking gesture you made in removing spoken language. what i’mhearing from you is a bit different, however, that there is apurity, a paring down, that you felt you didn’t need this piece tobe mediated by language.We always made sure that the story was clear. I remember when we were first rehearsing, wewould have people come in and we’d say to them: Watch an actor, watch a couple of scenes,and tell us if you understand it. Is it clear? One of my favorite memories is at some point inthe story when they go into the tailor’s shop and then go into the sweatshop—well, we hadall of the costume people come in to see whether that scene was clear or not. To watch thesewers of the Overcoat costumes watch the Overcoat actors sewing costumes was really quitelovely. The [costumers and sewers] were delighted, and they understood it. And if they gavethe stamp of approval on their world that we were showing them, then it was ok.

if you achieve that clarity, then audiences will certainly under-stand the story without words, and yet i can see what you meanabout this piece asking us to visually attend in a very focusedway. maybe it ’s like reading a novel, in that plot and motivationshould be very clear, but there is so much left to be supplied byyour own imagination.What’s left to your imagination is the emotional impact, because this music in itself is fullof passion, full of anguish, full of joy, and we are taken away by the music itself. Then whenyou add a story which fits hopefully seamlessly to the music, it is hard to hear that musicever again without that story being embedded in it. So we embed the story in the music.

i wanted to ask you about that original collaboration betweenprofessional actors and students, since a.c.t. is a conservatoryfor actor training as well as a professional theater company.wasn’t the cast for the first incarnation of THE OVERCOAT, at studio58, a combination of students and professionals?


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That’s right. Studio 58 is one of the top theater schools in Canada, and I’ve taught therenow for I guess 26 or 27 years. [Canadian] Actors’ Equity [the union for actors and stagemanagers] allowed us, because of the intriguing challenge of the project, to have 12 of oursenior students become part of the acting ensemble. By the time we took the productionon tour I guess in 2001, those acting students had become part of the professional actingcommunity. So by and large, we got most of the same cast back. The current cast is amélange of the people from both Toronto and Vancouver. It’s a national [Canadian] cast.

theater without spoken language opens doors to so many audi-ences who might not be able to appreciate conventional theaterbecause of a language barrier. san francisco is a multiculturalcommunity and we’re hoping to encourage many non-englishspeakers to come to THE OVERCOAT.Not only is there no language, but this piece is all about human emotion and themes thatcan be universally understood. It’s about someone trying to do the best he can, ridiculedby other people, who is then given hope that he could finally be accepted, and then hisworld is tragically obliterated.

maybe it ’s that tragic sense when we realize that we’ve attachedour happiness to something external that can’t possibly bring usinner happiness.It’s a universal theme so that no matter what nationality you are, or what culture you arein, you understand the human condition. We all have been ridiculed. And all of a suddenwe’re accepted, we’ve had a good night, a good hair day, whatever, magnificent or trite,whatever it is, we’ve all experienced it. In that way, everyone understands it. And Peter isin everyone’s character, Peter’s playing us. Also, we start off the play very, very simply: aman getting ready for work. There’s nothing intellectual, nothing clever, nothing esotericabout it. We all understand that. Then we see him in the rooming house, with his landladyand the other people, and then in the office. Nobody has to have a prior understanding ofany style to be able to listen to and watch the story evolve and be emotionally connected.

In the directors’ notes, the quote that I use is that “the music moves the story and thestillness finds the heart.” Because in the stillness everything is understood. And with thatstillness comes the breath in, and with the realization and the acceptance, the breath out.


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morris’s codeThis prolific playwright-director has one more goal: to be to theater what MargaretAtwood is to books—known for being good rather than being Canadian.

by alec scott (2004)

Most Toronto artistic types are stereotypically Canadian: soft-spoken, humble,surprisingly tepid about their chosen careers, professional in their Bohemianism,

diplomatic about others (even their artistic rivals). By and large, they are normal-seemingand, what is worse, normal-aspiring. The 52-year-old playwright-director-actor MorrisPanych is the exception to this rule. In this middling metropolis filled with middling people going about their middling business, he stands out: neurotic, intemperate, ambi-tious, talented, funny, feared, beloved, impossible—and altogether impossible to ignore.

Pacing the streets of that most generic of neighborhoods, Yonge and St. Clair, wherehe shares a studio apartment with his partner, the set designer Ken MacDonald, Panychis an unlikely Woody Allen. When writing, he wears earplugs and the heavy-duty earmuffs favored by baggage handlers and construction workers. He once went to bedsporting these layers of soundproofing, an eye cover, and a mouthguard. “Something’s gotto go,” MacDonald reportedly insisted. On long flights, Panych has been known to go tothe washroom, remove his clothes, and sponge himself down. He’s generally more inter-ested in your lunch than his own, picking away at it from across the table with abandon.

But his neuroses haven’t diminished his productivity. He’s easily the most prolificCanadian theater artist of his generation. In the ’80s, primarily in Vancouver, he starred inmore than 50 productions, playing everything from Hamlet to Amadeus. He’s directedmore than 30 staged works, ranging widely through conventional dramas, musicals, andoperas. And he’s mounted some 17 of his own plays. This month [November 2004], hebrings his 1995 play Vigil home after triumphs in Edinburgh, Washington, and London’sWest End. A 2002 Tarragon Theatre production of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl won five well-deserved Doras. The Overcoat, a wordless piece he created with his pal Wendy Gorling in1997, has since toured to England, Norway, and Australia, and goes to Hartford,Connecticut, in January [2005]. In 2003, a Japanese theater company revived his 1989 play7 Stories. Since its debut in 2001, Earshot—a play about a nutbar who shares Panych’s ownhypersensitivity to sound—has criss-crossed Canada, with another production in Ottawathis winter. A new Panych work [The Dishwashers] about the restaurant world’s untouch-ables, dishwashers, premieres in Vancouver this season in advance of a Toronto productionnext fall.


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His increasingly high international profile and his popular and critical success at homereflect not only the diligent application of a considerable talent but also the Canadian theater scene’s coming of age. We can say of his plays what we seldom could of his pre-decessors’: they are good, sometimes great. His characters are quirky and memorable; hisclever dialogue clips along; his resolutions neatly balance hope and despair.

It doesn’t take any prodding for Panych to acknowledge his ultimate artistic goal. Hewants to be as internationally recognized a theater artist as Margaret Atwood is a writer:“I’d just like to lose the Canadian,” he says. “It’s not that I’m ashamed of coming fromCanada. But with Atwood, for instance, the Canadian writer’s label comes off. WheneverI read a review [abroad] of my work that mentions its Canadian origin in the first line, Iknow it’ll be a bad one.”

He’s not self-effacing, our Morris, setting himself up as his own advocate and, it mustbe said, his own fiercest critic; in rapid succession, he’ll praise then bury himself. In eitherinstance, the self is front and center. As a long-time friend and colleague notes somewhatcattily: “Morris is the center of a play called The Morris Panych Life.” This is the story ofan un-Canadian Canadian’s rise to the top of this country’s theatrical hierarchy, and thebeginning of his single-minded pursuit of what comic-book evil geniuses call world domination—muah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

“The most disappointing thing you can know about a person, sometimes, is thetruth,” says the embittered father in Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. Panych’s work is

filled with such epigrams; for good and for ill, he’s addicted to the one-liner. The truthabout Panych, however, is anything but a letdown. His life outside the theater has been asfilled with drama—with quick changes of pace and background scenery, with highs andlows—as his stage work.

Born in 1952, he was one of seven children of a father with Ukrainian roots and a motherof mixed Irish-German descent. The family home in Edmonton was notorious for its creative chaos. As a brother-in-law says, “It was the ‘disaster’ place in the neighborhood.All the children were warned, ‘Don’t go over to the Panyches.’”

His artistic preoccupation with death—7 Stories presents a man on a ledge decidingwhether to jump; Vigil has a nephew visiting a bedridden aunt apparently in her lastdecline—can be traced to the funeral of his Ukrainian grandmother. “I was six and prettyimpressed with it,” he recalls. “The funeral was three days, filled with vigils. I rememberbeing picked up and thrust toward the coffin to kiss my dead grandmother. After I wenthome, I must have played that funeral out 6,000 ways. I was a dead body for a week, thena priest.”


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The Panyches weren’t moneyed (his father was a machinist) or conventional. “He’salways thought of himself as an outsider, as separated from society by his obsessions,” sayslong-time friend Glynis Leyshon, the artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse. Hismaternal grandmother, a grammar-correcting school mistress, weaned him on stories ofthe family’s difficulties during the Depression. “They’d been booted off a farm and had torun from boarding house to boarding house, always behind on the rent.” Panych’s plays—which owe less to the glittering legacy of Wilde and Coward, and more to the gritty hard-knocks school of Beckett and Mamet—are populated by such hand-to-mouth creatures.

A desultory high school student, he attended vocational college in Alberta, going on towork as a techie for the cbc’s local French station. “It was soul killing,” says Panych. “Andthe weird thing was, though I couldn’t speak French, I was responsible for the sound.People would call in to complain that the sound was odd, something I could never haveknown.”

Panych moved to Vancouver in 1973 to attend the University of British Columbia (ubc),where he studied creative writing. It was there that he developed a single-minded focuson theater, eschewing the fiction and poetry writing courses on offer. Near the end of hisdegree, he decided to become an actor, going away to one of the world’s two great theatercenters, London, to an alternative acting school. He loved the city but hated the course.“We did all this intensive psychological shit; it wasn’t technical enough. We weren’t learn-ing anything to develop our voices or our bodies.” His distaste for the approach has stuckwith him; as a director, rather than pontificate on character psychology or the drama’s ultimate meaning, Panych relentlessly focuses on details, on how to move, how to say lines.

He returned to Vancouver determined to learn by doing. It was during an audition inthe late ’70s that he encountered Ken MacDonald, a former art teacher, then reinventinghimself as a set designer. “When we met,” MacDonald recalls, “Morris was a waitermainly, and I was just struggling to make a name for myself. We had close to no money.But it has turned out to be a good life for us.” (This spring, the pair were married—atPanych’s old alma mater, ubc.)

Panych’s recollections of that era contain his characteristic mix of anger and satisfac-tion. “I was getting lots of really good, big parts—in plays like Hamlet, Amadeus, Childrenof a Lesser God,” he says, before interrupting himself. “Acting for me is very difficult. I’mvery bad at taking direction.” Notwithstanding this harsh self-analysis, he developed adecent reputation as a performer, with a particular knack for playing villains with gusto.

In part, his suitability for such roles is external: he doesn’t have matinee idol looks, thatbland, almost asexual symmetry of face. Physically, he projects an eastern European inten-sity, his deep-set eyes glowing fiercely under dark brown hair, as he makes this or that


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expletive-filled statement. In addition to the evident ferocity, there is also a vulnerabilityto him, a softness that comes out particularly when he speaks of someone whose work headmires. He turns his head sideways in such moments, as if a direct glance would revealtoo much. “I can’t think of one single thing wrong with Richard Wilbur’s translations ofMolière,” he says with warmth. Of Fiona Reid’s performance for him two years ago inSweeney Todd, he is equally complimentary: “You know, when you work with someone likethat, you realize there’s a reason behind their reputation. All the good actors take com-mentary and use it to perform better, to grow into a role in an exciting way.”

The verbally agile Panych is unusually pressed for words when trying to describe hisgradual shift from acting to writing and directing. “After a while, it just began to seem

more interesting to write,” he ventures. “And I started directing because I wasn’t confidentthat anyone else could handle my work.”

Panych learned about directing from the late Larry Lillo, the godfather, or perhaps mid-wife, who presided at the birth of Vancouver’s homegrown theater scene in the ’70s and’80s. Lillo is one of many friends Panych has lost to aids, and he remembers him as bothcompetitive (“He would always cheat when we played Risk, and I pretended not to notice”)and open minded (“Eighty percent of his brilliance was being able to listen to other people and to absorb their ideas”).

For someone constructed as Panych is—as smart as anyone in whatever room he’s in—learning how to listen was an important lesson. Although he has strong views, he knowsit’s smart artistically (and more fun) to allow performers to devise their own ways intowhatever piece they’re working on. “Sometimes Ken will see an actor in a rehearsal who’sdoing something odd with one of my plays,” Panych says, referring to his omnipresentpartner. “He’ll say, ‘Why are you letting them do that? That’s not what you intended.’ Myanswer usually is, ‘It may be shitty now, but in a few days it’ll probably turn into somethingelse. If it doesn’t, then I’ll get involved.’”

Panych’s transformation from regional to national force in the ’90s is attributable, inlarge part, to his other key mentor, Urjo Kareda, the former artistic director at theTarragon. Kareda was the first in Toronto to recognize Panych’s writing talent. “I remem-ber coming here when I was 25,” Panych says, “and knocking on every fucking door andnot getting a single bit of interest from anyone.” In addition to staging some of his earlyplays, Kareda helped him—with constructive but often harsh criticism—to produce hisgreatest artistic triumph to date, the coming-of-age story Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. Theplay presents an effortlessly precocious girl coping with the death of her fish (and with herparents, the nastiest stage couple since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). In a way, with a


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postmodern gloss, the piece hearkens back to earlier American work, to Eugene O’Neilland Arthur Miller, before trendiness became all.

It was exactly Kareda’s willingness to voice harsh criticism that Panych admired. “Hecould be ruthless,” he says. “Not personally, but about the art.” In Panych, this type of ruth-lessness comes out particularly when he’s directing. He can also be candid to the point ofinsulting. Members of various casts he’s directed once collected his sayings into what theycalled “Chairman Mao-ris’s Red Book.” “Stupid, go stand over there with moron” is onesaying. “Why don’t you just jump off the stage and tear up your Equity card right now?” isanother. But on and off the record, his former troupers praise him more than they carpabout him. “Sure, he can be mean,” says Judi Closkey, whom Panych directed in TheOvercoat, “but somehow you feel he’s on your side.” And Tanja Jacobs, who appeared inGirl, compares him to the ogre in Mordecai Richler’s children’s book Jacob Two-Two Meetsthe Hooded Fang: gruff on the outside yet gentle within.

With each passing year in the ’90s, Panych’s Toronto directing gigs began to out-number (and outpay) his Vancouver ones. Eventually, with a nest egg left to

MacDonald by his recently deceased mother, the two bought a studio apartment nearYonge and St. Clair late in the decade (in addition to keeping their house in Vancouver).“It has been the longest transition ever,” Panych says. “It started because, well, there’s noway around Toronto in terms of being a creative force in the country. Every time we camehere, it was a depressing prospect, staying in a grotty executive suite with ugly melamineplates.” If Vancouver saw Panych’s emergence as an actor and early promise as a writer, itwas in Toronto that he came into his own as a director and a playwright.

Since the millennium turned, Panych’s detail-oriented approach to coaching strong per-formances out of his actors and MacDonald’s striking art history–inspired sets have madethe duo much sought after as director and designer. They have visited Mozart and Freud’sVienna (for CanStage’s Amadeus and Hysteria, respectively), pre–World War ii Berlin (TheThreepenny Opera in Vancouver), a barbershop in Victorian London (CanStage’s SweeneyTodd) and prerevolutionary Russia (the Shaw Festival’s Nothing Sacred). This winter, againfor CanStage, they’ll serve up their vision of the American holy of holies, a baseball diamond, in Take Me Out, a multiple Tony winner imported from New York.

In evoking such diverse settings, the pair never try to literally re-create the scene. “Filmcan do period stuff much better than the theater can,” Panych says. “People come to thetheater to escape into a world that’s different, that’s obviously theatrical.” And so, the setfor Amadeus had Mondrianesque walls and pitilessly strong lighting—“I wanted it to looklike a sushi bar,” Panych deadpans.


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In the plays he’s penned, the characters always have identifiable motivations. His dialogue is snappy, lacking the jeweled literary flair his just-writer contemporaries tend tofavor. But he sometimes prefers clever false to ponderous true. Vigil has segments dividedby blackouts, which are meant to convey the passage of time; each is preceded by a one-liner, usually of the dark sort. For the most part, they work, but they also prevent the audience from developing deep feelings for the characters; just as they’re about to drawupon their stock of pathos, they’re diverted by yet another punchline. This, of course, isvintage Panych; he hates the easy out, the empathetic gush.

While American playwrights have largely spent the past two decades writing operaticplays about the issues of the moment—sexual harassment (Oleanna), aids (Angels inAmerica), 9⁄11 (Omnium Gatherum, The Guys) and racial discrimination (Fences, DrivingMiss Daisy)—[Canadian playwrights], led by Panych, have produced a diet of absurdist-inspired explorations of private life. His plays are curiously ahistorical, set in vague citiesof no particular dimension, as if the earmuffs had kept the entire world at bay. At his worst,he can produce clever but irrelevant-seeming works. In a rare Panych stinker, The Ends ofthe Earth, two losers (one has paranoia resulting from a lightning strike) end up in a hotelrun by a deaf man and blind woman. It has some great lines, but audiences left the theaterunsure why this play had ever been produced. . . .

[I]f he can apply himself to the noisy hurly-burly in the outside world, without forget-ting his own rich inner one, Panych may well reach even the lofty goal he has set himself.It’s already been a long, against-the-odds slog of many miles from a ramshackle house inworking-class Edmonton to London’s gilded Wyndhams Theatre (where Vigil, renamedAuntie & Me, had its run). And there remain many more miles to Panych’s personalBabylon: to leave behind a body of plays worthy of entering the international repertory.

The raw material needed to fulfill this goal has been there from the beginning. At theend of his first big success, 7 Stories, the suicidal man flies off the ledge into a cityevening—a breeze wafts him (and his open umbrella) upward. “For a brief moment,” theman recalls later, “the wind carried me up and took me along for a ride. And I forgot. I for-got my own story . . . and I flew . . . flew on the wings of someone else.” Panych’s writing(as he directs it) can induce this same sense of worry-obliterating, acrobatic flight. “Mybiggest ambition,” he says, “is to do my best writing. I don’t think I’ve done it yet. I’m frustrated at present because I see higher than I’m doing.” How good and right to hearsomeone in this bronze-addicted nation aspiring to gold.

This article originally appeared in Toronto Life, November 2004. © 2004 Toronto Life Publishing Co. Ltd.


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a brief biography of nikolai gogol

Russian novelist, dramatist, andsatirist Nikolai Gogol revolution-

ized the Russian literary tradition, estab-lishing the prose form as an artisticmedium on par with poetry. A master of colorful characterization andchampion of the “little man,” Gogolinfluenced with his “realism of indict-ment” generations of Russian writers,including Fyodor Dostoevsky, who iscredited with saying, “We have all comeout from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’”

Born April 1, 1809, in the Mirgoroddistrict of the Ukraine (also known thenas “Little Russia”), Gogol spent his child-hood on his parents’ modest countryestate. His father was an educated man

and a writer of plays and poems in Ukrainian. Educated at a boarding school, Gogolmoved to St. Petersburg in 1828, hoping to enter the civil service. He soon discovered, how-ever, that without money and connections it would be very difficult for him to make a liv-ing. He held positions in various government ministries and even tried his hand at acting.At his own expense, he published a poem he had written in school, Hans Küchelgarten; hewas so embarrassed by its disastrous failure, however, that he bought back all the copiesand burned them and considered emigrating to the United States.

Instead Gogol embezzled the money his mother had sent him to pay the mortgage onher farm and fled to Germany. When he ran out of money he returned to St. Petersburg,where he took a poorly paid government post. He continued to pursue his writing carrer,this time finding greater success publishing short stories replete with the folk and folkloreof the Ukraine. Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, published in two volumes in 1831 and1832, was a breakthrough work, demonstrating Gogol’s skill at mixing the fantastic and themacabre while distilling something essential about the Russian character. He becamefamous overnight, admired by such members of the Russian literary elite as AlexanderPushkin, Vaily Zhukovsky, Sergey Aksakov, and Vissarion Belinsky.

Nikolai Gogol, 1841 (© CORBIS)


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Gogol briefly took a post teaching history at the university in St. Petersburg, but left theposition in 1834 to become a full-time writer. In 1835, he published two new books,Mirgorod, four stories based on provincial Ukrainian life, and Arabesques, Petersburg essaysand stories, including “Nevsky Prospect” and “The Diary of a Madman.” In 1836 he published a satirical story (“The Coach”) in Pushkin’s periodical The Contemporary, whichfeatured Gogol’s story “The Nose” in its third issue. In April 1836 his play The InspectorGeneral, a satirical comedy that dramatizes the tale of a young civil servant who finds himself stranded in a small town, mistaken for an influential government inspector, wasproduced by special order of Czar Nicholas i.

Despite the czar’s endorsement, the reactionary press and officialdom condemned theplay for its indictiment of the corrupt Russian bureaucracy. Gogol again fled to Europe,exiling himself from his home and complaining that his work was universally misunder-stood. After traveling through much of western Europe, he settled in Rome, where hewrote most of his major work, Dead Souls. The comic novel, a striking illustration ofRussian society and human wiles, charts the progress of a smooth-talking newcomer as heinserts himself into a small Russian town, intent on purchasing the souls of the recentlydeparted.

Throughout the 1840s, Gogol became more and more conservative in his outlook,experiencing a religious awakening that drew him further into Orthodox theology. In 1842

he published Dead Souls and a four-volume edition of collected writings, in which previously unpublished stories, including “The Overcoat,” appeared. Dead Souls was hailedby democratic intellectuals as a masterpiece permeated with the spirit of their own liberalaspirations, and, after Pushkin’s death, Gogol became the leading figure of Russian litera-ture. Believing his God-given writing talent obligated him to dedicate his life to revealingto Russia the righteous way of living in an evil world, Gogol decided to continue DeadSouls as a Divine Comedy-like trilogy.

Gogol remained abroad almost continuously for 12 years, returning to Russia in 1849,two years after publishing Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends. Radicals whohad viewed Gogol’s work as shining examples of social criticism were deeply disappointedby this last book, in which he eulogized the autocratic czarist regime, the conservative offi-cial church, and the patriarchal Russian way of life.

In his later life, Gogol became a hypochondriac and came under the influence of afanatical priest who convinced him that his fictional writings were unholy. Gogol there-upon burned several of his unpublished manuscripts, including the remaining parts ofDead Souls, just ten days before his death on March 4, 1852.


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the apotheosis of a maskby vladimir nabokov

Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely devel-

oping the reader’s own notions of life. Great literature skirts the irrational. Hamlet is thewild dream of a neurotic scholar. Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is a grotesque and grim night-mare making black holes in the dim pattern of life. The superficial reader of that story willmerely see in it the heavy frolics of an extravagant buffoon; the solemn reader will take forgranted that Gogol’s prime intention was to denounce the horrors of Russian bureaucracy.But neither the person who wants a good laugh, nor the person who craves for books “thatmake one think” will understand what “The Overcoat” is really about. Give me the creative reader; this is a tale for him.

Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their momentsof irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secretmeaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of hisart, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treatrational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent. When, as in his immortal “TheOvercoat,” he really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss,he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.

The sudden slanting of the rational plane of life may be accomplished of course in manyways, and every great writer has his own method. With Gogol it was a combination of twomovements: a jerk and a glide. Imagine a trapdoor that opens under your feet with absurdsuddenness, and a lyrical gust that sweeps you up and then lets you fall with a bump intothe next traphole. The absurd was Gogol’s favorite muse—but when I say “the absurd,” Ido not mean the quaint or the comic. The absurd has as many shades and degrees as thetragic has, and moreover, in Gogol’s case, it borders upon the latter. It would be wrong toassert that Gogol placed his characters in absurd situations. You cannot place a man in anabsurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd; you cannot do this if you mean by“absurd” something provoking a chuckle or a shrug. But if you mean the pathetic, thehuman condition, if you mean all such things that in less weird worlds are linked up withthe loftiest aspirations, the deepest sufferings, the strongest passions—then of course thenecessary breach is there, and a pathetic human, lost in the midst of Gogol’s nightmarish,irresponsible world would be “absurd,” by a kind of secondary contrast. . . .


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The Facial and Reverse Sides of the Human Race (Gostiny Dvor), lithograph by Rudolf Zukowski, 1843


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So what is that queer world, glimpses of which we keep catching through the gaps of theharmless looking sentences? It is in a way the real one but it looks wildly absurd to us,

accustomed as we are to the stage setting that screens it. It is from these glimpses that themain character of “The Overcoat,” the meek little clerk, is formed, so that he embodies thespirit of that secret but real world which breaks through Gogol’s style. He is, that meek little clerk, a ghost, a visitor from some tragic depths who by chance happened to assumethe disguise of a petty official. Russian progressive critics sensed in him the image of theunderdog and the whole story impressed them as a social protest. But it is something muchmore than that. The gaps and black holes in the texture of Gogol’s style imply flaws in thetexture of life itself. Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in pur-suits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at theirfutile jobs—this is the real “message” of the story. In this world of utter futility, of futilehumility and futile domination, the highest degree that passion, desire, creative urge canattain is a new cloak which both tailors and customers adore on their knees. I am not speak-ing of the moral point or the moral lesson. There can be no moral lesson in such a worldbecause there are no pupils and no teachers: this world is and it excludes everything thatmight destroy it, so that any improvement, any struggle, any moral purpose or endeavor, areas utterly impossible as changing the course of a star. It is Gogol’s world and as such whollydifferent from Tolstoy’s world, or Pushkin’s, or Chekhov’s, or my own. But after readingGogol one’s eyes may become gogolized and one is apt to see bits of his world in the mostunexpected places. I have visited many countries, and something like Akaky Akakyevich’sovercoat has been a passionate dream of this or that chance acquaintance who never hadheard about Gogol.

The plot of “The Overcoat”1 is very simple. A poor little clerk makes a great decisionand orders a new overcoat. The coat while in the making becomes the dream of his

life. On the very first night that he wears it he is robbed of it on a dark street. He dies ofgrief and his ghost haunts the city. This is all in the way of plot, but of course the real plot(as always with Gogol) lies in the style, in the inner structure of this transcendental anec-dote. In order to appreciate it at its true worth one must perform a kind of mental somer-sault so as to get rid of conventional values in literature and follow the author along thedream road of his superhuman imagination. Gogol’s world is somewhat related to suchconceptions of modern physics as the “Concertina Universe” or the “Explosion Universe”;it is far removed from the comfortably revolving clockwork worlds of the last century.There is a curvature in literary style as there is a curvature in space—but few are theRussian readers who do care to plunge into Gogol’s magic chaos head first, with no


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restraint or regret. The Russian who thinks Turgenev was a great writer, and bases hisnotion of Pushkin upon Tchaikovsky’s vile libretti, will merely paddle into the gentlestwavelets of Gogol’s mysterious sea and limit his reaction to an enjoyment of what he takesto be whimsical humor and colorful quips. But the diver, the seeker for black pearls, theman who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in “TheOvercoat” shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which wedimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception. The prose of Pushkin isthree dimensional; that of Gogol is four dimensional, at least. He may be compared to hiscontemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky, who blasted Euclid and discovered a cen-tury ago many of the theories which Einstein later developed. If parallel lines do not meetit is not because they cannot, but because they have other things to do. Gogol’s art as dis-closed in “The Overcoat” suggests that parallel lines not only may meet, but that they canwriggle and get most extravagantly entangled, just as two pillars reflected in water indulgein the most wobbly contortions if the necessary ripple is there. Gogol’s genius is exactlythat ripple—two and two make five, if not the square root of five, and it all happens quitenaturally in Gogol’s world, where neither rational mathematics nor indeed any of ourpseudophysical agreements with ourselves can be seriously said to exist.

The clothing process indulged in by Akaky Akakyevich, the making and the putting onof the cloak, is really his disrobing and his gradual reversion to the stark nakedness of

his own ghost. From the very beginning of the story he is in training for his supernaturallyhigh jump—and such harmless looking details as his tiptoeing in the streets to spare hisshoes or his not quite knowing whether he is in the middle of the street or in the middleof the sentence, these details gradually dissolve the clerk Akaky Akakyevich so thattowards the end of the story his ghost seems to be the most tangible, the most real part ofhis being. The account of his ghost haunting the streets of St. Petersburg in search of thecloak of which he had been robbed and finally appropriating that of a high official whohad refused to help him in his misfortune—this account, which to the unsophisticated maylook like an ordinary ghost story, is transformed towards the end into something for whichI can find no precise epithet. It is both an apotheosis and a dégringolade. . . .

At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying theunderdog or cursing the upperdog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul wherethe shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.

1The shinel (from chenille) of the Russian title is a deep-caped, ample-sleeved furred carrick.Excerpted from Nikolai Gogol, © 1971 by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.


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“the overcoat”An Excerpt

by nikolai gogol

One of the most influential short stories ever written, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat’’(“Shinel”) first appeared in 1842 as part of a four-volume publication of its author’s

Collected Works (Sochinenya). The story is considered not only an early masterpiece of RussianNaturalism—a movement that would dominate the country’s literature for generations—but aprogenitor of the modern short story form itself. “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”is a remark that has been variously attributed to Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. That either or bothmight have said it is an indication of the far-reaching significance of Gogol’s work.

Gogol’s writings have been seen as a bridge between the genres of romanticism and realism inRussian literature. Progressive critics of his day praised Gogol for grounding his prose fictions inthe everyday lives of ordinary people, and they claimed him as a pioneer of a new “naturalist”aesthetic. Yet, Gogol viewed his work in a more conservative light, and his writing seems to incor-porate as much fantasy and folklore as realistic detail. “The Overcoat,” which was written sporadically over several years during a self-imposed exile in Geneva and Rome, is a particularlydazzling amalgam of these seemingly disparate tendencies in Gogol’s writing. The story begins bytaking its readers through the mundane and alienating world of a bureaucratic office in St.Petersburg where an awkward, impoverished clerk must scrimp and save in order to afford abadly needed new winter coat. As the story progresses, we enter a fairy-tale world of supernatu-ral revenge. . . . Gogol’s story is both comic and horrific—at once a scathing social satire, moralis-tic fable, and psychological study. (Introduction to “‘The Overcoat,’ by Nikolai Gogol,” The GaleGroup’s For Students Series, http://www.enotes.com/overcoat/, © 2005 eNotes.com LLC.)

In the department of … but it would be better not to say in which department. There isnothing more irascible than all these departments, regiments, offices—in short, all this

officialdom. Nowadays, every private individual considers the whole of society insulted inhis person. In order to avoid any unpleasantness, it will be better for us to call the depart-ment in question a certain department. And so, in a certain department there served a certainclerk; not a very remarkable clerk, one might say—short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhatred-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles onboth cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal . . . No help for it! ThePetersburg climate is to blame.


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The clerk’s last name was Bashmachkin. From the name itself one can already see thatit once came from bashmak, or “shoe”; but when, at what time, and in what way it camefrom bashmak—none of that is known. His father, his grandfather, and even his brother-in-law, and absolutely all the Bashmachkins, went around in boots, merely having themresoled three times a year. His name was Akaky Akakyevich. The reader will perhaps findthat somewhat strange and farfetched, but he can be assured that it was not fetched at all,but that such circumstances occurred of themselves as made it quite impossible to give himany other name.

As the child was being baptized, he cried and made such a face as if he anticipated thathe would be a titular councilor. And so, that is how it all came about. We have told it sothat the reader could see for himself that it happened entirely from necessity and that togive him any other name was quite impossible.

When and at what time he entered the department and who appointed him, no onecould recall. However many directors and other superiors came and went, he was alwaysto be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity, as the samecopying clerk. So that after a while they became convinced that he simply must have beenborn into the world ready-made, in a uniform, and with a balding head.

In the department, he was shown no respect at all. The caretakers not only did not risefrom their places when he passed, but did not even look at him, as if a mere fly had flownthrough the reception room. His superiors treated him somehow with cold despotism.Some chief clerk’s assistant simply shoved papers under his nose without even saying,“Copy them,” or, “Here’s a nice, interesting little case,” or something pleasant, as is cus-tomary in well-bred offices. And he took them, looking only at the papers, without regard-ing the one who put them there or whether he had the right to do so. He took them andimmediately settled down to copying them.

The young clerks poked fun at him and cracked jokes, to the extent that the office witallowed; told right out in front of him various stories they had made up about him, abouthis landlady, a 70-year old crone, saying that she beat him, asking when their wedding wasto be, dumping torn-up paper on his head and calling it snow. But not one word ofresponse came from Akaky Akakyevich, as if no one was there; it did not even affect thework he did: amidst all this pestering, he made not a single error in his copy.

Only when the joke was really unbearable, when they jostled his arm, interfering withwhat he was doing, would he say, “Let me be. Why do you offend me?” And there wassomething strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. Somethingsounded in it so conducive to pity that one recently appointed young man who, followingthe example of others, had first allowed himself to make fun of him, suddenly stopped as


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if transfixed, and from then on everything seemed changed before him and acquired a dif-ferent look. Some unnatural power had pushed him away from his comrades, whoseacquaintance he had made thinking them decent, well-mannered men. And long after-wards, in moments of the greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of thelittle clerk with the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: “Let me be. Why do youoffend me?”—and in these penetrating words rang other words: “I am your brother.” Andthe poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness isconcealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man the world regards asnoble and honorable. . . .

It would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so much in his work. It is notenough to say he served zealously—no, he served with love. There in that copying, he sawsome varied and pleasant world of his own. Delight showed in his face; certain letters werehis favorites, and when he came to one of them, he was beside himself: he chuckled andwinked and helped out with his lips, so that it seemed one could read on his face every let-ter his pen traced. If his zeal had been rewarded correspondingly, he might, to his ownamazement, have gone as far as state councilor; yet his reward, as his witty comrades putit, was a feather in his hat and hemorrhoids where he sat.

Outside this copying nothing seemed to exist for him. He gave no thought to hisclothes at all: his uniform was not green but of some mealy orange. The collar he wore wasnarrow, low, so that though his neck was not long, it looked extraordinarily long protrud-ing from this collar, as with those head-wagging plaster kittens that foreign peddlers carryabout by the dozens on their heads. And there was always something stuck to his uniform:a wisp of straw or a bit of thread; moreover, he had a special knack, as he walked in thestreet, of getting under a window at the precise moment when some sort of trash was beingthrown out of it, and, as a result, he was eternally carrying around melon or watermelonrinds and other such rubbish on his hat.

Akaky Akakyevich, even if he looked at something, saw in everything his own neatlines, written in an even hand, and only when a horse’s muzzle, coming out of nowhere,placed itself on his shoulder and blew real wind from its nostrils onto his cheek—only thenwould he notice that he was not in the middle of a line, but rather in the middle of thestreet.

Coming home, he would sit down staring away at the table, hastily slurp up his cabbagesoup and eat a piece of beef with onions, without ever noticing their taste, and he wouldeat it all with flies and whatever else God sent him at the time. Noticing that his stomachwas full, he would get up from the table, take out a bottle of ink, and copy documents he


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had brought home. When he had written his fill, he would go to bed, smiling beforehandat the thought of the next day: What would God send him to copy tomorrow? So flowedthe peaceful life of this man who, with a salary of 400, was able to content himself with hislot, and so it might have flowed on into extreme old age, had it not been for the variouscalamities strewn along the path of life, not only of titular, but even of privy, actual, court,and other councilors, even of those who neither give counsel nor take any themselves.

There exists in Petersburg a powerful enemy of all who earn a salary of 400 rubles orthereabouts. This enemy is none other than the northern frost, though, incidentally,people say it is very healthful. Toward nine o’clock in the morning, precisely the hour whenthe streets are covered with people going to their offices, it starts dealing such strong andsharp flicks to the noses indiscriminately that the poor clerks decidedly do not know whereto put them. At that time, when even those who occupy high positions have an ache intheir foreheads and tears come to their eyes, poor titular councilors are sometimes defense-less. The whole of salvation consists in running as quickly as possible, in your skimpy over-coat, across five or six streets and then standing in the porters lodge, stamping your feetgood and hard, thereby thawing out all your job-performing gifts and abilities, which hadbecome frozen on the way.

Akaky Akakyevich had for a certain time begun to feel that he was somehow getting itespecially in the back and shoulder, though he tried to run across his allotted space asquickly as possible. He thought finally that the sin might perhaps lie with his overcoat.Examining it well at home, he discovered that in two or three places—namely, on the backand shoulders—it had become just like burlap; the broadcloth was so worn out that it wasthreadbare, and the lining had fallen into pieces.

It should be known that Akaky Akakyevich’s overcoat also served as an object of mock-ery to the clerks; they even deprived it of the noble name of overcoat and called it house-coat. Seeing what the situation was, Akaky Akakyevich decided that the overcoat had tobe taken to Petrovich the tailor, who lived somewhere on the fourth floor, up a backentrance, and who, in spite of his blind eye and the pockmarks all over his face, performedthe mending of clerkly and all other trousers and tailcoats quite successfully—to be sure,when he was sober and not entertaining any other projects in his head.

Climbing the stairway leading to Petrovich, Akaky Akakyevich was thinking about howmuch Petrovich would ask, and mentally decided not to pay more than two rubles.Petrovich seemed to be in a sober state, and therefore tough, intractable, and liable todemand devil knows what price. Akaky Akakyevich grasped that fact and was, as they say,about to backtrack, but the thing was already under way. Petrovich squinted at him very


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intently with his only eye, and Akaky Akakyevich involuntarily said: “Good day,Petrovich!”

“Good morning to you, sir,” said Petrovich, and cocked his eye at Akaky Akakyevich’shands, wishing to see what sort of booty he was bringing.

“Ah! I . . . to you, Petrovich, this . . . this, in fact, is quite . . . ” There was no more of it,and he forgot himself, thinking that he had already finished it.

“What’s this?” asked Petrovich, at the same time giving his uniform a thorough inspec-tion with his only one eye, beginning with the collar, then the sleeves, back skirts, and buttonholes—all of which was quite familiar to him, since it was his own handiwork. Suchis the habit of tailors: it is the first thing they do when they meet someone.

“But I, here, this, Petrovich . . . an overcoat, cloth . . . here you see, everywhere, in dif-ferent places, it is quite strong . . . it is a little dusty, and looks old, but it is new, only herein one place it is a little . . . on the back, and here on one of the shoulders, it is a little worn,yes, here on this shoulder it is a little . . . do you see? this is all. And a little work . . .”

Petrovich took the overcoat, laid it out on the table first, examined it for a long time,and shook his head. He stretched the overcoat on his hands and examined it against thelight and again shook his head. Then he turned it inside out and shook his head once more,and finally said: “No, impossible to fix it—miserable garment!”

At these words, Akaky Akakyevich’s heart skipped a beat.“Why is it impossible, Petrovich?” he said, almost in a child’s pleading voice. “It’s only

a bit worn on the shoulders—surely you have some little scraps . . .”“Little scraps might be found, we might find some little scraps,” said Petrovich, “but it

is impossible to sew them on—the stuff ’s quite rotten, touch it with a needle and it fallsapart.”

“Falls apart, and you patch it over.”“But there is nothing to put a patch on, nothing for it to hold to, it’s too worn out. They

pass it off as broadcloth, but the wind blows and it flies to pieces.”“Well, you can make it hold. Otherwise, really, it’s sort of . . .”“No,” said Petrovich resolutely, “it’s impossible to do anything. The stuff ’s no good. It

is clear that you must have a new overcoat.”

Excerpted from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.© 1998 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.


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a brief biography of dmitri shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich, a Russian of the Soviet period, maintains a significant positionin 20th-century music history as a symphonist and as a composer of chamber music.

His writing style was sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched in anextension of traditional tonal musical language. His success varied with the political climate in Russia, and, since his death in 1975, his works and his life have been the subjectof much political and musical controversy.

Shostakovich was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg to an affluent and cultured musicalfamily. His father worked for a chemist, and his mother introduced him to the piano at theage of nine. Young Dmitri excelled quickly in his music. He continued his studies from1922 to his graduation in 1925 at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he became a skilledpianist and composer. His first major musical achievement, the First Symphony, was written as his graduation piece.

Shostakovich performed as a concert pianist for several years. Finding greater success inwriting music, however, he began to limit performances primarily to his own works, andsoon concentrated exclusively on composition. He developed an eclectic style that wasrooted in tonality, yet incorporated abrasive and avant-garde tendencies. In the years fol-lowing his graduation, he continued his cycle of symphonies and wrote his first opera, The

Dmitri Shostakovich, 1930s (© Bettmann/CORBIS)


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Nose, based on a short story by Gogol, which garnered generally poor reviews. In addition,he scored several silent films and composed for the ballet.

First performed in 1934, his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was immediatelysuccessful. In 1936, however, Shostakovich suffered political censorship in an attack onLady Macbeth, rumored to have been instigated by Stalin. In an infamous article in Pravdaentitled “Chaos Instead of Music,” the opera was denounced for both style and content,putting the young composer’s career on hold.

That same year, he set aside his Symphony no. 4, fearing it would spur further criticism.Shostakovich instead began work on his Fifth Symphony (1937), which was consideredmore conventional and accessible in form and tunefulness. The Fifth Symphony wasreceived so favorably by the Russian state, as well as by his international admirers, thatShostakovich turned from composing for the theater, ballet, and opera to concentrate onsymphonies, concertos, and quartets.

From 1938 to 1955, Shostakovich devoted himself to symphonic music and began his vastcycle of string quartets. The Leningrad Symphony (his Symphony no. 7), which he beganin 1941 in St. Petersburg at the outbreak of the war with Germany, was adopted as a sym-bol of Russian resistance. In 1943, the Russian government evacuated his family toMoscow, where he was appointed professor of composition at the conservatory. In 1948 hewas denounced by the state yet again for composing a Ninth Symphony considered frivo-lous by the official musical establishment. Most of his works were banned, he was forcedto repent publicly, and he lost his position at the conservatory. He took to writing littleother than patriotic cantatas, private music (mainly his outstanding preludes and fugues forpiano), and film scores.

The death of Stalin in 1953 opened the Russian music world to a less rigid aesthetic.Shostakovich once again began composing symphonies and quartets and joined theCommunist Party in 1960. Later in life, his work reflected the darkness and introspectionof ill health and old age. He died of lung cancer on August 9, 1975.

Although he outwardly appeared to conform to official policy, posthumously releasedinformation suggests that Shostakovich may have in fact been critical of Stalinist dictates,particularly with regard to music and the arts. The debate continues over many of his mostpopular works, including the Fifth and Tenth symphonies, as to whether their dissonantquotations and motifs are meant to be interpreted as coded antigovernment messages.Many scholars argue that the significance of Shostakovich is to be found in his music,rather than in his life and opinions, and that to seek political messages in the musicdetracts from, rather than enhances, its artistic value.


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music in THE OVERCOAT

by composer dmitri shostakovich

Waltz from Jazz Suite no. 1

Allegretto from Piano Concerto no. 1 (first movement)

Lento from Piano Concerto no. 1 (second movement)

Allegro con brio from Piano Concerto no. 1 (fourth movement)

Lyric Waltz from Jazz Suite no. 2

Allegro from Piano Concerto no. 2 (third movement)

Dance from Jazz Suite no. 2

Waltz from Ballet Suite no. 3

Romance from Ballet Suite no. 1

Waltz from Ballet Suite no. 2

Allegro from Piano Concerto no. 2 (first movement)

Waltz from Ballet Suite no. 1 (first movement)

Romance from Ballet Suite no. 2

Allegretto from Symphony for Strings, op. 118a

Allegro from Symphony no. 10

Andante from Piano Concerto no. 2 (second movement)

Waltz from Jazz Suite no. 2

Music composed by Dmitri Shostakovich is used by permission of G. Schirmer Inc.


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ruined choirs: shostakovichby alex ross (2000)

Addendum 2004: This article contains quotations from Testimony, the purported memoirs ofDmitri Shostakovich. In light of Laurel E. Fay’s latest researches, published in The ShostakovichCasebook, it is no longer possible to place any faith in Solomon Volkov’s book. Writing in 2000,I stated that the composer’s signature appeared on the first page of the manuscript. This, it turnsout, is not the case.

On a January evening in 1936, Joseph Stalin entered a box at the Bolshoi Theatre, inMoscow. His custom was to take a seat in the back, just before the curtain rose. He had

become interested that month in new operas by Soviet composers: a week earlier, he had seenIvan Dzerzhinsky’s The Quiet Don, and liked it enough to summon the composer for a con-versation. On this night, the Bolshoi was presenting Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a dark, violent,sexually explicit opera by Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin enjoyed himself less. After the thirdact—in which czarist policemen are depicted as buffoons who arrest people on hastily fabri-cated pretexts—the Leader conspicuously walked out. Shostakovich, who had been expect-ing the same reception that Stalin gave to Dzerzhinsky, went away feeling, he said, “sick atheart.” Two days later, Pravda published an editorial under the headline “Muddle Instead ofMusic,” which condemned Shostakovich’s opera outright. “From the first minute,” theanonymous author wrote, “the listener is confused by a deliberately disordered, muddledstream of noise.” The composer was playing a game that “may end very badly.”

In 1936, Shostakovich was 29 years old, and he was the brilliant young man of Sovietmusic. His First Symphony, which he completed at the age of 18, had been taken up byorchestras around the world. He had dedicated himself—industriously, if not enthusiasti-cally—to works on Communist themes. His first opera, a setting of Gogol’s The Nose,typified the impertinence of art in the early Bolshevik years, and his second, Lady Macbeth,was hailed—before Stalin saw it—as the prototypical Soviet music drama. For the benefitof the proletarian establishment, Shostakovich declared of his opera, “I wanted to unmaskreality and to arouse a feeling of hatred for the tyrannical and humiliating atmosphere ina Russian merchant’s household.” At the same time, his satire of the police must havestruck a sympathetic chord with audiences who were living under Stalin. It’s impossible tosay whether Stalin himself took offense at the police scene, or the graphic bedroomsequences, or the spasms of dissonance produced by the orchestra. Perhaps he simply felt,with his genius for destruction, that this young man needed a comeuppance.


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Shostakovich lived the next two years of his life in a state of abject fear. Pravda’s denun-ciation of Lady Macbeth coincided with the beginning of the Great Terror, andShostakovich was immediately declared “an enemy of the people.” He is said to have sleptin the hallway outside his apartment, so that when the n.k.v.d. came to take him away hisyoung family would not have to witness the scene. He finished his Fourth Symphony, asurreal, desolate piece in a Mahlerian vein, and withdrew it when cultural officials warnedhim that he was still on the wrong path. In April of 1937, he set to work on a new sym-phony, in a simpler style; two months later, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a Marshal of the SovietUnion, who had been a supporter and friend of Shostakovich’s for many years, was shot forhis part in a nonexistent conspiracy. As the n.k.v.d rounded up Tukhachevsky’s circle,Shostakovich was called in for questioning. In an impeccably Gogolesque turn of events,the composer found that his appointed interrogator had been arrested, and that no one elsewas interested in his case.

When Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony had its premiere, in November 1937, it sent theaudience into convulsions. During the third movement, the proudly sorrowing Largo,many broke into tears. During the finale, people around the hall got to their feet, as if roy-alty had entered the room. The ovation afterward lasted for 40 minutes. Shostakovich hadwritten a piece that had aroused the love of the masses, and he had done so in a clear stylethat passed muster with socialist-realist aesthetics. The Fifth went on to achieve enormouspopularity in the West. Shostakovich, in the remaining 40 years of his career, proved to beone of the few 20th-century composers who could hold audiences in thrall, and interest inhim has only intensified since his death.

But something funny has happened to this composer on his way to immortality.Audiences are listening to him more intently than ever, but they are being urged to listenin a very different way. Shostakovich, once pegged as a propagandist for the Soviet system,is now exalted as its noblest musical victim. He has been canonized as a moral subversive,a conscientious ironist, a “holy fool.” The ending of the Fifth Symphony, which was oncedescribed as a paean to Stalin’s Russia, is now described as a sub-rosa denunciation of it.Such a 180-degree rotation of meaning is curious, to say the least, and the arbitrariness ofthe change—the music is still said to represent Stalin but, now, critically—suggests thatthe new interpretation may be no more valid than the old one. The Fifth has become a hallof musical mirrors in which our own unmusical obsessions are reflected. The notes, in anycase, remain the same. The symphony still ends fortissimo, in d major, and it still bringsaudiences to their feet.

When I began listening to Shostakovich, in college, I came across a record of a Sovietradio broadcast of one of the composer’s public speeches. I put it on, expecting to meet the


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masterful personality behind the Fifth Symphony. Instead, I heard a man speaking hur-riedly in Russian while an interpreter, sounding like a voice-over man in a driver’s-ed film,intoned such deathless phrases as “We are all a vital part of the times we live in” and “Sovietart rests foursquare on the ideas and principles proclaimed by the great Lenin.” This wasan introduction to the enigma of Shostakovich, who made an art of saying nothing memorable in public. After any performance of his music, he would declare, “Brilliantlydone.” When he was shown something by another composer, he would say, “A remarkablework.” He mastered Soviet doublespeak, and artfully mocked it in his correspondence:“1944 is around the corner,” he wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman. “A year of happiness, joy,and victory. This year will bring us much joy. The freedom-loving Peoples will at long lastthrow off the yoke of Hitlerism, and peace will reign throughout the world under thesunny rays of Stalin’s Constitution. I am convinced of this, and therefore experience thegreatest joy.”

This façade was shattered in 1979, with the publication of Testimony: The Memoirs ofDmitri Shostakovich, as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. Volkov, a young Leningradmusicologist, had interviewed the composer in the early ’70s and smuggled his manuscriptout of the Soviet Union. In Testimony, Shostakovich rages against Stalin and offers provoca-tive reinterpretations of several of his most familiar works. The book introduced many read-ers to Shostakovich’s biting wit, and they began to hear the same tone in his music. A revisionist school of interpretation developed, as critics went hunting for subversive messages in Shostakovich’s ostensibly socialist-realist symphonies. The quartets were like-wise glossed as “private diaries” of the composer’s anguish under Soviet domination.

Not everyone has bought into this outspoken posthumous dissidence. A year afterTestimony appeared, an American scholar, Laurel Fay, wrote an article questioning thebook’s authenticity. A second camp was formed—one that declared that Shostakovich hadnever strayed too far from the Party line, and that to call him a “dissident” made a mock-ery of the term. Fay recently published Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford), which paints thecomposer as a fearful, accommodating figure.

In the last few years, the war for the mind of Shostakovich has only escalated. Polemicsand counter-polemics are flying over the transom. Here is a possible compromise:Testimony does tell us what Shostakovich was thinking about at the end of his life, butShostakovich at the end of his life was a desperately embittered man, whose pronounce-ments on his own work are not always to be trusted. Testimony, in other words, may beauthentic, but it may not always tell the truth. By the early ’70s, when Volkov conductedhis interviews, Shostakovich was wracked by illness and clouded by medication. He hadacquired a poor reputation among those who were trying to resist the excesses of the Soviet


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regime, and, in 1973, he enraged the dissident community further by signing a letter ofdenunciation against Andrey Sakharov. The composer may have wished to improve hisimage in the eyes of the younger generation, of whom Volkov was a representative. So hewent back over his published work and argued that what had seemed doctrinaire was infact subversive. This is what he said of the Fifth Symphony:

I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing isforced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beat-ing you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business isrejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our businessis rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” What kind of apotheosis is that? Youhave to be a complete oaf not to hear that.

It is strange for an artist to hector his audience in this fashion. Shostakovich was usually as vague as possible when he spoke about his music, and his belated, belligerentspecificity about the meaning of the Fifth seems to protest too much. Nothing in the scoresupports such a reading. And even if the composer had wanted a sardonic ending, attemptsto perform it sardonically have proved unconvincing. A hundred orchestral musicians can-not play their hearts out in a major key and sound insincere about what they are doing.

Shostakovich’s revisionist account of the Fifth has caught on because the circumstances ofits creation make us uncomfortable. It’s hard to accept that a composer wrote his best-lovedwork under the gun of a totalitarian regime. Listening to the Fourth and Fifth Symphoniesside by side—one sprawling, dissonant, and spooky; the other strict, conservative, and uplift-ing—leaves no doubt that in 1936 and 1937 Shostakovich did make an abrupt and partlyinvoluntary stylistic swerve. Yet most of us prefer the straitjacketed Fifth to the wildly ges-ticulating Fourth. Most of us, like it or not, share Stalin’s taste for the tonal and the tuneful.The revisionist interpretation, conveniently, gives us the luxury of listening on two levels—the intellectual and the emotional. First, we ponder the theory that Shostakovich set out towrite a meretricious grand finale, hedging it in with ironies and ambiguities. Then we con-nect emotionally with the unironic, unambiguous power of the sound. We nod our headssagely at the program notes, and sway in our seats to the thudding of the drums. If we areinspired, we can jump to our feet at the end—sardonically, of course.

This raises a question about the famous premiere in 1937, at which people stood up inawe while the music was still playing. If, as the revisionists claim, all good Russians under-stood the coded message “Your business is rejoicing,” why didn’t they remain seated? Morelikely, they were getting to their feet because the music was rejoicing, in spite of every-thing—proudly, darkly, improbably. Evidence for the ultimately triumphal character of the


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Fifth crops up in, of all places, Shostakovich Reconsidered. That book excerpts some lecturesby Maxim Shostakovich, the composer’s son, who has long been an authoritative conduc-tor of the symphonies. “The Fifth Symphony is his ‘Heroic’ Symphony,” Maxim writes.He quotes his father as follows: “The hero is saying, ‘I am right. I will follow the way Ichoose.’” The interpretation that Shostakovich offered his son contradicted what he toldVolkov—the ending, he implied, was sincere and in his own voice. The symphony, in otherwords, is the conventional Romantic story of an individual overcoming adversity. ThatSoviet propagandists co-opted it as a glorification of Stalin shouldn’t stop us from hearingglory of a different kind. The hero of this symphony has the freedom to imagine joy, if notto experience it. Call it an angry joy—a lunge for a better world.

The Fifth Symphony is a statement of awesome confidence, but it emerged from conditions of fear. During the remainder of Shostakovich’s career, fear took its toll. Thesuccess of the Fifth, and the even greater wartime success of the Seventh Symphony, the“Leningrad,” made the composer a potent propaganda resource for the Soviets, and hebegan to feel trapped in his position. After the war, he failed to produce the Beethovenian“Victory” symphony that Stalin had been expecting, issuing instead a largely frivolousNinth Symphony with a vaudeville finale. A second campaign against formalism eruptedin 1948, and Shostakovich suffered another sickening fall from grace. A new trend emergedin his dealings with the regime: instead of lying low, as he had done after the Lady Macbethcrisis, he went out of his way to humble himself in public. At the 1948 proceedings againstformalism, during which most of the accused composers avoided personal appearances, heread aloud a speech that was stultifying in its banality and disconcerting in its masochism.He later claimed that the text of this speech had been forced on him, but other partici-pants in the affair were apparently able to speak in their own voice. Prokofiev, for one, sentin a reply that was prickly and condescending in tone.

Shostakovich suffered under the Soviet system, but so did many other people. After apoint, the fact of oppression fails to justify his actions. During the Khrushchev thaw, hebecame, if anything, more deeply implicated in the Communist hierarchy. He recited everyspeech that was put in front of him, he signed manifestos and denunciations without read-ing them. In 1960, he joined the Party, an unnecessary action, for which he gave conflict-ing explanations (one being that he was drunk). There were elements of defeatism in hisphilosophy. “Don’t create illusions,” he would tell his colleagues. “There’s no other life.There can’t be any.” The text of Testimony is laced with hopelessness: life is miserable, itsays, nothing can change, one must grow hard, death waits at the end. Shostakovich con-demns two “patented saviors,” two men of “false religiosity,” who thought they could savethe world. They are, incredibly, Stalin and Solzhenitsyn.


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In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Shostakovich did write many works in which resistanceto authority was a running theme: the texts of his vocal works spoke of poets murdered byczars, rebels dancing on the scaffold, exiles expressing the conscience of a country. But suchmusic was more the projection of a dissident career than the enactment of one. It offeredno hope for action and change. For genuine dissidents, such as Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky,Shostakovich was part of the problem. In an interview, ironically, with Solomon Volkov,Brodsky attacked the effort to locate “nuances of virtue” in the gray expanses ofShostakovich’s later life. Such a career of compromise, Brodsky said, destroys a man insteadof preserving him. “It transforms the individual into ruins,” he said. “The roof is gone, butthe chimney, for example, might still be standing.”

Ruins, however, can be beautiful to behold. Shostakovich was never able or willing towrite another convincingly “heroic” symphony, but he found other avenues of expression,most significantly in chamber music. He wrote his first string quartet in 1938, in the wakeof the Fifth Symphony, and the quartet medium became for him a refuge from the anxi-ety of symphonic public speaking. In the new realm, he could explore the technical limitsof his musical language, which is based on an intricate array of Russian modal scales, andalso test the psychological limits of his narratives, in which seemingly simple and innocentideas are revealed as their opposites. A banal melody is often heard over a changing andblackening array of accompaniments, so that its meaning is altered and destroyed; in thesame way, a plain chord twists around and falls apart as long lines of eighth notes snakethrough it. Shostakovich is a master manipulator of mood: he can show panicky happinessslipping into inchoate rage, and then crumbling into lethargic despair.

Shostakovich’s career was a spectacular one, mixing scenes of triumph and terror. But itis not enough to match up the events of the life with the events of the music, because themusic is still more triumphant and more terrifying. You can hear the agony, and you canthink about the agony in Shostakovich’s life, but Shostakovich wrote agonized music fromthe beginning to the end of his career, no matter who was running the country. Russiancomposers long ago perfected techniques of agony, formulas of lamentation. Tchaikovsky’smusical suffering led biographers to emphasize the suffering in his life, and, when thebiography was exhausted, enthusiasts embraced a spurious rumor that the composer hadcommitted suicide. Something similar has happened with Shostakovich. The strong feel-ing in his music has led people to imagine a man who was engaged in a great battle withthe system. But the hard facts reveal a smaller, weaker figure—a man who strived at allcosts to create conditions in which he could work in peace.

Excerpted from an article originally published in The New Yorker, March 20, 2000.


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cautionary tale of the coat that speaks foritselfby robyn mclean (2004)

With Charlie Chaplin as one of his childhood idols, it seems fitting that PeterAnderson has the lead role in The Overcoat.

The show was recently described in an Australian newspaper as an “epic mime.” Andersonadmits it can be difficult to describe exactly what the show is, but the term mime can be mis-leading. He is concerned stereotypes of mime may give the wrong impression. You won’t seeclowns with painted faces and frozen teardrops escaping from the corners of their eyes, norwill you see the performers climbing over invisible walls or bumping into invisible obstacles.

“Mime sometimes conjures the wrong image for people,” says Anderson. “This is quitea lush production. It’s large, with a massive set, with giant gears that descend (and) sewingmachines.”

The music of Dmitri Shostakovich plays throughout, but again Anderson is forced totry to describe what the show is not. We’ve established it’s not traditional mime, and nowhe’s keen to get across that, despite the constant presence of music, the show is not a danceperformance either.

“It’s so difficult to describe. It’s told without words and it is choreographed to the musicof Shostakovich. We’re not dancers, we are very definitely actors telling a story. It’s lessabstract than most dance. It’s a unique blend of music and movement. The challenge I loveis having movements time out exactly to notes in the music but to make it look accidental.”

Anderson plays the role of the Man, a nondescript fellow who is teased and exiled by hisco-workers and bosses for his shabby appearance. After a last-ditch attempt to salvage his oldcoat from its ever-increasing state of disrepair, he finally has a magnificent coat tailoredspecifically for him. “He defines himself through his coat, it’s sort of his soul,” says Anderson.

Unfortunately his dreams of having his fortunes improved by his impressive newthreads do not come to fruition. “He makes the mistake of thinking that what he wearsand how he looks is [important]. He’s a bit of a lonely social misfit. He comes to think thatif he has a new coat he will fit in with society,” explains Anderson.

“In fact he does [find joy] for a short period of time, but then it sours as it always doeswhen we look for happiness outside of ourselves. I guess you could say it’s a cautionary tale.It all sounds very bleak, but actually there’s quite a lot of humor in the show. It’s very livelyand magical. The way in which the movement is tied to the music is great.”


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Visually, Anderson likens The Overcoat to watching a silent movie, one of his favoritefilm genres, which sparked a continuing interest in mime.

“I studied at mime school in California. It’s always been my first love, which is ironicbecause I’m a playwright and I love text and words. I love expressing with my body. Maybebecause, when I was younger, I was very introverted. I had a hard time going to dances athigh school and being the kid who couldn’t dance.

“I think the universality, too, of wordlessness is great. I mean words are wonderful butparadoxically they can be used to cover up and intellectualize things,” he says.

“My teacher used to always saymime is not so much acting withoutwords, it’s acting for the need forwords. It forces you to find the basicemotions.”

But while he doesn’t speak onstage,Anderson says there is a constant dialogue happening in his head. “Thedialogue is definitely there internally.For some actors who work primarily intext, the show is more of a challenge,but for me it’s just great fun.”

With an onstage cast of 22, TheOvercoat is somewhat of an epic pro-duction in these budget-consciousdays. Half the cast hail from Torontowhile the others, including Anderson,come from Vancouver. After extensivetouring in Canada and overseas,Anderson says the performers are apretty close-knit bunch (except duringhockey season, he jokes).

Anderson has been playing the roleof the Man on and off for the pastseven years. “Even though I’ve been doing it for so long, the music keeps it fresh becauseit’s so complex. Every time I hear it, I hear something new.”

Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, March 12, 2004, © 2004 Financial Times Ltd. (from The Dominion Post ).

Photo of Peter Anderson in The Overcoat by David Cooper


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say it without words

The body is not a foreign language.wendy gorling

The language of the body . . . in many ways is older—some people say richer and morepowerful—than spoken language. We read the language of the body all the time, but it isusually sort of a . . . it is an older language. Spoken language is the second language wehave learned, and really our first language is the language of the body, and it often gets lostin the way we depend on spoken language. Every movement is crammed with language. Itis the language of the body. And the language of music.

bill irwin

Most theater that we see today is thought about in terms of the word, the text. Everythingis subservient to the text: the actor’s gestures, the lighting, the décor, the costumes—every-thing is there to interpret, to make comment upon, or to illustrate the text. In my theater,what we see is as important as what we hear.

robert wilson



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The body says what words cannot.martha graham

Movement is an infinite series of attitudes.etienne decroux

I make the visible invisible and the invisible visible. People think that when we are silent,you have nothing to say. But you can make people laugh and cry through the tragedy andthe comedy of life.

marcel marceau

To mime means to be at one with, to know more intimately by touching from within, therhythm and forces that organize and direct living beings and their dynamic expression, aswell as the organization of things in the space within and without the body.

jacques lecoq

I’ve never used speech in the dance pieces I’ve done because it always felt like I’ve failed ifI’ve had to fall back on saying something with words rather than movement.

The appeal of it is that you don’t quite know what’s going on all the time, it suggests toyou . . . it’s this underlying story . . . going on and for me it’s a new way of storytellingbecause my natural instinct is to be clear, because it’s not got words, I want the audienceto get it. I want them to understand, and when they don’t get it, I’m thinking, How can Imake this clearer? With [Play without Words], that was the big question mark. We thought,Well, we don’t have to explain this. Let the audience think what’s going on here.

matthew bourne

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be under-stood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then Iquestion whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

charlie chaplin

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?marcel marceau

Silence is of the gods. Only monkeys chatter.chinese proverb


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questions to consider

1. Why does the Man want a new overcoat? What happens when he gets what he wants?What happens when he loses what he wants? What does the overcoat represent for him?What does it represent for you?

2. Is The Overcoat a comedy or a tragedy or both? Why?

3. How does The Overcoat compare to other plays you have seen? Is it more like a play ora dance? How is a story typically told in dance? How is this production different?

4. How would you describe the movement in The Overcoat? Is it dance? What kind ofdance? Is it mime? Is it clowning? What other types of movement does it remind you of?Does it remind you of silent movies? How?

5. How do you think the play would be different if it used spoken dialogue to help tell thestory? Would you react the same way if you heard the Man verbally express his desire fora new overcoat? What do you think the Man’s voice would sound like?

6. How does the music in the play help to create the mood of each scene? How does it helpto tell the story? Can you imagine different music being used? What if the play had beenset to rock music, or perhaps Russian folk music? How does the style of the music makeyou feel, and how does that change your perception of the action?

7. Why is the main character called the Man? Why doesn’t he have a name?

8. Which characters in The Overcoat might be considered stock characters, or charactertypes? In what other forms of storytelling have you seen those characters? What are theadvantages of using stock characters in storytelling, especially nonverbal storytelling?What are the disadvantages?

9. To what extent does physicality play a role in television and film today? Can you thinkof any contemporary performers who use physical expressiveness to communicate charac-ter and story?

10. Describe the set. What does it remind you of? Does it evoke a particular style of art, ora particular era in history? Is this production a “period piece”? Which period?

11. In the absence of spoken language, do you think your perception of other elements likecolor, shape, and pattern, and texture are enhanced? Do you focus on other things whenyou don’t have to pay attention to dialogue?

12. What, if any, is the moral to this story?


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for further reading . . .

on nikolai gogol and THE OVERCOAT

Gogol, Nikolai. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Translated and annotated by RichardPevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

——. Dead Souls: A Novel. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. NewYork: Vintage. 1997.

——. The Theater of Nikolay Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings. Edited and translated byMilton Ehre and Fruma Gottschalk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

——. The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil. Translated by David Magarshack.New York: w. w. Norton and Co., 1957.

Magarshack, David. Gogol: A Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1944.

PBS Online. The Face of Russia. http://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/intro.html.

Peace, Richard. The Enigma of Gogol: An Examination of the Writings of N. V. Gogol and TheirPlace in the Russian Literary Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel. Out from Under Gogol’s Overcoat: A Psychoanalytical Study. AnnArbor, MI: Ardis, 1982.

Trahan, Elizabeth, ed. Gogol’s Overcoat: An Anthology of Critical Essays. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982.

Troyat, Henri. Divided Soul: The Life of Gogol. Translated by Nancy Amphoux. GardenCity, NY: Doubleday, 1973.

on dmitri shostakovich

BBC.CO.UK. Music: Artist Profiles: Dmitry Shostakovich. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/profiles/shostakovich.shtml.

Fay, Laurel. Shostakovich: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Jackson, Stephen. Dmitri Shostakovich: His Life and His Works. London: Pavillion, 1997.

Loh, Ch. Speaking of Shostakovich: An Archive of Media Clippings. http://www.geo-cities.com/kuala_bear/ds.html.

Naxos.com. Dmitry Shostakovich. http://www.naxos.comcomposer/shostako.htm.


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Ross, Alex. “Ruined Choirs: Shostakovich,” The New Yorker, March 20, 2000.

Shostakovich, Dmitri. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Editedby Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonia W. Bouis. New York: Limelight Editions, 1984.

Volkov, Solomon. Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship between the GreatComposer and the Brutal Dictator. Translated by Antonia W. Bouis. New York: Knopf, 2004.

plays by morris panych

7 Stories. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1990.

The Dishwashers. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2005.

Earshot. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2002.

The Ends of the Earth. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1994.

Girl in the Goldfish Bowl. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2003.

Lawrence & Holloman. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1998.

Other Schools of Thought. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1994.

Vigil. Vanvouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1996.



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