Arts & Entertainment
Creative coupling
Toronto-based theater pair in D.C. for ‘Shoplifters’
Ken MacDonald and Morris Panych (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
‘The Shoplifters’
Through Oct. 19
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth Street, S.W.
$45-90
202-488-3300
In theater, longtime collaboration is not uncommon. For Canadian playwright/director Morris Panych and his husband, set designer Ken MacDonald, it’s a way of life.
Together, the pair has worked on about 90 productions. Both agree their joint projects can be trying, but they’re always the most fulfilling. “Nobody argues like we do in terms of design,” MacDonald says cheerily and without hesitation. “Other directors like my work from the start, but Morris can be critical. He loves design and as director ultimately has the last word.”
“It’s true,” agrees Panych. “When you collaborate with someone for years whether you live together or not, you get to know them really well — weaknesses and defaults and when they fake an easy route. You call them on it and it irritates them. But it also brings out their best.”
Currently, the couple is in Washington premiering Panych’s “The Shoplifters” at Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theatre. The biting comedy features Broadway’s Jayne Houdyshell as Alma, a career shoplifter whose thieving ways are about to be cut short by an overzealous security guard.
“Morris likes to write about petty things,” says MacDonald during a recent chat in one of Arena’s comfortable backstage rooms. The couple finishes each other sentences and talks over one another in a funny but singularly polite way. “That’s true,” Panych says. “I like starting off with something small — like a woman stealing a steak — and extrapolating it into a huge deal.”
Have either ever shoplifted? “No. Never,” says McDonald. But Panych says, “Sure. Long ago before I had a career, I took meat. My friends and I liked to do steak fondues.”
Panych, 62, began his career as an actor but later branched out into directing and playwriting which he had studied in college: “Acting can be humiliating and alienating. Not so much in theater, but as an actor you have to try to get all kinds of work to survive and the judgment is nonstop. I wanted other ways to express myself creatively.”
Throughout most of his 20s, MacDonald, 61, was a high school art teacher. “I was never trained in set designer. I’m foremost a drawer/painter. I draw my sets and then figure out how to build them.”
“He has no technical skills,” says Panych wryly. “But Ken does have great ideas.”
“The Shoplifters” is set in a grocery store break room. Rather than design a generically drab space, MacDonald has constructed a dizzyingly high tower of 800 brown packing boxes interrupted by brightly colored patches of laundry detergent and breakfast cereals. Some of the custom made boxes float like clouds and light shines through the spaces that separate them. “Other directors expect something more realistic. But Morris and I believe theater should be theater. It should make a statement.”
“The play is approached from an absurdist, mock naturalistic point of view. It has to be dreamlike,” Panych says. “We have people surrounded by stuff. We live in a hugely consumeristic world with a huge dichotomy between the haves and have nots. There’s a shockingly large amount of shit in the world. Boxes represent all that we live in.”
Together 34 years, the Toronto-based couple married in 2004. “It was shortly after same sex marriage had become legal in parts of Canada. And there was talk that the right might be taken away. So we thought we’d better do it. Now no one in Canada cares. That’s what I foresee for the U.S. in a couple years.”
In addition to opening “The Shoplifters,” they’re also designing upcoming productions of Panych’s next new play, and the musical “Sweet Charity” for Ontario’s Shaw Festival in May. Right now they’re fighting a lot, says the couple. But it’s not they’re fault. They blame the deadlines.
“We’re fine,” Panych says.
“We’re used to it,” MacDonald adds.
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Uncloseted Media published this interview on July 7.
By SPENCER MACNAUGHTON, ISABEL STOKES, and BELLA SAYEGH | After appearing on the 11th season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” the first season of “Canada’s Drag Race: Canada vs. the World,” the sixth season of “RuPaul’s All Stars” and now the 11th season of “All Stars,” Silky Nutmeg Ganache, known by many as the Reverend, is undoubtedly a legend.
Born and raised in Moss Point, Miss., Ganache bears all in this episode of “UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton.” She speaks about her relationship with gender, her 100-pound weight loss, what it’s like living as a queer person of color in a red state and why she’s calling on allies to stand up for the trans community.
Patrons enjoyed a night out at the popular LGBTQ venue Crush Dance Bar on Friday, July 3.
(Washington Blade photos by Landon Shackelford)
Theater
‘My Favorite Sociopath’ debuts at Shepherdstown’s CATF
Gay playwright Aurin Squire’s take on D.C. journalism in the ‘90s
‘My Favorite Sociopath’
Contemporary American Theater Festival
July 10-Aug. 2
Shepherdstown, W.Va.
Catf.org
Discernment. It’s a thing some people have, explains playwright Aurin Squire, especially when you’re gay or Black in America (Squire is both).
“You instinctively know when the mob is teaming up for the best interests of the powers that be. You can feel it in the air.”
In his sharp new satire “My Favorite Sociopath,” Squire writes about life experiences but set in a different time and place: It’s the 1990s, early days of the 24-hour news cycle, and three ambitious journalism students are pursuing success in D.C.
And now, Squire’s play, along with other new works, are making their world premieres at the annual Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) at Shepherd University in historic, queer-friendly Shepherdstown, W.Va. (just a 90-minute drive from D.C.).
“All of my plays are queer in some way,” says Squire, 46. “This one touches on harmless and dangerous lies. The characters are on the spectrum sexually, and it’s interesting how all that falls out.”
And he’s given it a lot of thought.
“Already as a kid, it seemed to me that the rage against rap music and sex was coming from closeted people resisting their own urges and temptations. For me, it was interesting to see a witch hunt led by witches. Queer people can always call out a lie.”
Since September, Squire has also been working with a TV show about the tech industry set in Silicon Valley. He says, “It seems the general flow of the tech industry is that humanity and civilization is finished and it’s just about accumulating as many goods as possible before everything collapses. In fact, those who are profiting actually agree. But for those who disagree, they believe the solution is to build bigger gates, but activists believe we can stop this”
Yet, he’s learned from folks associated with the show. “Many say the quickest way to divorce yourself from any responsibility or regulations — smash and grab. Otherwise, you have to stop and think and regulate your desires for greed and power”
Squire possesses a penchant for pithy titles. He laughs, explaining the first thing he wrote as a student at Juilliard was “Obama-ology,” the comedy with contemporary message. While a lot of people liked the name, it didn’t necessarily vibe with the author. He concedes that he chooses names based on “easy to remember” and titles that won’t be easy to lose as a file.
Another is “Defacing Michael Jackson,” a coming-of-age dramedy set in rural Florida in 1984, specifically Squire’s native town Opa-locka, Miami, a fantastical place famed for its fanciful Moorish revival architecture.
Living in the shadow of exotic structures, he wasn’t particularly fazed. Squire says “It wasn’t until returning to visit after my freshman year at Northwestern University in Chicago that I realized how weird it was: When you grow up in a place, you take surroundings for granted no matter how over the top.”
Now based in New York (where for two happy years, 2017-2019, he shared digs with drag king Murry Hill), Squire returns frequently to Miami to be with family, but this summer has been filled with both work and travel.
Currently, he’s in Shepherdstown with CATF shaping up “My Favorite Sociopath.” Later this summer he will travel to South Africa for research, followed by a silent writing retreat in Santa Fe, N.M.
Much of Squire’s work reflects the Latino, African, Caribbean, African-American, and Jewish cultures he grew up around in South Florida.
When asked if today’s winds of anti-multiculturalism worry him, he replies, “No, because that’s going to pass. Most people don’t like, people are seeing the negative results of it, and the young people coming up despise it. White male gamers were tricked momentarily through the algorithms into voting against their own interests and they’re now seeing how it’s not working out for them.
“Conservatives always try to stop progress and eventually they always lose. It’s just a question of where we’ll be in the middle of the end of civilization before that happens. I’d like to hope we can turn the ship around before then.”
In addition to “My Favorite Sociopath,” CATF summer season features three other world premieres (Lisa D’Amour’s comedy “The Smoker,” “Refugee Rhapsody” by Yussef El Guindi, “Best Line Wins: A Play Inspired by the Improvised Lives of Elaine May & Mike Nichols” by Beth Kander) and “¡VOS!” by Christina Pumariega.
CATF runs from July 10-Aug. 2 in three venues on the Shepherd University campus: Frank Center, Marinoff Theater, and Studio 112.
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