Sunday, October 07, 2007

Class Fictions: What 30 Years of Pesto Stains Will Do To You.

Toronto loves it's rubbish. It loves it so much it's hesitant to send any of it to the waste tip. Whereas we in Ireland throw consumer durables into the nearest skip or try hide them buried under food packaging for garbage day collection, Toronto breeds an informal economy of weekend garage sales.

What doesn't sell, finds its way into crumpling cardboard boxes with the label "free" attached. Overflowing mainly with unwanted books or magazines, they rest battered outside houses all over the city every weekend. Fodder for wandering book worms, the rooting curious or shopkeepers filling their second hand bargain bins.

They say you shouldn't judge a book by the cover. In these instances, more often than not, its precisely the cover and blurb that draws you in. Images and choice words that sketch unknown authors and titles - pushing your buttons of choice, however superficially.

Wedged in between omnipotent, always out of date geek tech manuals outside BMV was The Dishwashers. A compact play in two acts, by Vancouver based Morris Panych, it sold itself well. A Vice-esque cover with a certifiably Victorian dish washing unit cast in theatrical lights, suggested the dingy glow of a pouncy hotel's hidden basement innards and working life.

Fire on a back blurb attacking the contemporary fiction of the classless society, alongside the petty tyrannies of supervisors over their own miserable domains and at two dollars - bingo.
Panych throws his playwriting lens on the everyday hidden, the dream likes states of the "off stage" service industry. Silenced and treated as unreal, these are alien places where real life is suspended and a new "non-reality" begins - one with frightening and hidden consequences that often can not be woken from.

Using eleven scenes from the very temporal world of dish washing he sketches the frustration of "falling in the hole" of poorly paid and dirty jobs. That frustration is amplified if you are Emmet, once rich and then waking to find his wealth as "numbers on a chalk board erased." In a four man play he becomes that archetype of the worker "only passing through" and our means to meet those for whom dish washing is permanent.

Moss is a pitiful old crone, 90 years old and riddled with terminal cancer, in the job "since dish washing was invented" his work is an exoskeleton keeping his fragile sense of self alive - then he is fired.

Dressler is a supervisor and thirty years hot spraying pesto stained dishes has left him bitter. His muscles flex on minutia. He tears into any hints of a personality wanting to move away from sink and up the stairs that lead to the restaurant floor and by extension, the good life. He is tormented by the taunts of the social mobility myth: "if everybody was on the top of the heap, there wouldn't be a heap."

Emmet rushes into his kingdom of piled plates, bearing a banner of hope and class war vindictive - antagonising the survival strategies of those that have allowed themselves to wilt in the face of failed ambitions. Ultimately he is the one we should identify with but Panych is more subtle.

The pathetic Dressler is a cunt, driving himself on with spiteful critiques of his underlings and forensic examinations of the waste he sees on the plates he washes: "a fillet mignon with only one little bite out of it, and a cigar tuck into the smashed potatoes. Beautiful. What an extraordinary little monument to overindulgence."

But unlike Emmet, he is going no where so he has none of Emmet's naive faith in opportunity amidst economy based on manufactured tastes and distinctions: "people need to be led to these things; like slaves to the promised land. You don't go out in search of encrusted head cheese for fuck's sake."

Dressler also gets to deliver some of my favorite lines of late: ""democracy is a lazy bitch who never did a day's work in her entire life; then complained if after a late shift, you made too much noise coming home and dropping dead from exhaustion on the sofa."

Stick that down as your email signature. When Emmet does move on, he does so with a distaste that rubs itself in the face of those he leaves behind in the dishwashing basement, the sort of distaste that perpetuates the alienation he raged against while soaping up everyday.

Panych's latest production called Benevolence plays Toronto this month. Set in an old porn theater, on seats where exposed foam wrestles with exposed duck tape and the lives of a financial district dick and winter jacketed bum dangerously intertwine.

Despite Panych's concern for low paid service sector jobs with uncomfortable hours in The Dishwashers, Benevolence is a play I won't get to see - its over 35 dollars a ticket. Maybe I'll find it in a bargain bin some years down the line.

Labels: , , , ,


Comments: Post a Comment

About
Soundtracksforthem specialises in iconoclastic takes on culture, politics, and more shite from the underbelly of your keyboard. A still-born group blog with a recent surge of different contributers but mainly maintained by James R. Big up all the contributers and posse regardless of churn out rate: Kyle Browne, Reeuq, Cogsy, Chief, X-ie phader/Krossie, Howard Devoto, Dara, Ronan and Mark Furlong. Send your wishes and aspirations to antropheatgmail.com

Label Cluster
In no certain order... Politics, Guest Bloggers Interviews, Music, Internet, Guest Bloggers, Travel, Blogging, TV, Society, Film, Gig Reviews, Art, Media.

The Neverending Blogroll
A Womb Of Her Own
Arse End Of Ireland
BlissBlog
BBC One Music Blog
Blackdown Sound Boy
Buckfast For Breakfast
Customer Servitude
Counago & Spaves
C8
Candy PDF Mag
Guttabreakz
House is a Feeling
Homoludo
Infactah
Indymedia
Indie Hour Blog
Jim Carroll
kABooGIE MusIC
Kid Kameleon
Kick Magazine Toronto
Libcom
Matt Vinyl
Modern Cadence
Mongrel
Nialler9
One For The Road
Old Rotten Hat
Pitchfork
Salvo
Spannered
Sigla
Test
Thumped
Newish Journalism
TV Is Crying
Uncarved
Una Rocks
Urban75
Weareie
WSM
Wooster
Village Magazine
Radical Urban Theory

Archives
February 2002 October 2002 April 2003 September 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 June 2004 September 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008

Postings
Interview: Going Beyond The Green Zone With Dahr J...
This Ain't No Roller Disco
In Me Ears 5: Serve Me That Bounce
A Street Car Called Slut
IBM Virtual Strike: Knowledge Workers Upping The Ante
Bounce Back and Forth
New Stuff From Herv
The Launch Of Spook Country By William Gibson
Chew on the Credit
Cousin Cole

www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from antrophe. Make your own badge here.

Irish Blogs

Irish Bloggers

| Soundtracks |