The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter

The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter
© Copyright 2013 by Don Hannah

Playwrights Canada Press

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Cover art and design by Jeff Kulak

Book design by Blake Sproule

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hannah, Don, 1951-

   The cave painter ; &, The woodcutter / Don Hannah.

Two plays.

Electronic monograph in multiple formats.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-77091-130-7 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-77091-131-4 (EPUB)

I. Title. II. Title: Woodcutter.

PS8565.A583C39 2013   C812'.54   C2012-907935-9

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC)—an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,681 individual artists and 1,125 organizations in 216 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.8 million—the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

For Paul

Foreword

In June of 2010 I was directing the first production of The Woodcutter for the Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation in Edmonton. After rehearsal one day I offered to drive Don to a friend's place for dinner. When we got to my car I asked Don where I needed to take him. While he had visited the place many times before, he didn't remember the actual address, so he consulted his address book. It was a tiny, battered, worn old thing with pages falling out and scraps of addresses stuffed inside. Don leafed through the book, having no success locating the address we were seeking, but finding a lot of other names. After a minute or so of this, Don stopped, sighed and said, “Almost all of these people are dead!” That moment gave me an insight into what drove Don to write The Cave Painter.

Only a month earlier, at the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre's annual Playwrights Colony, we had read an early version of The Cave Painter. I have been fortunate to have worked on a number of Don's plays, beginning years ago when we first met at the Banff Playwrights Colony. From the beginning I have found Don's writing to be compelling, heartbreaking and potent with emotion and truth. But I was not prepared for the power and intensity of this new play. He has given us a character, Dianne, who is facing almost unbearable sadness as she tries to come to terms with the loss of so many of the people most dear to her. An artist, she seeks comfort in the past that has fuelled her work. She looks back on her life, on her family, friends and lovers, while rummaging in her little room, unconsciously searching for meaning in fragments of her past. A deer bone conjures images from the Lascaux caves. A piece of jewellery takes her back to MoMA and a goofy trip to New York. She recounts a tale of a crazy Halloween night with her fabulous friend, Simon. She cries in grief at the unfair death of her dear sister. There is a relentless inevitability to her story as she plunges into the heart of things, at last revealing the painful encounters she's had with her conservative-Christian son. She's looking for hope, for a reason to keep going. In the end, it is her passion as an artist and the eternal curiosity that drives her to keep wondering how and why humans do what they do that gives her the comfort she needs.

A mutual friend, after reading the play, told Don she felt that it is drenched in sorrow. And I guess that it is. But after all the time I've spent with this gorgeous piece of theatre, it is also a source of comfort for me, as I too begin to realize that more and more of those who were dear have moved along. Having this play in my heart makes it a bit less lonely and a lot easier to keep on going.

—Kim McCaw, Director, Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation, Alberta

The Cave Painter was first produced in Edmonton by the Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation in partnership with StageLab. The play premiered in June 2011 with the following cast and crew:

Dianne: Jenny Munday

Director and dramaturg: Kim McCaw

Stage manager: Betty Hushlak

Set and lighting design: Daniela Masellis

Costume design: Nick Blais

Projections: Daniela Masellis, Clinton Carew

Notes

Dianne is in her late fifties–early sixties and wears blue jeans and a T-shirt beneath a work shirt. Her clothes have printer's ink and paint on them.

The set is a space that shifts between room and cave: interior and subterranean. A rough wall in the back. A table covered with debris. Although not immediately apparent, as the lights broaden and brighten the space is seen to contain piles of debris: a jumble of paper, books, boxes of artifacts (bones, shells, pebbles), clothing, piles of objects from the past. The clutter of a life. An upturned chair is there, as are these specific objects: a scarab pin, a deer bone, a hideous paisley kaftan, some copper etching plates (10" x 10" or so), a small can of Silvo.

During the play, Dianne searches through the clutter. Her searching is a combination of the purposeful (Where is that deer bone?) and something more random (What's all this stuff?). Finding the copper plates is an example of the second kind. For the most part, objects that she finds should not relate directly to what she's speaking about; they should not be illustrative.

Lights snap up on dianne in the process of attacking a book. She is furious. Little of the space about her can be seen.

DIANNE

I'm ripping the Bible to shreds.

The one from last Christmas—“To Grammy and Peter from Margaret and Martha.”

Not “Maggie,” but “Margaret.”

Our granddaughters' names, but their mother's handwriting—her prissy, fundamentalist handwriting.

“To Grammy and Peter.”

Not Grampy, not Pete, but Peter.

And not even “love Margaret and Martha.” Just “from.”

With the words of Christ written in red.

She throws the Bible on the floor. Helpless, almost vibrating with anger—what to do next?

I can't sleep.

The day before yesterday, all I could do was rant.

Yesterday I tried to start the purge. Threw out most of what was in the fridge, went at the closet, got rid of stuff I haven't worn in years. “Clearing out the cultch,” Mom would say. Or would've said, used to say, back when she knew what the hell she was saying.

I ended up spending half the night watching dead singers on YouTube. Peggy Lee. Sarah Vaughan. John Lennon.

Perry Como did me in. “Catch a Falling Star.” I couldn't stop crying.

Mom, Dad, my sister, our first TV…

Dad loved him so. “Oh, let her stay up—it's Perry Como!”

Curled up in his lap, on the couch beside Mom…

(
rants
) Getting old is so sad, so unbearably sad, and the young don't get it, they just don't get it, and they won't begin to get it for twenty or thirty years until overwhelming sadness hits them over the head and they go, “Oh my God, I had no idea! I had no idea it would all go to hell! I had no idea my body would turn to crap! I can't believe I have this gas! I can't believe I have to pee fifty times a day! Who knew I would be abandoned—who knew?”

Then they'll understand why old people fart day and night, and obsess about their bowels and the obituary pages, because… because…

Because at a certain point that's what's left: Who's Dead Now and Metamucil.

Unless, of course, you have the comfort of Christ's words written in red.

She stomps on the Bible.

“Red?” says Pete, “Why red?”

“Because red was the colour of the blood he shed to save your sin-sick soul.”

“Really? Oy vey. I thought my people were crazy.”

Thank God there's no Hell 'cause I'd've just condemned myself to it.

Well, for that matter, thank God there's no God. Thank God for that.

Lights open the space a bit. The chaos surrounding her is more apparent.

Thirty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens started living long enough to know their grandchildren. Before that, we died before our children were old enough to have children of their own. Didn't get out of our twenties alive, most of us. Thirty thousand years ago. That's a thousand generations.

Martha goes, “Grammy, how long is a generation?”

“About thirty years.”

“The little Neanderthal boy, he lived before that, right?”

“That's right. He lived seventy thousand years ago.”

“Does that mean he didn't know his grammy?”

“Maybe.”

“I'm glad I'm not a Neanderthal, then.”

“Me too.” And I kissed her good night. And Maggie. I kissed our granddaughters good night. Not for the last time, the very last, but almost.

The third to the last time.

I always thought of myself as someone who believed that life was worth living.

“Dianne, do you think that life is worth living?”

“Oh, yes,” I would say. “Oh yes oh yes.”

Moron.

Somewhere after Peggy Lee and Perry Como, somewhere, somewhere deep in the night, I realized that everyone I wanted to phone, or spend time with, or talk to, is dead. (
addressing the space around her
) You're all dead.

And I feel so left behind. Like all of you are waiting for me.

A subtle shift in the lighting, in the space. Debris is everywhere.

You live your life and then you end up here. Who knew? Who knew?

She spies something tiny.

Oh.

She picks it up. A stick pin.

This was always on Grammy's dresser in Brooklyn. The only thing of hers I have now.

I used to have her silver cream and sugar—

But I gave that to Ryan when he got married. (rants) So that damn wife of his could stick it in a box marked “Not In My House” until the end of time!

(
calmer
) It's a scarab. A dung beetle. I think it's 1920s, when King Tut's tomb was discovered, and Egypt was suddenly all the rage, art deco. (
She accidentally jabs herself with the pin, jumps.
) Ouch, shit.

I have no idea what this pin meant to her, who gave it to her or why.

Grammy got her bridge partner, the art teacher—she had big hoop earrings and turquoise bracelets—Grammy got her to take me with her class to the Museum of Modern Art. And I spent the day with children who were not like the children I knew back in New Brunswick, not one bit. I was exotic to them. I discovered Matisse. I made collages. Grammy told me that the next time we came to visit, they would be framed, hanging in a place of honour.

But there was never a next time.

She has started to gently prick the sharp end of the pin against the back of her hand.

When Dad told us she'd passed away, Steph and I were upset. “She'll never come anymore at Christmas” and “We'll never go stay in New York again ever.” Then he said, “She's in Heaven now, watching over you girls.” Which was comforting. I mean, when that rotten Marsha Morrissey was bullying me—and she always was, behind the teacher's back—I thought, “Grammy's watching this from Heaven, like a witness.” So, when Marsha's number was up, on that day when she stood at the pearly gates, God would stick out his hand and go, “Not so fast there, missy. I don't think so.”

I don't imagine it has any value whatsoever. Apart from sentimental. Which means that as soon as I'm gone, it'll cease to be valuable.

She talks to the pin directly.

Soon you'll be worthless. I know just how you feel.

As she talks, she occasionally touches the pin to her hand, her fingers.

I was such a tomboy, always climbing trees, shimmying up, sliding down. Which is how I discovered incredibly pleasurable sensations in my crotch. Then I found a bump on a branch that I could, well, mount, and it wasn't too long before I realized that I didn't have to have an entire maple tree between my legs, that I could do this, and more, with my fingers and the palm of my hand, and it made me so happy, until one day, hard at it, when I suddenly thought of Grammy and all her dead girlfriends from bridge club on their way to somewhere in Heaven, “Oh, let's take a look down and see what my little Dianne is up to.”

So much for the comforts of Heaven.

The Egyptians believed that all dung beetles were male, and that these male dung beetles deposited their semen into balls of dung that they rolled into holes in the earth. So when baby scarabs emerged from the holes, they went: “Oh, look, a species that doesn't need females.”

Her pricking becomes more focused, more determined.

And when they were watching these so-called male dung beetles push what they thought were semen-filled shit balls around, they thought, “Oh look, doesn't that make you think of the way that Ra pushes the sun across the sky?” So they decided that dung beetles were sacred, and made them symbols of creation and resurrection.

The Sphinx, the tomb paintings, the Book of the Dead—right there at the heart of all that was a god who rolled the sun across the sky in the same way that bugs shoved balls of shit into holes in the ground.

She jabs the pin into the back of her hand. She looks at it stuck there.

And, well, really, it's no more idiotic than guardian angels, or the miracle of Easter. It's just people trying to figure out what to do with death.

What do you do with death?

She takes the pin, shoves aside a space for it on the table and sets it there.

Goodbye, Grammy.

I can remember being close to Dad, but then, somehow, we started to be on opposite sides of everything.

She's looking for something.

I was printing at Open Studio. I was inking the copper plate when, “There's a phone call, your sister. An emergency.”

“Out on the old highway,” Steph said. “They were driving back with groceries. Mom's here in the hospital, and she'll be fine, but Dad… Dad's…”

“Is he dead? He's not dead ?”

“We think it was a heart attack.”

Heading into oncoming traffic. Somehow Mom managed to grab the wheel, shove his foot on the brake, get the car off the road. He was probably dead before they hit the ditch.

That night, Ryan and I are on the plane, we're looking down at the lights of a town. Quebec or New England someplace.

“Is Grampy in Heaven?”

“That's what your grammy would say.”

“But is he?”

Would it have killed me to lie to an eight-year-old boy, to comfort him by saying that yes, his grandfather was in Heaven? Hadn't I lied to him about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy?

But, oh no, I'd decided to be the rational, enlightened parent. I'd spare my son the idiocies of religion: the blood of the lamb, the crucifixion—I mean, the crucifixion, holy crap, they executed people on the cross for chrissake, it's like worshipping an electric chair. I'd spare Ryan that, and the backbiting in Ladies Aid and the Session that drove my parents crazy, spare him the guilt and shame that comes from being spied on by your dead relatives.

And false comfort, I'd spare him that too.

“It's just a story, Ryan honey. There really isn't such a thing as Heaven.”

A texture on the wall, like lace, like bone filaments, is gradually revealed.

Then two years later, after his father died, when Ryan and I drove to Nova Scotia to take Simon's ashes to the southernmost tip, the very end of land, we talked about how becoming a part of the ocean was an amazing thing—heroic, even—and humbling, too.

“You can see why Simon loved this beach,” I said. “It was the only place from his growing up that he wanted to see again.”

We hugged each other and the tide took Simon away. Ryan and I watched him become a part of everything and that gave us comfort.

Well, it gave me comfort.

The first time Simon came to our house, Christmas back in our second year, he was so well-behaved, he was so courteous, and Mom and Steph loved him because he was so funny. But Dad wasn't impressed. He wasn't rude, just wasn't polite. He hadn't been thrilled with me going to art school—“All that modern art is a load of crap in my humble opinion”—so poor Simon, who was obsessed with minimal sculpture and who overused the word fabulous, poor Simon became the focus for all Dad's frustrations and disappointments with me.

She finds the deer bone in the debris. As she talks, she holds it up to her eye.

Ryan and Dad found it when we were home visiting, the summer he turned seven. They came back from a walk in the fields, and Ryan was holding it like a baton.

“Look what Grampy and I found,” he said. “A deer bone!”

It's curved a little, has to be held just so to see the light at the other end. A tunnel, where the marrow used to be. A long cave.

Bone isn't solid, that would make it too heavy, it's lacy and light. After Dad died, I started making little marks in my sketchbook, and I realized I was drawing it, drawing something that was both real and dead.

The etchings were very big (
indicates two by three feet with her hands
), copper plates. I started drawing tiny little lines in the hard ground, immersing the plates in the acid for short bites, chewing my way into the plate in layers, the bites getting deeper, the lines heavier. There was a time when those deep bites would have intimidated me, because they're so final—if they hadn't worked the plates would've been ruined. Back then, I was foolish enough to think that everything I did was a potential masterpiece. I wanted to be a little art star so that the world could tell Dad that he was wrong. Wrong about me and art school and everything else.

Wrong about Simon.

A growing darkness, the wall is becoming a rougher surface.

Then after he died, I was drawing this bone, then etching it into copper and beginning to understand that what makes us make pictures in the first place is a need to figure out what to do with the dead.

Schoolboys discovered the Lascaux Cave in 1940. Occupied France, four boys in the woods with a dog named Robot, and they stumble into this cave that no one has seen for around sixteen or seventeen thousand years.

It's a perfect story. Children, the woods, a dog. A cave filled with wonders.

And way back—six hundred generations back—who started painting on the walls of caves? Did their parents say, “It's a load of crap, in my humble opinion”?

The sense that she is in a cave.

Or was it the parents and grandparents who started to paint? After a generation of experience, of living in the world, were they trying to show their kids something?

Deep in the cave, a huge parade of animals, horses and bulls, painted across the roof and walls. Then, deeper, a herd of swimming deer. In the Chamber of Engravings, hundreds of animals are scraped into the walls, layers upon layers, each obscuring the other.

Then the Shaft of the Dead Man.

The only human figure in all Lascaux is in here, a stick man, with a little pointy penis, lying on his back. Was he somebody? Does he represent something? Is he dead, is he sleeping, is everything that surrounds him a dream? Why are the animals so magnificent and the lone human a mysterious stick man with a little pointy penis? How can we not be curious about him?

The interior of a cave, the interior of the deer bone, Dad's heart bursting in a car in his adopted country.