Goodness Read online

  ALTHEA: No. I’ve done my part. You keep that thing. Give it to him if you want. Or take it home. Pick it up any time you think you can make a better world.

  Althea watches him. He takes it to himself.

  SONG: ‘Binaya’ (Central West African)

  Young Althea sings quietly in the background. She is joined by the others.

  Binaya la bis stobu sala daneh bifoghu

  Binaya mashi mashi hu sala daneh bifighu

  Binaya Binaya Binaya Binaya

  ALTHEA: Now you give something in exchange. Spiritual collateral.

  She holds her hand out. For a moment, he’s not sure what she means, but then it lands. He passes her the notebook and she opens it and looks inside, then closes the cover and holds the book at her side.

  ALTHEA: Now we’re back where we started. I’m harmless and you know nothing. I’ve turned back time.

  MICHAEL: Althea –

  ALTHEA: No.

  Song ends abruptly.

  Michael looks at her, waiting, but nothing is going to change. He leaves the apartment.

  MICHAEL: I went down the stairs alone to the street and stood under her window across from the bar. I could feel the gun in my pocket, a cold, dark weight. There is a question I never know how to answer.

  TODD: How does it feel?

  MICHAEL: How does what feel? To be left? To be the last of anything? To be trapped inside of THIS, not knowing what it would be like to be anything else?

  I thought of going back into the bar, to see if he was still there. But then I … threw the gun into the trash. And I ran. After a couple of blocks, I flagged a cab, said, ‘Heathrow.’

  As Michael speaks the following, the cast slowly assembles upstage.

  It was evening, I was being driven away from that place where Althea and Stephen Part were never going to meet, and the street was filling with people, people going home, going out. Going to the movies. To the theatre. To be with each other. In groups. In gangs.

  Michael points the gun, which he is still holding, at Althea, maybe at some of the other characters, maybe himself, and maybe at the audience. Or maybe he just stares at it for a moment, weighing it.

  How does it feel to be out there in the dark? Just watching. Invisible, but still a part of everything. A part of this. How does that feel?

  Althea turns to look at Michael and begins to sing, as if in answer to his question. The cast joins the song, as does Michael, slowly lowering the gun, drawn to Althea. All then walk towards the audience. The song stops one note short of completion.

  SONG: ‘Tobela’ (Zimbabwean)

  Horiyatsa

  (Look around / pay attention)

  Hamuzani waka

  (To what is happening)

  Tobela

  (Pray)

  Ayitobela Murena

  (O Pray to God)

  Chorus:

  Tobela Murena / Tobela Murena

  Tobela Murena / Tobela Murena

  Horiyatsa

  (Look around / pay attention)

  Hamuzani waka

  (To what is happening)

  Tobela

  (Pray)

  Ayitobela Murena

  (O Pray to God)

  Iyo-o / Iyo-o / Iyo-o

  (a soothing sound)

  Ayitobela Murena

  (O Pray to God)

  Horiyatsa

  (Look around / pay attention)

  Hamuzani waka

  (To what is happening)

  Tobela

  (Pray)

  Ayitobela –

  (O pray to – )

  Silence. The cast stands downstage facing the audience. Michael holds the gun in his hand. He looks down at it. Beat. He looks up at the audience.

  Long beat.

  Blackout.

  On the production and this text

  Goodness is my second collaboration with Ross Manson and Volcano. The first, Building Jerusalem, opened in 2000 after four years of workshopping, revision and fruitful agony. In 2003, during one of our regular creative catch-ups, Ross revealed he’d been doing research in the field of moral philosophy (the study of ethics), and I admitted that I had the bare bones for a play about a war criminal with Alzheimer’s. We took our two notions to Blyth in the summer of 2003, and with the help of six actors, banged them together to see if they would turn into a play. They did.

  Two years later, on October 25, 2005, Goodness had its world premiere at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, as a Volcano/Tarragon co-production. This book went to press on October 20 and I was forbidden from coming within two hundred metres of Coach House Press as of October 18. It was a sound policy.

  This means that minor, last-minute changes made within the final week before opening may not be reflected in here. Openings and publication dates provide a useful barrier to further revisions. So here is the play, to the best of my knowledge. One note for future productions is that, at the end of the last scene with Michael and Althea, I had written that Althea would destroy the notebook. Obviously, this changes the temperature of that scene significantly. For the Volcano/Tarragon production, we thought it was equally potent for her to take it and keep it, and this decision is reflected in the printed version of the script. Future productions may wish to experiment with the alternate resolution.

  Details about the stage design have been omitted from this text, as future productions may find it useful to wrestle in their own way with the play’s casual disregard for time and space. But the original production featured eight chairs around the periphery of a spare room designed by Teresa Przybylski that functioned both as an understairs holding pen and as Althea’s dark, quiet one-bedroom apartment in London. Rebecca Picherack’s lighting design further created spaces within this space—by the time the production opened, 72 lights had been hung and there were 120 individual lighting cues.

  The music in this play was sourced and developed by Ross Manson and Brenna MacCrimmon, with the aid of Waleed Abdulhamid, Kitka, Teddy Masuku, Mariana Sadowska and Sarah Sanford. The placement as well as lyrics to all of the folk songs used in Goodness have been published here, but not the music itself. In some cases, such as with much of the African music, the lyrics are phonetical approximations of folk songs taught live to the cast by native speakers. My apologies to anyone who finds a typo in these lyrics; we did our best to render them faithfully. Most of the songs used in the original production were performed live by the actors and complemented by a gorgeous chiarascuro of a soundscape designed by John Gzowski. For guidance, future productions may wish to avail themselves of a CD recording of the music in this play, which is available from the author’s agent (see the copyright page for that information).

  Michael Redhill, October 18, 2005

  Thank you

  To Ross Manson for his commitment, his passion and the clarity of his theatrical vision, as well as all the actors who were involved at one stage or another in the development of the production: Leah Cherniak, Sean Dixon, Jerry Franken, John Fitzgerald Jay, Hardee Lineham, Soheil Parsa, Jane Spidell, Ordena Stephens and Sanjay Talwar. My gratitude goes especially to Tom Barnett, Sarah Sanford and Karen Robinson, who originated the parts, respectively, of Stephen, Julia and Althea. Fate decreed they could not join us for the world premiere, but the fibre of these three characters owe a great deal to the presences of these three actors in the creative process. To Victor Ertmanis, Tara Hughes and Jordan Pettle I owe a similarly profound debt, but I also have the pleasure of seeing them in the final production. Stepping in and taking over from Tom, Sarah and Karen were Jack Nicholsen, Bernadeta Wrobel and Lili Francks, each of whom plunged into a madly rushing river, picked up the paddles and kept going with grace and aplomb. My thanks to them for their talent and their faith in this play. Thanks as well to JP Robichaud, who stage-managed and is the invisible master of everything.

  Many thanks to Richard Rose and everyone at Tarragon, for their enthusiasm and support, and everyone at Volcano who is not Ross Manson, namely producer Camilla Holland and as
sociate artistic director Lara Azzopardi. Finally, my thanks to Alana Wilcox, Rick/Simon and the sleepless pressmen at Coach House Books, for putting themselves through a ridiculous schedule.

  MICHAEL REDHILL is the publisher and one of the editors of Brick, A Literary Journal. His most recent books are Fidelity, a collection of short fiction; Martin Sloane, a novel that was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, the Torgi Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Books in Canada/Amazon Best First Novel Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book; Light-crossing, a collection of poetry; and Building Jerusalem, a play, which won a Dora for Best New Play and a Chalmers Award for Playwriting and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. His new novel, Consolation, will be published in fall 2006. He lives with his partner and two sons in Toronto.

  Typeset in Janson

  Printed and bound at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane, 2005

  Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover by Rick/Simon

  Author photo by Kevin Kelly

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