Seven StoriesBy Morris Panych

Who is Morris Panych?Playwright, actor, and

director Morris Panych is a man for all seasons in Canadian theatre. He has directed over eighty productions, and written more than two dozen plays that have been produced across Canada, Britain, and the United States.

PanychPanych was born in 1952 in

Calgary and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. He received a diploma in radio and television arts from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and then studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia (BFA, 1977), and theatre at East 15 acting school in London, England. He works primarily in Vancouver, and more recently, Montreal.

7 StoriesThe play is set on the

seventh storey ledge of an apartment building, in front of several windows. The protagonist, simply named “Man,” stands on the ledge, contemplating a jump, but he is constantly delayed by interruptions from the individuals in the apartments.

7 Stories: Charlotte and RodneyCharlotte and

Rodney play violent games which heighten their sense of being alive by bringing them closer to death

7 Stories: LeonardLeonard, a paranoid

psychiatrist, refuses to acknowledge any definable reality by continually shifting his perspective and interpretation.

7 Stories: MarshallMarshall denies his

own reality, and adopts a persona for personal and financial gain.

7 Stories: RachelRachel, a religious

fanatic, constructs a bogus faith and contrives catastrophes to incite others to subscribe, parodying God’s trials of Job.

7 Stories: Joan and MichaelJoan and Michael

“expose the utter pointlessness of dressing for an existence that is all pretence. For them, human consensus is simply a reduction of life to ‘beige,’ and the central question is ‘which beige?’”

7 StoriesAll are attempting to

escape their limitations, to explore other ways of being and perceiving.

7 Stories: LillianAn old woman, Lillian,

functions as a kind of seer in the play, Her advice to the Man that he must fly – must rise above his limited and negative point of view -- is an indicator that the imagination can create for itself a freer environment, a larger space. For Lillian, her enclosed space, a small room which she has not left for fifty years, can be very large. Freedom is a state of mind.

7 Stories7 Stories is a highly meta-theatrical play in that it draws

attention to its form and conventions: the structure functions as a metaphor. The characters point to their own role-playing as a way to create a reality for themselves which has some significance. They state and question the themes of the play; and at the end, an audience is created which observes the Man’s miraculous flight which functions as a climax, before it (and we) are dismissed from the scene by the police. Theatre, then, becomes a way of imagining life, and the play points many times to the ways in which “all the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players” (to quote Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

7 StoriesMarshall’s view of

theatre as life is more cynical: he points to the absurdity of “squeezing a whole existence into a measly evening’s entertainment on the stage.”

7 StoriesEach character has a story to tell the Man, who functions first

as an audience, and then as the protagonist, when he finally tells his own story in a lengthy monologue near the end. Lillian’s absurd story of how the despairing and disillusioned Frenchman (an allusion to the existentialism of Sartre, a French philosopher) makes nonsense out of any attempt to find a philosophy by which to live. It prompts the Man to recount his own moment of crisis, when he lost his faith in the structure that provided his life with some meaning, or at least direction. Although there are continual references to, and examples of miscommunication and misunderstanding in the play, the act of storytelling, of creating an imaginative construct in an effort to make sense of life, is shown to provide a way of coming to terms with chaos.

Sourceshttp://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?

term=7%20Storieshttp://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/

artistsstories/writing/ob127888028985562330.htm