Poetry in motion

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This article was published 25/01/2024 (940 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In December, David Yee was sitting in the shadows at the gala for the Siminovitch Prize — the most prestigious theatre award in the country — with a crumpled-up speech tucked into his jacket pocket, just in case.

At the podium stood Guillermo Verdecchia, the chair of the Siminovitch jury, and perhaps more importantly, one of the first Canadian playwrights whose work inspired Yee to write a script of his own.

As a theatre student in Toronto, reading Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas was Yee’s “first inkling” of his potential to build characters of his own, ones with whom he could relate.

“This was the voice of the outsider,” Yee recalls thinking. “This was the voice of the other.”

And then, 25 years later, that same voice was describing the voice of Yee as “never the same twice and yet immediately recognizable,” with a “combination of swagger and sweetness, of the very funny and the pissed-off.”

Yee — who always thought of himself as an outsider too — found himself the centre of attention: he won and now, everyone was paying closer attention than ever before to what he had to say, both in his acceptance speech and in his work to come.

“I felt like an idiot kid who conned his way into a party he didn’t belong at,” recalls the 47-year-old playwright, who won a Governor General’s Award for 2015’s carried away on the crest of a wave.

“I thought, ‘Am I ever going to fool them again? And when will they figure out I don’t know what the f— I’m doing?’”

Was he supposed to have it all figured out?

“When we’re young, we write about youth and ourselves and when you hit a certain age, you start writing about people that seem to be in a different place than you. Then you realize, ‘Oh no. We’re the same age,’ and that becomes a terrifying existential crisis, which I like to have in all of my work. If it doesn’t cause a good existential crisis, then what’s the use of putting it on paper?” Yee says.

His latest work, among men — on to Feb. 10 at the Tom Hendry Warehouse in a co-production between the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Theatre Projects Manitoba — follows two men who know a thing or two about artistic doubt, machismo and existential crises: Canadian poets Milton Acorn (1923-1986) and Al Purdy (1918-2000), considered in their lifetimes to be among the most important voices in our national literature.

“Purdy wrote with this kind of fire that was missing from the living Canadian poets I’d read. There’s a guttural sort of angst or difficulty of being that Purdy has that I responded to,” Yee says, adding Acorn has a disdain for others, but also a desperate longing to be a part of something.

“I think I have equal parts of each in me.”

The play, which premièred two years ago at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, takes place in the late 1950s at Purdy’s property in Ontario’s Prince Edward County, where he and his wife Eurithe plan to build an A-frame cabin. When it was finished, the A-frame became an impromptu community centre for a who’s-who of Canadian arts and letters. Michael Ondaatje visited, as did Earle Birney, Steven Heighton and both Margarets — Atwood and Laurence.

But it took years to build, and for a few months, Purdy invited his friend Acorn to help him hang a shingle.

Yee first found out about Acorn’s and Purdy’s relationship through their written correspondence, discovered after he read Purdy’s letters to American writer Charles Bukowski. He was fascinated by the two men in general, but particularly at that point in time. Neither had won their respective Governor General Awards, and both merely flirted with literary success: they were nobodies waiting to figure out which kind of somebodies they would become.

“The play is about them, and about poetry and the mystic quality of creating art. The unknowableness of what goes into that creation and how magic is made,” says Yee.

And in these two sensitive, erudite and sometimes explosive men, the playwright also found a vehicle to explore one of the most pressing concerns of our time: male relationships and toxic masculinity.

That’s a major reason Theatre Projects Manitoba artistic director Suzie Martin — who cast Tom Keenan as Acorn and Eric Blais as Purdy — found the work so powerful and promising.

“I have to read a lot of plays, and this one felt like meeting somebody at a party that made me forget who I came with,” says Martin, who is directing the co-production in her first engagement with the Royal MTC.

“My favourite things in the world are making art and having friendships, and these are the core pillars here. And in this cloistered cabin in the woods by themselves, (Acorn and Purdy) are able to unlock things together that they couldn’t otherwise. Being present with each other in that space makes them more open humans and better artists, too. I found that very resonant and beautiful, and I just wanted to play with that.”

Yee did too, and the sequestered forest setting felt like the best place for that exploration, isolated from judgement and in turn begging for it.

“It’s curious to me how people act with one another, especially when the world can’t see them. I think we’re losing what it is to not have an audience,” he says.

“These two creators are waiting for the world at large to figure out who they are, while also figuring out who they are to themselves and to each other.”

If that isn’t relatable, what is?

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com