«The End» and «A Day at the Beach»

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Palmer has written about a dozen plays. In October 1976 Factory Theatre
Lab produced a one-act monologue of his—Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity
of Producing Norwegian Drama. Given the precarious situation of Canadian
culture in the face of free trade, it is a play that deserves revival.

The first play in this volume, “The End,” predates that brilliant
one-act by some four years, having been first produced at the Toronto
Free Theatre in 1972. It was reportedly a hit for the theatre, of which
Palmer was a founding member. The play begins with a plunge into farce,
which actually sounds more like the absurd and is likely to have the
reader or the audience echoing the oft-repeated words of one of the
characters: “Did I miss something?” The play is polysaturated with
the lard of farce tradition: characters blindly following their
particular chimeras, hide-and-seek characters, and doors, doors, doors.
This mayhem is occasionally punctuated with insightful wit. About a gay
or transvestite character, someone says, “You’re a guy”—to which
the reply is, “My mother agrees. The army doesn’t. The experts
differ.”

Notwithstanding an explicit acceptance of the value and “finish” of
this play in the introductory interview between the author and critic
Robert Wallace, the final impression given by this script is of a
chaotic jumble of one-liners and obvious promises—alas, unfulfilled as
a total dramatic package. Amazingly, the final scene seems to tuck
people away with neatly marked exits. One could wish that this talent
were applied to the rest of the play, for in the end it is indeed full
of sound and fury, but signifying . . . ?

While the first script is marked with spontaneity leading nowhere, the
second—actually a pair of one-acts dating from 1987—is distinguished
by the polish and depth of a playwright who has found his métier and
his sensibility.

In Act I of “A Day at the Beach,” Palmer takes all the wacko
on-the-edge characteristics of The End and with those raw materials
crafts a couple of hurting postmodern characters on the fringes of an
“NYU Lesbian/Gay Dance Harvest Moon Bash” (which is, in fact the
title of the piece). Act II has an equally New York sensibility (the
author has lived there “intermittently”) and a title to match:
“Beth Shalom Halooa Sukkot.” Again the stage action takes place on
the periphery of a gay dance. Palmer has the maturity to give the
characters of both plays time to establish a firm grip on the stage
reality he has created, while giving strong suggestions of their
off-stage lives. In the last act, Saturday night at a gay synagogue, the
two characters move gradually into a dialogue about “fairies,” which
leads to the following assertion: “They got all those rights . . . we
let them in, right, and bingo, we turn around, what have we got?
AIDS.” This is not the only articulated conclusion that will shock.
But the shock tactics are immeasurably more meaningful here than in the
first play, as the dialogue moves on to Jew-bashing, fag-bashing, and
finally to parents’ coming to terms with how their children have
turned out—in this instance, gay. It is a harrowing experience,
because these parents are more adept at giving voice to common bigotry
than anything else. It is electrifying, obscene, and funny . . . with an
ache.