Michael Nathanson’s hit play interweaves failed friendship and Middle Eastern politics
“We’ve known each other a long time; we’ve killed roaches together in a rented apartment in Toronto years ago” is how actor Graham Ashmore describes his 20-year friendship with his co-star Arne MacPherson. The kind of chemistry that a pair builds up over that length of time is something “you can’t define, but an audience really picks up on it.” MacPherson agreed easily, noting, “If the people watching believe in the friendship, then they have a stake in the process.”
The “process” he’s talking about forms the core of Michael Nathanson’s play Talk: Two men who’ve moved apart try to halt the disintegration of their lifelong friendship. During a single long discussion over pints, the conversation veers towards Middle Eastern politics and global terrorism, and then things never quite right themselves.
Creating a play that revolves around a single relationship is a difficult prospect for any writer – sure, the plot’s simpler and the action uncomplicated, but the central relationship has to be believable. Without that, the whole enterprise fails. “The key is not to overwrite in explaining the friendship,” Nathanson tells me. “Real friends or family have a kind of shorthand that they use to communicate, and you don’t want to belabour that.”
Nathanson is also very careful to about the balance between the political and the personal in his writing. Though the play is about the friendship, it still has enough jaw to sink its teeth firmly into Middle Eastern politics. “When they meet in the middle, both men can agree. It’s when they go to either extreme that the process breaks apart, and this [metaphor] is an engagement with the world.” Nathanson continues, “If I can’t make people think, I’m not doing my job. That’s what I love about theatre – people can be pushed, they can be rude, they can say nasty things about each other.”
Talk comes to town as part of the Prairie Scene initiative at the NAC, which brings hundreds of artists in from all parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Among the artists coming there’s a definite excitement, a buzz about being included in what their press information aptly describes as “a vast, living portrait” of a place and a people.
Talk
Written and directed by Michael Nathanson
At Irving Greenberg Theatre (1233 Wellington Street West)
April 28-30, 8 p.m.
As seen in the Ottawa XPress, April 28, 2011: http://ottawaxpress.ca/2011/04/28/prairie-scene-talk-walking-the-talk/
