The Drawer Boy: Hermes On the Farm

"OH! the fond links that bind us to this earth,

strong as bands of iron-yet fine as gold;

partings and tears oft mingle with our mith,

If loving much love can never grow cold!"

John Imrie (Canadian poet)

The Theatre is staging Michael Henley’s The Drawer Boy at 101, 215, 14 Ave, SW. The play is a modern Canadian classic. A quick summary of the play: a young Canadian actor, Miles from Toronto, arrives at a farm to conduct dramaturgical research. The farm is run by two aging bachelors, Morgan & Angus, two friends who have lived with each other since the Second World War. Angus, soft and childlike, has something equivalent to trauma-induced amnesia, and Morgan, sardonic and terse, acts as his business partner and caretaker. What ensues is a narrative replete with themes of psychological repression and the evasion of trauma through storytelling and myth-making. I would certainly like to deconstruct the plot in depth, but it will inevitably take something away from the experience for those yet to see it. Instead, I will generally touch on some themes.

Why does an actor come to visit Morgan & Angus? What does it say about the intersection between the philosophical temperament of an ‘artist’ and the agrarian wisdom of Angus & Morgan? Miles embodies what Friedrich Schiller (German philosopher) termed the play drive. It is the meeting ground between our desire to impose cognitive unity on the world (form drive) and our need to engage with the world through feeling and spontaneity (sense drive). The artist lives on the threshold between control and chaos. Such a temperament is defined by the capacity to sustain contradiction between reason and emotion. Too much of the former and life becomes a tried exercise in rules and lifeless certitudes, and too much of the latter results in being deluged by sensory experiences that are unanchored and incoherent.

Miles, as we find out, plays a pivotal role in helping Angus rediscover traumatic memories (war & relationships) through the power of drama and imitation. This, in some ways, is a sort of theatre of restoration, allowing Angus, through the safety of fiction, to confront excruciating and contradictory truths. Miles introduces him to the world of the artist, a world that abounds with the play drive. Such a therapeutic practice actually does exist, and was popularized by Jacob Moreno (Viennese Psychiatrist). The practice was known as psychodrama, the aim of which was to use performance and drama to allow patients to safely stage their memories, conflicts, and relationships. This, it has been argued, is a much more constructive form of engaging with difficult memories and experiences. Unlike talk therapy, which has been criticized for not being a whole-body activity, the entire body in psychodrama is mobilized for the discovery and resolution of difficult emotions; there is a somatic dimension to the healing. It is no wonder that Miles takes Angus, in one scene, through the story of Hamlet, possibly to remind Angus (and us) that Theatre is a laboratory for grief and remembrance. Angus, like Hamlet, is plagued by a fractured and grief-stricken conscience; unlike Hamlet, he has no capacity for his language to match the structure of the pain and suffering behind his trauma.

This is what I have often found terrifying and sublime in Hamlet, no matter the depth of his suffering, his language traces the architecture of his despair with frightening lucidity. Hamlet is absolutely ruthless in exposing the depth of his suffering to the heat and light of linguistic articulacy; Nietzsche (German philosopher) famously said that Hamlet does not suffer from indecisiveness because he is weak-willed, but rather he has seen through the veil of the world and through it he develops an “insight into the horrible truth…”. The insight being that existence is tragic, wholly tragic; what else could explain Ophelia’s (Hamlet's lover) self-destruction (suicide) in Hamlet? To see the epitome of purity and beauty (Ophelia) broken by the indifference of the world and by the callousness of Hamlet is deeply disturbing. If Hamlet thinks too deeply about the state of things, she feels too deeply about the state of things. Whereas Hamlet’s intellect comes to comprehend the tragic texture of life, Ophelia's heart absorbs its tone completely. The artist (actor), like Hamlet & Ophelia, occupies some liminal position between thinking too much and feeling too much, and it is the brinkmanship between both that Miles represents at an archetypal level (explained below).

The invocation of Hamlet in this play is relevant when seen through a psychotherapeutic lens. Angus cannot find his memories unless he finds the right language to unlock them. On my way home from the play, I came across someone who had their key stuck in a lock (apartment building). After a few minutes of trying to help her by contorting the key with force, it eventually came free after a fluid and loose motion of the wrist. Relevant, personally very relevant, after having seen this play. Miles, like a good therapist, does not force the lock of Angus’s mind open with brute force; rather, he loosens it with dramatic language and imaginative re-enactment. For anyone with an interest in mythology, Miles potentially symbolizes Hermes (Greek Mythology); he (Hermes) was a conduit between different worlds (seen & unseen) and moved between the known and the possible. This is apt, because Angus requires a guide to take him through the terrain of past and present. Who better than an actor? Someone vocationally trained to cross the liminal boundaries of self and circumstance.

If Miles is Hermes, then Morgan is Apollo (Greek sun-God of wisdom and calm) – stoic, reserved and defined by emotional control. There is much that can be deconstructed here, but for the aforementioned reason (not revealing the narrative), I will not do so; suffice it to say, he helps Angus learn to live by framing his reality and his language for him. This should not be thought of as contradictory to how we live our lives; we shape reality for each other through the use of a mutual lexicon. To quote Wittgenstein (Austrian-British philosopher), “To imagine a language”, he wrote, is to “imagine a form of life.” As we find out in the play, Morgan’s need to impose order on a difficult history through a sanitized and safe curation of language is both well intentioned and a psychological evasion.

Both things can be true. We can tell people we love them, and we may mean it, but we may not tell them what we need them to hear or what we need to say. Are they ready to hear what we have to say? How will we know if we never tell them? Morgan's sterilization of language is emblematic of how we purge our domestic communication of uncomfortable truths. In such a context, language takes on the opposite function for which we believe it exists – it obfuscates reality and does so in inventive and subversive ways. Miles, by dramaturgically rewriting of the state of things on the farm, de-naturalizes the grammar of Angus and Morgan’s shared world. The minimal but impenetrable language of the farm is laid bare, peeled back slowly like the layers of an onion.

To expand on the mythic theme, what does Angus symbolize? Potentially, Dionysus (Greek God of wine and revelry). The mythology around him (Dionysus) is varied, contextually anchored in the spiritual practices of diverse historical communities. There is one aspect, though, that may be salient. The Orphic school of mysteries rewrote the myth of Dionysus; for them, he was not only the God of excess and mischief, but was a God who had suffered and had been torn apart, out of jealousy, by the Titans (they precede the Olympian Gods). It is in this image that Angus is a Dionysian figure, dismembered by trauma. It is not hard to see the image of the Trinity here; Morgan as the sun-God of reason, Miles as the messenger and medium of worlds (Paraclete - holy spirit), and Angus as the son-God (Christ) of suffering. Is this mythic construction an interpretive stretch? Probably, but the theatre is a sanctuary for myths that, like Dionysus, refuse to die. There is minor symbolism in the play to support this interpretation. Example - we see Angus administer some form of liquid medicine to Morgan when he is bruised (after an accident), and likewise, Morgan administers it to Angus at a certain point in the play. This can certainly be read as the sacrament (Eucharist) of their unity. Such a reading does not require one to be religious, only interested in approaching this text with the curiosity of an anthropologist.

Two other moments in the play that I found intriguing, we see Angus staring out towards the night sky, counting the stars with mathematical brilliance, and Miles polishing stones (a form of punishment administered by Morgan). The counting of stars is a demonstration of the Dionysian-Christ figure struggling to understand the nature and orchestrations of the infinite through the deductive certainty of human cognition. It evokes the biblical sentiment, ‘let this cup pass from me’, (even Christ could not understand the workings of the divine mind) this is the human plea before the unfathomable mystery of all that lies outside of human reason. We hear during the play that Angus counts the stars by breaking the sky up into sections; this is, of course, equivalent to using a knife to cut through the crust of the earth. Like Angus, there are moments in life where reason is dwarfed by the chilling ferocity of the unknown, we try to carve sense out of enormity. It is also a representation of how the inner vastness of Angus's mind has been compartmentalized/sectionalized (hence, the 'drawer' boy) through trauma. Mile’s stone polishing can be read as the sharpening of the human spirit through creative insight and interruption. Such a process cannot always express itself methodically, which is why he eventually becomes impatient and, in a fit, throws all of them (stones) into a bucket. This underscores the improvisational and non-linear movement of creative agency - there is no right time for things to get better, for things to improve, time is what we make of it - Angus has spent a lot of time imprisoned in a mind brim with distorted truths - Miles instigates him, to want more, to ask for more. It is this provocation that compels Angus to slowly become an artisan of the soul. This complements the traditional truth that he already lives with as a farmer - creativity is not what we till from the world, rather, what the world tills from us in return. The surrender of the farmer to the mystique of nature becomes the artists surrender to the mystery of existence.

What does the end of the play show us? Are we left with a Hamletian (before his death, where he is contrite) vision of our place in the world? A world in which human beings must tragically succumb to the vagrancy and arbitrariness of life and fate? Or does it suggest something more redemptive? It is redemptive, wholly redemptive. Angus's journey reflects the trinitarian cycle - creation, fall and redemption. Angus’s psyche, once whole, becomes shattered by trauma and, through the reconstruction of this trauma, regains its innocence, i.e., becomes whole once again. As the play shows us, art is not a civilizational luxury, it is a spiritual necessity - art gently cracks open the shell of our inherited and lived traumas, taking us to intersections that hold the healing energies of, both, rural (traditional) wisdom and cosmopolitan imagination.

Angus & Morgan are never assured of a good harvest but they labor anyway, demonstrating a trust in the cyclical replenishment of the earth. So too, does Miles slowly fallow the fields of Angus's mind, sowing images, words and characters where silence and confusion once existed. Whether we tend to land or to a wounded psyche, both require love, tenderness and faith. Sometimes, at such junctions, 'cutting the sky up into pieces' (equivalent to Hamlet's rumination) for the purposes of deductive clarity is not enough, something more is needed, it is the creative bravery and audacity (embodied by Hermes) of human agency. It is a form of emotional grounding that can recover and move through the world without capitulation in the face of trauma. It is to move from the cosmic impulse to act without falling into the abyss of self-annihilation.

Nietzsche's partial quote on Hamlet (above) is half the story, the entire quote suggests that art is the antidote to human despair. Knowledge, and in the context of this play memory, wounds us, so deeply sometimes that our certitudes around fate, life and the nature of existence collapse around us, but this is where the regenerative power of art is revealed - it knows the secret language of human suffering because it does not conceal the horrors of existence but shapes them into forms that make them bearable. This is the beating heart of the play - Angus must find a way to metabolize his memories, and it is art that provides the means for him to integrate them (memories) without shattering his psyche. The transformational power of art protects the vulnerable like Ophelia, they are given a second chance at life by organizing the inner maelstrom of a broken heart into ritual, transforming anguish into renewal. In mythic terms, this is the Dionysian reconstruction after dismemberment, or in Egyptian mythology Isis recollecting the scattered limbs of Osiris - fragments brought to a state of wholeness (the parallel in the Christian canon is the resurrection). Does art perform the same sort of sacred labor? The play would seem to suggest so, it brings that which has been shattered by trauma into a state of rehabilitation, into something luminous.

There is also a little Easter egg for theatre lovers in the play - somewhere near the end, we see Miles confronted with a choice, will he write down everything that he has seen and witnessed on the farm? Will he codify the narrative of the events in a writing journal? He does not - this is an appreciation (of course I am over-interpreting but why not) of the primacy of the oral transmission of human experience and the fact that some of our best stories can only be told through a living voice. Through the trembling, fragile and utterly human act of telling. We can read this as a homage to the theatre and the underscoring of the fact that some of our best stories can only find loving and authentic homes in the living voice between human beings.

To the production – What a hell of a comeback story by this company. Their last production was rocky, very rocky, but they have smashed this one out of the park (sorry Blue Jays). This production has been put together very tastefully. The dramatic presence of the actors is raw, sensitive, and powerful. They are never rushed; they take their time and deliver the drama with the stellar patience of midwives. This is the result of complete immersion into the dramatic ecology of the play; at no stage do we see anything that resembles anything foreign or exterior to the world of this play. The organic wholeness is beautiful and at times mystifying. There is a qualifier, though; if you are interested in the art of truthful storytelling and not performative contrivances, then this is the play for you. If you are looking for BIG (bombastic, imitative, grandstanding) acting, then this is not the play for you, but id humbly argue against a position that looks for that sort of performative aesthetic in a genre like this. The diligence that the director/s and actors have put into the construction of these characters and the world that they inhabit is evident, but strangely enough, there is an unfinished realism in the play. This appears to be deliberate, this is how we (audience) are given enough room and space to gently enter into that world with them. Like the key analogy I used earlier, this is what this production does so well, the hinges of the dramatic world are gently loosened so that we are allowed to slowly move through it. This is the hallmark of a confident production, one that is comfortable with silence, understanding that it is the groundless ground from which all action and dialogue emanates.

How is it possible for such a minimalist set to say so little yet say so much? We see inside a house, its walls transparent, and with the lovely little minimalist touches of lighting we come to realize that at one level it is a house, but at another level it is our point of entry into Angus’s mind. It is this metaphysical layering over the set that opens us up to interpretive curiosity. It (set) reminded me of Jalaluddin Rumi’s (Muslim mystic) poem 'The Guesthouse', “This being human is a guest house, every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes, as an unexpected visitor.” In the same vein, the set becomes the house of Angus’s inner life, a tenement where memories and emotions arrive like guests in Rumi’s guesthouse. The chemistry between the actors was excellent; nothing seemed formulaic or predetermined. The dialogue was delivered with a high amount of realism and immersion.

Richard Beaune, as Angus, renders a performance that is quite simply beautiful. It is a masterclass in performative realism and is a must-watch for any budding actor. The first thing you will notice is his complete control over the body; there is no tension, no stress, it (body) exists in harmony with the drama on stage, it goes where the text will take it, or in some cases, the other way around. It is a dialectical exchange between body and word. This is theatre as embodiment and not surface-level representation. He captures the childlike innocence and inner fracture of Angus with brilliance; there are no big chops, there is just a fidelity to playing this character with authenticity. That is why it is an outstanding performance. Mark Edwards, as Morgan, was good – playing a stoic and minimalist character with ease. It is a performance that is predicated on psychological realism; there are no histrionics and there is no hysteria. This accords well with the temperament of the character. I had some issues understanding some of his dialogue, especially during his monologue, but this could very well be because of my hearing problem. Nonetheless, more audibility would help. That notwithstanding, it was a solid and truthful performance. Noah Sharon, as Miles, was good. Playing the inquisitive and youthful actor with confidence. There is an interesting dynamic to be seen in his performance; it seems out of kilter with the world of the farm, but this is precisely what disrupts the memory of the narrative on the farm. Noah captures this energy with verve and sharp intent.

The direction is outstanding. Probably one of the best showings of directorial craftsmanship I have seen in the last two years. It says a lot without saying much. It lets us see the inner seeds of language (silence) slowly ripen beneath the lighting of the stage.  

Bravo!!!

Rating – 8.5/10