7 Stories
Written by Morris Panych Directed by Dean Paul Gibson Starring Peter Anderson At the Bluma Appel in Toronto
***½
******
The title of Morris Panych's 7 Stories, getting a snappy 20th-anniversary revival at Toronto's Canadian Stage Company in co-production with Theatre Calgary, has two meanings.
The Man, played by Peter Anderson as in the play's 1989 premiere, spends the entire show perched on an outdoor ledge seven storeys up, while behind him are seven windows into seven apartments that contain seven different stories that burst out and interrupt his contemplation of suicide.
In one apartment, poet Charlotte (Rebecca Northan) and lawyer Rodney (Damien Atkins) liven up a dull affair by taking turns trying to kill one another.
In another, actor Michael (Atkins again) smokes his last cigarette and prepares to assume the role of "Marshall". In a third, a drunken party that no one wants to be at, and the host wishes he wasn't having, rages away.
From 20 years on, we can see the seeds of future Panych plays in many of these shreds of stories. Vigil is foreshadowed in the relationship between terminally ill 100-year-old Lillian and her misanthropic nurse. Paranoid insomniac Leonard - played with bug-eyed vigour by Christopher Hunt - seems a precursor of Earshot's reclusive Doyle. There's even a pet goldfish in peril that brings to mind Girl in the Goldfish Bowl.
Dean Paul Gibson directs 7 Stories with flair, finding ingenious ways to rise above the restrictions of Ken MacDonald's challengingly confining set.
The Man stands on a thin strip and the rest of the characters are only glimpsed through thin rectangular windows, but Gibson gets more out of less by using depth and height to his advantage and filling every square inch of stageable space with sharp, stylized movement.
In a way, the play's cleverness under constraining conditions seems a riposte to the reasons the Man gives for considering suicide. One morning, he awoke and suddenly saw his body, his shoes and his hat as all prisons.
There is no escape from himself, he realized, not even in his car: "This instrument of liberation. It wasn't freedom. It was merely the idea of freedom, bound in metal. A kind of hope, but with a speed limit attached to it."
None of the characters in the building - played by a fine quartet of actors - have any sympathy for him. Indeed, only a couple are aware enough to notice that he's about to kill himself. Even Lillian offers little consolation: "When you're a hundred years old, you'll understand everything. And then you'll die."
Anderson is excellently expressive in his silences when playing straight man to the building's odd tenants, but becomes oddly stilted when he opens his mouth to deliver his final speech. This production's main flaw, however, is that there is never enough tension over whether the Man will jump or not; his kindness is always more clear than his desperation.
But Panych's text delivers: It is funny, philosophical, often poetic and shows no signs of dating. When partygoer Percy brags about having 940 friends, but has trouble naming a single one he likes, it's hard to believe his lines were written in a time before Facebook.
The only nod to the fact that the play premiered in 1989 is that Rachel, a religious zealot who tricks her downstairs neighbours into believing in God, lowers a crisp Canadian one-dollar bill out of her window instead of a loonie. (The paper currency was withdrawn from circulation the month after 7 Stories premiered.)
Panych's strengths are all here, but so are his recurrent weaknesses. The self-deprecating metatheatrics diminishes his work for cheap laughs.
"What's the flying supposed to represent?" asks one character. "Is it an existential statement or what?"
Metatheatricality can sometimes feel like a form of artistic apology, which may be why so many Canadian playwrights have embraced it. In some recent works, Panych, 57 has shown himself reaching beyond the protective one-liners and digging deeper into real emotion.
He has given us many gems over the past two decades, but I'm fairly confident that his best story has yet to be written.
7 Stories continues in Toronto until Dec. 5.