Preview
GET AWAY
Alberta Theatre Projects
playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays
Starring Jesse Dwyre, Patrick Galligan and Adrienne Smook
Written by Greg MacArthur
Directed by Glenda Stirling
Runs until March 5
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Is there anything more surreal than feeling alone among busloads of strangers, wondering whether it’s only you who has realized that not a soul is actually speaking to anyone else? Could you be blamed for wanting to take a vacation from it all and retreat into the woods for awhile, to touch base with yourself? Would you bring the disease with you?
In the disturbed world of playwright Greg MacArthur’s Get Away, one of the four mainstage plays being presented as part of this year’s playRites festival at Alberta Theatre Projects, modern malaise has consumed the world with all the efficiency of a virus, leaving only listless souls and profound loneliness. Sensing the plague, David finds a cabin in the woods where he hopes to escape from this growing sense of defeat. It is there that he meets a homeless teenage couple – Henry and Garbo – who seem to offer him something resembling the companionship he longs for. But while David finds relief in their company, his dependence soon begins to grow into something far more menacing – a dangerous desperation that guides the play’s detached sense of terror.
While the growth of this obsession is disturbing, MacArthur regards it as a necessary extension of the play’s central conceit – an increasing sense of loneliness and disillusionment that the Montreal-based playwright wants audiences to see as a very human, even reasonable condition.
"I think that desperation stems logically out of that kind of isolation, and especially so in David’s case," he says. "He’s so isolated and feels so out of synch with the world, and when he gets a glimmer of it in these two teenagers he is in such a desperate state that he latches onto it and says, ‘These two people will save me.’ And once he gets a taste of that, the fear or the tragedy that it might be taken away and he would be left with himself again is almost too much to bear."
MacArthur says that the characters talk a lot about material objects in the play, "but ultimately you can’t depend on that to save you. You have to find it in yourself, and that’s what pushes (David) to such desperate measures; that desperation, that fear that what he’s found is going to be taken away."
This tenuous connection that David holds onto reflects both the growing plague in his own world and the feeling of separation felt by MacArthur himself, who started writing the play as a way of dealing with these feelings of separation. While Get Away’s "plague" may be implausible, it is rooted in an urban reality.
"You ride the metros, the subways or the buses and you get the sense that no one’s really connecting with each other, that no one’s really speaking," says the playwright, who has held writing residencies in Toronto, Montreal and Cape Town, South Africa. "And sometimes I look around and I think, ‘Is everyone feeling the same way? Is everybody feeling this and yet no one wants to talk about it?’"
Ultimately, it is the failure of communication that drives the growing terror of Get Away, with its characters speaking to each other and the audience without ever illuminating their ugly, hidden realities. Like the thousands of city dwellers who spend their days as perpetual strangers, it is the act of selective silence that haunts MacArthur’s play.
"I think that if these characters could actually yell and scream at each other and break down and cry, then the play wouldn’t exist," he says. "Part of the tragedy of it is that none of these characters can either say what they want or know what they want; if they could, I don’t think that the epidemic would exist for them." |
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