David Fennario is Canada’s most
prominent Marxist playwright. He is
also a writer of great integrity. Several
years ago he asked himself: “Whose
politics do my plays serve?” And when
he realized the working class was gaining
little or no benefit from his work, he
turned his back on the mainstream thea-
tre despite its lure of imminent fame and
fortune.

Fennario was born and grew up in
Point Saint Charles, an Anglo working
class neighbourhood in Montreal. After
years of living on the streets and working
in warehouses, he published some
excerpts from his journal and began
hawking them around town.

Without a Parachute was an account
of being young and poor, about the
world of “hard work and small plea-
sures.” The book won Fennario a grant
to study theatre. For two years he
watched rehearsals at the Centaur Thea-
tre in Montreal, then sat down to write a
play of his own.

The result was On the Job, a one-act
play set in a shipping department. His
next play, Nothing to Lose, was about a
bunch of truck drivers in a bar arguing
about a strike. Toronto, his third play,
has sunk from view, but the bilingual

DAVID FENNARIO

|

Balconville was a brilliant evocation of

working class life in Montreal and played

land. It won Fennario the Chalmers
Award for the Best Canadian Play in
1979.

With his fifth play, Moving, Fennario
began to grow disillusioned. Although
Moving was about the working people of
Point Saint Charles, few of them came to
the theatre. Fennario suddenly realized
he had travelled too far too fast. Some-
where along the way he had lost all the
people he cared about.

It was a difficult decision, but as a
socialist Fennario felt he had no choice:
if the people he grew up with could not
accept the mainstream theatre as theirs,
neither could he. After 10 very successful
years he turned his back on the best job
he had ever had.

What Fennario wanted was a socialist
theatre. “I still believe in using theatre as
a tool to raise social consciousness and
even to build a revolutionary party.” He
wanted a theatre which would awaken
people to their predicament and lead to
action. Fennario felt it was one of the
ways the working class could develop a
positive sense of itself and begin to
explore its huge untapped potential.

As a step in that direction, in 1981
Fennario and some friends formed the
Black Rock Community Group and

to audiences across Canada and in Eng- |

Playwright rejects fame
for people’s theatre

issued a manifesto. (Workers building
the Victoria Bridge over the St. Law-
rence had dredged a large black rock out
of the river in the 1850s and set it as a
memorial on the unmarked graves of
6,000 immigrants who had died of
typhoid fever in 1847. By naming them-
selves Black Rock the group was assert-
ing their pride in their local history and
who they were — the sons and daugh-
ters of the working poor.)

The group formed a theatre troupe,
but as Fennario soon found, a revolu-

tionary culture is much easier to imagine’

than create.

Despite all the problems, Fennario
persisted, and in 1984 the troupe pres-
ented its first of community theatre, Joe
Beef. Joe Beef was a local legend. During
the Lachine Canal strike in 1877, Joe
Beef, a tavern owner, had provided the
labourers with free food and drink so
they could prolong their fight for a
union.

With Joe Beef, Fennario abandoned
the traditional idea of a play for a more
popular cabaret style that included
songs, satirical skits and dance routines.
The play had no fixed text but evolved
from one presentation to the next
according to audience response. After

_——————

I still believe in using
theatre as a tool to raise
social consciousness and
even to build a revolution-
ary party.

each performance the audience were
invited onto the stage for a beer from Joe
Beef’s bar and to discuss the play with
the actors. It was a genuinely popular
play, a community event.

Though most of the characters in Joe
Beef were flat, little more than carica-
tures, the play made a major advance in
another direction. For the first time Fen-
nario put the exploiters and the oppres-
sors on the stage. In all his previous plays
they had been an invisible force, a malig-
nant power which mysteriously seemed
to distort the lives of the working class
characters. Now, at last, Fennario could
explore not only the poverty and depri-
vation of Point Saint Charles, but its root
causes.

Plays and politics are Fennario’s twin
passions. He has said: “The kind of thea-
tre I want to do I can’t do without a
growing revolutionary party.” He rec-
ognizes the dialectic between growing
class consciousness and radical expres-
sion in the arts, and how the two have a
way of feeding on one another.

More than anything else, Fennario’s
plays need a new audience, and he works
hard to build one. Last winter when he
was in Toronto, he arranged for a group
of worker-writers to get together with
some professional actors at the Iron-
workers Hall to read through a draft of
Doctor Neill Cream. It matters to David
Fennario what working people think of
his plays, and how they respond to them.

David Fennario, the guy from Point
St. Charles, has a grudge. He hates capi-
talism. He hates it with a passion. He
hates what it does to people, generation
after generation. He hopes his plays can
help put an end to it.

— Brian Davis

10 « Pacific Tribune, November 28, 1988

ARLO GUTHRIE

Poy
|
¢

PETE SEEGER

Guthrie, Leadbelly tribute

Fans of the late and great Woody Guth-
rie and Huddie Ledbetter — and of pro-
gressive rock and folk — will be warming
up the couch on Saturday, Dec. 10. That’s
when KCTS public television in Seattle
(Channel 9 in most areas of B.C.) presents A
Shared Vision: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie
and Leadbelly. :

The songs of both legends of progressive
American music will be performed by Bruce
Springsteen, U2, John Cougar Mellen-
camp, Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, Pete Seeger,
Arlo Guthrie, Little Richard, Emmylou
Harris and several other prominent artists.
It airs at 10:10 p.m.

Immediately following the show, at

. approximately 11:40 p.m., is the acclaimed

1980 documentary, The Weavers: Wasn’t
That A Time, featuring the famed four-
some’s reunion concert at Carnegie Hall.

* *

Those who missed the premiere on CBC
last year can still catch Heaven On Earth, a
dramatized account of the arrival of Welsh
and British orphans in Canada during the

late 19th century. The story revolves around
several children who find new lives — and
new tribulations — im the farming com
munity of New Canaan, Ont. The two-hou!
production airs on Masterpiece Theatre 08
KCTS this Sunday, Dec. 4, 9 p.m.

* * *

Ever wonder who the “real Julia” was?
Readers of Lillian Hellman are generally
aware that the late’ left-wing playwright
embellished her memoirs, such as the

acclaimed Pentimento, which carried a |

account of an American turned anti-fascist
resistance fighter in pre-war Austria. That
chapter was made into the movie Julia stat
ring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave.
The ‘Real’ Julia: Muriel Gardiner’s Story

contends that Gardiner, an American pSY- |

chiatrist whose life paralleled that of Hel
Iman’s Julia, is the inspiration for the story:
The production, which includes interviews
with Gardiner along with archival footag®
plays on KCTS TV on Monday, Dee. 12
10:25 p.m. It is preceded by the movie, Julia,
at 8:03 p.m.

Political thriller hits

McCarthyism, Cold War

the flag, spouting Cold War, anti-Soviet

THE HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET.
Screenplay by Walter Bernstein; produced
and directed by Peter Yates. Starring Kelly
McGillis, Jeff Daniels, Jessica Tandy,
Mandy Patinkin. Available on video
cassette.

Imagine, if you can, an exciting mystery
thriller — today, out of Hollywood — in
which the major villain is a dead ringer for
the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy and
FBI agents are painted as something less
than heroic. (It is set in the 1950s.)

Imagine, further, that the heroine, Emily,
is a peace activist who has been fired from
her job as a photography editor of a major
magazine for refusing to “name names”
before a senatorial Un-American Activities
Committee. This could only have been writ-
ten by a formerly black-listed screenwriter,
as indeed it was.

The House on Carroll Street really gets
lively when Emily, played with intelligence
and believability by Kelly McGillis, stum-
bles on a scheme by the senator to smuggle
Nazi war criminals disguised with Jewish
names, into the US. Still being harassed by
two FBI agents for her refusal to testify, she
has been forced to take a skimpily-paid job
as reader for an elderly woman (Jessica
Tandy) whose Brooklyn house backs onto
the mysterious house on Carroll Street.

Glancing out the window, Emily spots
the same senator who had badgered her
conferring with suspicious strangers. After
befriending a young German who seemed
to be in on the plot and who was subse-
quently stabbed, Emily tracks the Nazis toa
Brooklyn wedding party.

Mandy Patinkin does a bang-up job as
the smarmy senator who wraps himself in

rhetoric, and who tries to persuade Emily

that “we're both on the same side.” Failin8

that, and suspecting that she’s on to hs

smuggling game, he becomes a frightenin&
menace,

Aside from a fairly incredible chase sce”

inside the roof of Grand Central Station: |

the film’s action for the most part 1S

sé
against the mellow streets and houses of

Greenwich Village and Brooklyn. To g° i

whole distance without a single exp!

car is a considerable relief. To be sure, there
is one explosion and a stabbing, and
exciting chase through library book stacks

but those episodes are believable in the con

text.

_Not too believable is Jeff Daniels
nice young Mid-westerner turned
agent. Because he falls for Emily
course of dogging her tracks, he finds ?
self coming to her defence when shes
terrible danger from a conspiracy
appears to have the blessing of the g°
ment. For his trouble the bureau tra?
him back to the boonies. pe

In the end, they part “cute” whe?
repeats his opening line, “I would really It
to take to you,” and she replies, as she 10
in the beginning, “I have nothing to S4Y de
you.” Never mind their romantic interlu
— she is not about to cave in.

Walter Bernstein wrote the scree?
for The Front (starring Woody Allen a
Zero Mostel), a film that told the story © the
experiences as a blacklisted writer im

sfers

as a

FBI
the |
ds him”

1950s. He mined some rich material fof | + |

House on Carroll Street from

experience — poetic justice, you m t pe

— Pele deL4
People’s Daily

ver"

jay
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