Theatre

DYLAN HEWLETT Enlarge Image

Daria Puttaert and Tom Keenan in The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

From the page to the stage, Theatre Projects Manitoba presents The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz, the premiere play by local novelist Armin Wiebe. Best known for a trio of tales — 1984’s The Salvation of Yasch Siemens, 1991’s Murder in Gutenthal and 1995’s The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst — all set in the fictional Manitoba Mennonite town of Gutenthal, Wiebe’s theatrical debut is a long time coming.
   
"The initial impulse for the story came in 1995," says Wiebe, 62. "I was a writer-in-residence in Dauphin and I had a group session do a free-writing exercise starting with ‘I remember.’ I decided to write along with them and I remembered this anecdote that my mother had told me about my grandfather. He was out berry picking and he answered the call of nature and reached for the wrong leaves, contracting poison ivy so severe that he had to wear a dress for the harvest. A farmer does what he has to do to get the job done."
   
That funny free write evolved into a short story, And Besides God Made Poison Ivy, which Wiebe set about developing into his fourth Gutenthal novel. The story’s play potential was exposed a couple years later when, during a Prairie Theatre Exchange playwrighting course (taught by Blatz director Kim McCaw), Wiebe used the characters to write some scenes.
   
"Over the years I would keep going back to those scenes I had written," Wiebe says. "I was trying to write a novel, which wasn’t working out and was getting too clumsy. Then around 2006, I had a conversation with Rory Runnells of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights. He’d been asking me to write him a play for years. I showed him what I had, we had a chat and then I started concentrating on it. That was five years ago and it’s finally coming together."
   
Speaking of accomplishment, The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz explores humans’ struggle for fulfillment. Set in 1930s southern Manitoba, a farm wife in want of a washing machine instead receives a husband with poison ivy, a broken piano and a refugee from the Russian revolution — a musician — to repair said piano. Talk about a communication breakdown.
   
"There’s a Mennonite term that, directly translated, means ‘through the flower talkin,g, which basically is speaking in euphemisms," Wiebe says. "In much of the play, the characters are beating around the bush and not spelling out clearly what they’re up to, which creates all kinds of difficulties and misunderstandings along with the language that I have some infamy for."
   
That language is a distinct Mennonite mixture, English dusted with High German and Low German. Wiebe says that the Blatz cast — Eric Nyland, Tom Keenan, Tracy Penner and Daria Puttaert — have embraced the text and provided some valuable insights into it.
   
"They keep surprising me because I just wrote it intuitively without that much analysis," Wiebe says. "This morning Tracy raised an issue about a line and it was something I never would have thought of questioning, so I told her, ‘You’re an MRI machine.’"
 

THE MOONLIGHT SONATA OF BEETHOVEN BLATZ
Theatre Projects Manitoba
April 7 - 17,
Rachel Browne Theatre