The Drawer Boy

Shannon Hengen is an associate professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

Michael Healey’s award-winning play has strength not only as a
skilfully crafted story but also as a commentary on skilfully crafted
stories and their power to change lives. Not an empty exercise in
metatheatre, the play addresses in a meaningful way the impact of
telling tales, of performance, and of play by re-entering the world of a
historic collective theatrical creation of 1972—Paul Thompson and
Theatre Passe Muraille’s The Farm Show (although that piece is
mentioned explicitly only in the Playwright’s Notes). Healey’s work
represents what is presumed to be an outtake from the original piece
(which consisted of monologues, sketches, and songs), and the subtle
topic of this out-take seems to be some of the uses of fabrication—for
therapy, teaching, livelihood, laughs.

Young Miles, an actor with the theatre collective, works on the farm of
Morgan and Angus, who are in their 50s, and records scenes from their
daily lives, scenes that then enter the next day’s rehearsals.
“We’re here to get your history and give it back to you,” Miles
explains naively. Morgan’s initial tales to Miles about farm life are
obviously lies (such as his claim that unproductive milk cows are
slaughtered for beef, and that the apparently placid cows sense the
pressure to produce) and seem merely amusing at first but become vital
elements of theme. For it happens that Morgan also lies to Angus, his
lifelong friend, about the conditions under which Angus suffered
cognitive impairment during World War II and about how both lost their
English fiancées.

In performing Morgan and Angus’s relationship, Miles overcomes
Angus’s impairment and Morgan’s mendacity, having struggled with the
potentially tragic consequences of appropriation of voice. And Miles
simultaneously loses his own ability to perform the story for profit.
The two farmers and Miles rehearse the deep losses in the farmers’
lives against the backdrop of farming’s physical, psychical, and
financial hardship in a story that could be ponderous but
instead—because it is a story lovingly told—becomes a tribute to
stories lovingly told.