Morris Panych: Canada’s “most prolific theatre artist”
In a November 2004 Toronto Life magazine feature on Morris Panych, writer Alec Scott described the playwright, actor and director as “the most prolific Canadian theatre artist of his generation.” A glimpse of Panych’s productivity — and the accolades he has earned — makes the assessment hard to dispute.
In 2004, Panych received the Governor General’s Literary Award in the English-language drama category, for his black comedy, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, which tells the story of a dysfunctional West Coast Canadian family through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl who believes her dead goldfish has returned as a young man with the heart of a poet and a determination to save the world.
The Canada Council-appointed jury called the play “metaphorical, imaginative [and] profoundly complex”; it hailed Panych for “masterfully craft[ing] a wildly hilarious and deeply affecting tale about the death of childhood, innocence and fish.”
It was the second time Panych has won the GG for drama. His first win, in 1994, was for the play The Ends of the Earth, which, like Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, is published by Vancouver-based Talonbooks.
First staged by Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre Company in 2002, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl has also earned Panych two Dora Mavor Moore awards, which recognize outstanding achievement in Toronto theatre, dance and opera. He won the prizes for outstanding new play and outstanding direction.
Meanwhile, his 1995 play, Vigil, which won Vancouver’s Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for “Outstanding Original Play or Musical” in 1996, has enjoyed successful runs in Edinburgh, Washington and London’s West End and was recently translated into French.
While the French version of Vigil was being produced in Paris in January 2005, Panych was busy directing his Dora Award — and Jessie Award — winning production, The Overcoat, at The Bushnell Center in Hartford, Connecticut.
Created by Panych and regular collaborator Wendy Gorling at the Vancouver Playhouse, where it was first presented in 1997, The Overcoat is based on Nikolai Gogol’s short stories, The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman, and is set to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Broadcast on CBC Television in 2002, The Overcoat features a cast of over 20 actors who rely on the traditions of physical theatre — but no script — to conjure a story of how the need to be popular can inspire lust, envy and madness.
In February 2005, Panych’s new play, The Dishwashers, which he told Montreal Gazette theatre critic Matt Radz is “a thoroughly unpleasant comedy about work,” made its premiere at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre Company.
Two months later, Panych headed to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. to direct You Never Can Tell, written by George Bernard Shaw, at the Shaw Festival.
Born in 1952 in Calgary and raised in Edmonton, Panych received a diploma in radio and television arts from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, and graduated from the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver in 1977 before heading overseas to study theatre at East 15 Acting School in London.
As an actor, he has appeared in more than 50 plays. As a director, he has staged more than 30 works — over half of them his own creations.
- Christopher Guly