Medici Slot Machine.

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Mark Brownell, co-artistic director of the Pea Green Theatre Group, has many productions and significant awards to his credit. In 2001 he was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for his play Monsieur d’Eon. Medici Slot Machine premiered in 2006 at the Tarragon Theatre and was nominated for three Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Best New Play.

If you are unaware of Joseph Cornell’s surrealistic art, you might want to think of this biographical theatre demonstration as a kind of high art Spamalot. The chronological scenes picture family and artistic realities and fantasies in a series of staged shadow boxes spilling a crateful of themes like one of Cornell’s thimble forests going on forever. The author gives Joseph the opening words of welcome to Cornell’s eternal present: his “eterniday”. He immediately launches into definitions of art and how real objects may be seen as real or abstract to the viewer and how life and art interact organically. There follows a literal staging of the premise: the family box where Joseph’s care for his invalid brother is a virtual springboard into his own artistic originality and uniqueness (eventually one critic is led to ponder which of the two actually is the artist). Incomprehension and annihilation seem always to loom over Joseph, not just from the outside (where he is exploited by galleries and an unsavoury girl quite unworthy of his romantic fantasies despite her role as a muse) but also from within the family: the burden of caring for his brother is nothing compared to his harridan Christian Scientist mother, who leads him to the brink of depression and suicide. A brilliantly macabre scene ghoulishly evokes “my son’s final box.” As Cornell himself comments, his life is difficult to box in. The recurrent Greek chorus of a critic is also given pride of place as the penultimate punctuating speech, so that in the end one will probably reel out of the theatre with the resonance of arbitrary, uncomprehending, formal art criticism doing battle in our heads with the vicious domestic squabbles one has witnessed. Recommended.