All Clear

The world ends in a haze of orange fog in Eugene Stickland's All Clear

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“I think T.S. Eliot was right,” says director Bradley Moss. “It’s not going to be a bang; it’s going to be a whimper. You read the articles, and in the next 20 years we’re going to lose thousands of species on this planet, the bird population has already dropped by 50 per cent.... I think that’s the road we’re on: we’re going to dwindle away. You look at Easter Island, and that’s the symbol of what’s going to become of us.”

“And yet I think there’s going to be a lot of terrorist activity in the meantime,” adds actor John Wright. “Especially headed toward the United States.”

“And there’ll be retaliations on account of that,” agrees Moss. “The U.S. has created a thousand Osamas. A hundred thousand. A whole generation looking for ways to avenge themselves against North America.”

Moss, Wright and I are sitting in the Sugarbowl Café on 124 St, sipping coffees and squinting into the sunlight streaming through the front window. It’s a beautiful, uncharacteristically warm spring day—so why are we discussing the end of the world? Well, it’s because Moss and Wright are both involved in Theatre Network’s production of Eugene Stickland’s latest play, All Clear, a bleakly funny script about the dysfunctional Ford family’s hapless attempts to cope with the fact that the world outside their door (and their duct-taped windows) has been destroyed. Stickland never explains the exact nature of the catastrophe—there might have been a nuclear war or maybe kind of environmental Armageddon has taken place. All we know is that all the electricity has been knocked out, the sounds of helicopters and explosions keep breaking the silence and the earth has been blanketed by a thick orange fog that, if you’re exposed to it, either kills you (if you lucky) or simply leaves you mentally deranged (if you’re unlucky, like the Fords’ teenage son Bobby).

“I asked [Eugene] what had happened,” Moss says, “but he didn’t give me an answer—he just said he wanted the audience to decide for themselves. And he’s purposely gone out of his way to make it general. Is it nuclear? Is it chemical? Is it a meteorite? Who knows? But it’s serious and it’s in our backyard.... And I think what’s fascinating about the play is watching this family struggle without the tools they need to get through this experience. And I love the question it brings in from the land of existentialism—do you see the world as half-full or half-empty? Audiences will decide what they want to take home from this play; I know some people who’ve seen the show [in Calgary] felt very hopeful for the characters, but others felt completely the opposite.”

And some Calgary theatregoers left simply wondering what had come over Eugene Stickland to make him write a downer like All Clear, with its grim echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, instead of another A Guide to Mourning or Midlife or any of the other populist comedies he’d created during his 10-year stint as playwright-in-residence for Alberta Theatre Projects. Comedy does tend to be Stickland’s natural habitat, but given the huge upheavals in the world (the 9-11 terrorist attacks) and in his home (the breakup of his marriage), he found his writing taking a noticeably darker turn.
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” says Wright, who also appeared in the Calgary production as distracted patriarch Delaney Ford, “and I think Eugene got slammed for it. The reactions were such polar opposites—people either loved it or they went, ‘This is not Eugene.’”

Edmontonians might be more receptive to All Clear, though—especially if they saw Theatre Network’s world premiere production last season of Stickland’s offbeat archaeological comedy Excavations, whose thematic preoccupation with the long-ago extinction of the dinosaurs and the inevitable future extinction of the human race makes it All Clear’s spiritual cousin. (Wright appeared in that play too, playing a misanthropic old coot who takes an almost Biblical glee in the thought of humanity getting wiped out.)

Moss, who’s directed four Stickland plays in five years for Theatre Network, sees other threads connecting All Clear to Stickland’s previous work as well. “There’s a surrealness to this play that you can see in previous shows of his, like Appetite or Quartet,” he says. “And the style of humour is similar as well. Marianne Copithorne [Wright’s real-life wife, who plays Delaney’s discontented spouse Maddie] put it really well. She came in the other day and was talking about the duality in Eugene’s writing—it’s the end of the world, but every once in a while there’s a little break where it goes into this absurd bit of comedy. I find that to be very human. You know, actors are trained to look for ‘character arcs’ and writers are always worrying about building the character to a big climax, but to me the world is more Brechtian. You say one thing and then a few moments later you say something that totally contradicts yourself. I think in theatre we often spend too much time trying to map all that stuff out, but Eugene has a bit of a ragged edge to him. He’s not afraid to have a character say something and then say the opposite two scenes later.”

Hopefully, Stickland shares this trait with his characters—he’s informally announced that All Clear will be his final play. (He’s currently working on his first novel and will continue to write his opinion column for the Calgary Herald.) If Stickland really is moving onto a new phase in his career, it’s ironic that he should leave behind a houseful of characters for whom moving on is impossible. Delaney wants to become a poet, but even though he’s picked out a title for his first book—A Study in Concrete—that’s about as much progress as he’s been able to make. Meanwhile, his teenaged daughter Billie (Vanessa Holmes) is pining away for her first serious boyfriend, and his wife Maddie wants to leave him for another man—except, of course, she can’t even leave the house. “They all have their own ways of coping with the stress of what’s happened,” Wright says. “Delaney just figures, ‘Gotta keep busy, gotta keep busy.’ It’s his way of not dealing with the reality of the situation—but you’ve got to ask, who would want to? Maddie, meanwhile, is the one who still has hope, but ironically her hope is being able to leave her husband.”

“That’s where the real pathos in the play comes from,” Moss says. “Not from the end-of-the-world situation, but from people’s inability to say what they really need to say to each other.”

“There’s a moment between Delaney and Billie,” Wright says, “where they admit to each other that they’re scared to death, but he hasn’t got the physical capability to just give her a hug. He tries, but he can’t anymore. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s all more unsaid than said. That strikes me as a truism that runs through all of Eugene’s writing—the silence, the look that sits there, the things that are not said.”

When I ask Wright what he hopes audiences get out of his character, he says, “I just want people to say to themselves, ‘God, I hope I don’t end up like him.’” The same could be said of pretty much everyone else in the play as well - especially the brain-addled Bobby, which Wright and Moss agree is probably the most challenging role in the play. (Here’s a sample line of Bobby’s dialogue: “Orange orange orange orange orange orange red. Orange orange orange orange orange orange red.”) If All Clear as a whole is reminiscent of Endgame, then Bobby’s garbled soliloquies recall Lucky from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

“It’s a highly personal part,” Moss says. “The thing everyone’s been trying to help Jesse with is to help him have clarity about what he’s trying to communicate. If he’s clear about that, then I think we in the audience get it. And Jesse is one of those actors who’s physical, who’s got great instincts, who comes in and is willing to try a million things—he’s found some things I doubt anyone else would ever find. And you really get behind his character’s struggle—the thing I relate it to is my grandfather after he had his stroke and his inability to express the things he wanted to express. But if you could get his ‘heart language,’ you could still hook into what he was trying to say. It’s a frustrated character and a frustrating part.”

Despite the play’s somewhat stylized post-apocalyptic setting, Bobby’s peculiar brain injury is just about the only thing in All Clear that seems like science fiction. It was a little horrifying to realize, as Wright, Moss and I started batting around various doomsday scenarios, just how easy it was to imagine the world ending and how plausible and immediate all those scenarios seemed to be. “I know,” Moss says. “It’s not a Twilight Zone episode or War of the Worlds anymore. That’s been the real wake-up call for me. And I think that if you go through the experience [of this play], you could even be motivated to live your life with a little more joy, a little more celebratory joie de vivre. If the end really is nigh, maybe we should stop bitching about the little things and make the decision to live life as fully as we can.”

“Yeah,” growls Wright. “That’ll be the fucking day.” V

All Clear
Directed by Bradley Moss • Written by Eugene Stickland • Starring John Wright, Marianne Copithorne and Jesse Gervais • Roxy Theatre (10708-124 St) • Apr 6-18 • 453-2440

All Clear

The world ends in a haze of orange fog in Eugene Stickland's All Clear

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