The Stone Face.

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

The Stone Face is Sherry MacDonald’s brilliantly theatrical take on the making of film, an iconic work that combined the talents of Buster Keaton (known as the great Stone Face), Samuel Beckett (the craggy spearhead of absurdist theatre his first assay into film), and first-time film director Alan Schneider (director of the original production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Her metaphorical staging stunningly recreates both the Keatonesque genre of silent film comedy and the terse existentialist dialogue of Beckett. She chronicles a relatable context for the planning and execution of the film project by bringing into the scene Keaton’s articulate wife, Eleanor, and then with a stroke of genius she ties the lot together with a silent young man (the young Keaton) who leads the chronological sequence from initial meeting through the concept and planning stages and rehearsals to the screening, and finally to a silent coda. It is a play where questions are avoided, but answers sometimes silently illustrated with beats and pauses that hover between Beckett and Pinter in significance. Or sometimes a long anecdote stands in for the answer to a simple question. What is also truly amazing is the adept description of sight gags and comic shtick that are part of the action. There is even a brilliant recap of the who’s-on-first routine using merely pronouns and letters.

A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at UBC, MacDonald has written a half-dozen other plays (some unpublished, some available from the Playwrights Theatre Centre) and as a filmmaker has had work screened at various festival in Canada, the U.S., Italy, and Iran. She teaches English at a community college in Vancouver. The Stone Face was part of the 2004 Alberta playRites festival and was premiered in 2007 by Vancouver’s Damfino Theatre, the same year it was given an American workshop production at the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival. The author has also served as Drama Editor of the Prism International literary magazine.

            The Stone Face is a literary gem that deserves to be in all collections.