Problem+Child

Playgoer's Companion Draft / Comments on the draft / Russ' editing

Liz McCabe

"Outstanding script... brilliant stuff!" -Irish Times "Black comedy of the highest standard"- Irish News - George F. Walker is a famous Canadian playwright, born in Toronto Ontario on August 23rd, 1947 - Originally a taxi driver, Walker wrote his first play “The Prince of Naples,” and sent it to Factory Theatre on a whim, after noticing a call for scripts on a poster in the city. His play ended up being very well received ( [|www.canadiantheatre.com] ) - Walkers’ plays are often based on the element of surprise and he has received the Governor General’s award twice, four Doras and seven Chalmers awards ( [|www.canadiantheatre.com] ) - In 2006, Walker was inducted into the Order of The Order of Canada - His plays are often influenced by the works of Eugene Ionesca and Samuel Beckett ( [|www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com] ) - He is known for writing various television series, including “Due South,” “The Newsroom,” “This is Wonderland,” and “The Line.” He wrote a series of plays, all of which took place in the same motel room. These plays were published in 1997 (Walker, 1999).

- “Problem Child” reflects a master-victim theme: Which is when the author creates characters who, in other cases, would be seen as deplorable people, and presents them in a way that makes the audience feel sorry for them. It is through the characters actions and the things that happen to them in the story that invokes this feeling of sympathy. - "Problem Child" has been translated into various languages and performed around the world --> Irish Premiere 2000 Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and tour of North/South Ireland ([])

- “Problem Child” is a dark-comedy, which is part of a series of plays that work as a whole, but can also function independently from eachother. The setting of each play is in the same motel room. “Problem Child” does not vary in setting, and all action takes place in this one space.



The following is a review I found of “Problem Child” from: ** ( [] ) ** Published: May 26, 1997, Monday
 * By D. J. R. BRUCKNER **

Down and Out but Dead Set On Recovering Their Baby 'Problem Child' Theater Off Park With George F. Walker's Suburban Motel, Rattlestick Productions, an ambitious young theater company, takes on a project of perhaps Wagnerian proportions. Under that umbrella title, Rattlestick is producing in repertory three plays, all set in the same motel room, and will present the next three in the series this fall, with Daniel De Raey directing all six. It's not a Ring cycle; but Mr. Walker once hinted he may write dozens more plays in this group, so who knows what could happen? The first segment, Problem Child, delivers 90 minutes of fascination, pleasure and frustration. A government agency takes a child from a blue-collar couple who, with help from the motel's manager, fight with a welfare worker to get the baby back. Christopher Burns and Tasha Lawrence are wonderfully appealing as the parents, born losers with dark lives but bright mouths: he a witless ex-convict to whom reform is now religion and she is smart, bitter, angry and defeated. Mark Hammer as the motel manager does a canny comic turn. And Kathleen Goldpaugh is a fine welfare snoop: imperious, officious and slightly bonkers. The frustration comes from the script. Mr. Walker can write crackling lines: witness the constant laughter. But he leaves the annoying impression that he is only toying with the characters and cares much less about them than the director and cast do; his command of plot is so uncertain that at the end Miss Lawrence has to step up and tell us how it all came out -- or didn't. Performances of the first three plays continue through June 29 at Theater Off Park, 224 Waverly Place, West Village. D. J. R. BRUCKNER

===For more information about the Rattlestick Theater's production of Walker's "Problem Child", follow this [|LINK.] ===

**A Review of the Play**
http://www.sffringe.org/media/problem4.html

review in the SF Weekly by Michael Scott Moore ** Writing about Problem Child is problematic: How do I say exactly wh at’s wrong with a show that turns on a very strange and unlikely (and funny) event without giving the event itself away? If the script were an excellent piece of writing I could just hand out vague praises and sign off, because the rest of the production is good. But the script has definite and interesting problems, so I’m warning everyone now that I may not be able to discuss them without ruining the plot. George F. Walker, Canadian author of Nothing Sacred, has written a six-part cycle of plays called Suburban Motel, with every play set in the same dingy motel room. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to present unconnected stories of everyday people in a Ray Carver kind of setting. Problem Child is about a broke and drug-addicted young couple who’ve lost their daughter to a foster family. They’re waiting in the motel room, full of hope, to hear their social worker declare them fit to take their daughter home. But the social worker doesn’t oblige. She comes to the motel and tells them the process isn’t that far along. Immediately we have a plot problem: Why, if the process still needs time, have the parents moved into the motel at all? Why didn’t they stay where they were? The only answer is: because Denise (the mother) is so desperate. Denise’s desperation fuels Problem Child the way jealousy fuels a soap opera, and most of the lurid events that unfold have a soap-opera gloss. John Sowle has built the vividly realistic set, with ugly bedspread and plastic-wrapped lampshades, dull curtains and droning TV chatter. Allyson Kulavis plays a good deadbeat mom, in torn jeans, a tight tank top, and a gray cotton sweater. She finds a simple, appealing persona for Denise and only slips out of it on the awkward lines, the evidences of writerly effort. Barry Levine’s R.J. (the father) feels a little willed, partly because he’s obsessed with trash TV to an extent that stops being quite so funny after the first hour. But Stephen Pawley’s Phillie Phillips, the drunken, simple-minded caretaker who gets involved in Denise’s plot, is a stroke of brilliance. He philosophizes and complains in a monotone voice full of muted rage, and gives fresh life to lines that on the page aren’t obviously strong. “The bathroom’s spotless, NOT THAT I GIVE A SHIT,” he hollers; and, later, while vacuuming: “I can’t get into that shit, the haves and the have-nots, the fuckers and the fuckees -- no, I can’t get into that shit. ... Let me just suck up what little dirt I can here.” You have to see it to really appreciate it. Unfortunately, poor old Phillie gets into the master-victim theme so often that it starts to feel forced. And R.J. points out the same theme every time Jenny Jones or Ricki Lake drags some unwilling schmuck in front of the cameras for her audience to jeer at. Denise complains about it to Helen, the social worker; presumably this sense of injustice (combined with her desperation) is the reason she almost kills Helen, wrecking all hope of retrieving her child. It’s a good theme, but it doesn’t need to be ridden so hard, and Helen’s near-death has such an unlikeliness about it that enjoying the humor is a strain. Without it, of course, there would be no play; and after it Christina Augello’s performance as Helen vastly improves, from solid but slightly stiff to hilariously faux-polite and outraged. But the event creates a disconnect between Walker’s crushing realism and his flights of imagination. It’s a compromise solution to a number of plot problems, which places Problem Child in a purgatory between absurdism and simple awkward writing. There. Nothing given away. The other problem with Walker’s script is that time freezes near the end, so Denise can turn to give the audience a summary of her next few months. It’s like those wrap-ups at the end of a movie that scroll up the screen to let you know what happens to all the characters, only placed in one of the actors’ mouths. These tweakings of convention should be David Lynch-like -- realism fused into something else -- and they might work if they had dramatic purpose; but they don’t. They just make the writer’s job easier, and diminish the play.
 * Problem Child **** by George F. Walker

Problem Child. By George F. Walker. Directed by John Warren. Starring Barry Levine, Allyson Kulavis, Stephen Pawley, and Christina Augello.

Laura Graham Biography

http://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=Walker%2C%20George%20F.

Walker, George F.
Playwright born in Toronto's East End working class district, [|Ontario], August 23, 1947. He was a taxi driver when he heard that [|Factory Theatre] was looking for new authors. He sent them his first play, //The Prince of Naples// and the company performed it in 1972. He has been linked with the house ever since. Mr. Walker experiments with form and language, fitting odd concepts and words into the mouths of characters that, as strange as it sometimes seems, profit from the anomaly. In [|Zastrozzi], for instance, Walker uses a strange hybrid language between modern and written/literary/romantic to create a dark comedy about obsession. However, he switches gears to a more contemporary idiom in [|Criminals in Love] to tell the tale of a bunch of urban losers who are occasionally wise, often witty but are nevertheless victims of circumstance. He revels in surprise, sometimes using it to trip up and comment on the form he has chosen for the play (as in //Problem Child//). Walker, one of the savviest writers in the land, walks a tightrope between pure artistic achievement and commerciality. He does it very well. He has become, in the process, one of the rare Canadian writers who has had a made-in-Canada commercial production of a work with [|Nothing Sacred]. He has twice won the [|Governor General's Award] and has four [|Doras] and seven [|Chalmers Awards] (the latest for //The End of Civilization//, of //[|Suburban Motel]//, 1999). His plays have been performed across the country as well as in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago (among other cities), in over 100 productions in English and several in translations to German, French, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish and Czech. Mr Walker also directs, including his own six-play cycle, //Suburban Motel// - of which //Problem Child// is a part (Factory Theatre, 1997). In January, 2000, Mr. Walker's play //Heaven//, figured in a controversy when [|Canadian Stage], the company premiering the work, transferred the work from its mainstage to its smaller hall after the leadership of the house decided the work was too controversial. Said Martin Bragg, artistic producer, in an interview with CBC, "George wants to make people angry ... and what he doesn't realize is that a good portion of the Bluma Appel audience wouldn't have the interest in getting beyond the first five pages of the script." He said, himself (in interview with [|Kate Taylor] ), on the production, "First and foremost, an audience wants to be connected . . . They connect emotionally." And in the same interview, about why he directed his own plays, "I want to make sure they have a pulse. I don't want the intellectual approach to my work that I think is a big deal in Canadian theatre." [It's important that he directs his own plays. What can we find out about why, and what happens when he doesn't?]4 He has three children and lives in Toronto with his second wife, actor Susan Purdy. Other plays include: //Tough!//, //Escape From Happiness//, //Theatre of the Film Noir//. An archival collection on this subject is available at the LW Conolly Theatre Archives at the University of Guelph, Ontario. (Additional information provided by Ed Gass-Donnelly) Suggested Readings: George F. Walker. //The East End Plays, Part 1//. Vancouver: Talon, 1988 George F. Walker. //Suburban Motel//. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1999. Chris Johnson. //Essays on George F. Walker: Playing with Anxiety//. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1999. Last updated 2006-10-25

Dusty Green

George F. Walker's plays have been preformed all across Canada, the United States, and have been translated into many languages for international productions. He first started his work in 1971 when a Toronto theater company was looking for new playwrights. The following is a list of plays that Walker has written:


 * //Prince of Naples// (1971)
 * //Ambush at Tether's End// (1971)
 * //Sacktown Rag// (1972)
 * //Bagdad Saloon// (1973)
 * //Beyond Mozambique// (1974)
 * //Ramona and the Whilte Slaves// (1976)
 * //Gossip// (1977)
 * Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline (1977)
 * //Filthy Rich// (1979)
 * //Rumors of Our Death// (1980)
 * //Theatre of the Film Noir// (1981)
 * //Science and Madness// (1982)
 * //The Art of War// (1983)
 * //Criminals in Love// (1984)
 * //Better Living// (1986)
 * //Beautiful City// (1987)
 * //Nothing Sacred// (1988)
 * //Love and Anger// (1989)
 * Escape from Happiness (1991)
 * //Tough!// (1993)
 * //Suburban Motel// (1997): //Problem Child//, //Criminal Genius//, //Risk Everything//, //Adult Entertainment//, //Featuring Loretta//, //The End of Civilization//
 * //Heaven// (2000)

George F. Walker is currently working on a number of projects, including writing for several Canadian television productions. In 2006 he became a member of the Order of Canada, and he received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award. One of his most interesting production is the //Suburban Motel series, which includes six plays performed on one s//tage, featuring the play //Problem Child.// According the the New York Times, it is rare that the six plays are produced at the same time; three plays are selected and produced for one season, and the remaining three are to be produced in the following season. George Walker said that he plans to make many more plays for the Suburban Motel collection. This information is available at: this [|LINK!]

Athabaska University and the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia have just released an updated [|BIOGRAPHY] of Walker and his work.

Cathy Doucette

"Problem Child" is a dark comedy, or black comedy. "The purpose of black comedy is to make light of serious and often taboo subject matter, and some comedians use it as a tool for exploring important issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious thought, as well as amusement, in their audience. Popular themes of the genre include rape, murder, suicide, war, drug abuse, terminal illness, abuse, insanity, disease, racism, disability, both physical and mental, chauvinism and crime." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy)


 * Suburban Motel** : review from Amazon.com

"George F. Walker has a knack for creating astonishing, vivid characters that exist beyond the confines of the stage. After seeing his plays, you leave convinced that these people were not simply dissolved into nothingness when the play concluded. Their lives continue on, as is sometimes most obvious when Walker revisits his characters down the road. SUBURBAN MOTEL is a series of six plays, all taking place in the same (supposedly) seedy motel room. Each play stands alone, although some characters do pop up in more than one. The interconnecting theme, besides the location, is the despair that these characters feel. As in most Walker plays, the plot is secondary. These are character-driven pieces, with no pat answers or Neil Simon-type wit. The inhabitants of these tales are stuck in lives they want out of, but with no clear idea as to how to leave. Everyone will have their favorite play. Mine is CRIMINAL GENIUS, in which several criminals (including a few from previous Walker productions) decide to overthrow a vicious crimelord. Sadly, they fail miserably. I give nothing away by this; the enjoyment here comes from the characters, not the plot. Overall, some plays don't measure up to others. They lack the bite of Walker's best plays (see ZASTROZZI or NOTHING SACRED). But less-than-perfect-Walker is still good theatre, and good reading. "

http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/11559/Suburban-Motel-%28Problem-Child-Criminal-Genius-Risk-Everything%29.html : In the transient world of the motel, no-hopers, ‘the scum of the earth’, fail to fulfil their aspirations, sometimes poignantly (//Problem Child//), sometimes farcically (//Criminal Genius//), sometimes with a mixture of both (//Risk Everything//). In the confines of one shabby room, Canadian playwright George F. Walker creates a world inhabited by extreme but believable characters.
 * 1) //Problem Child//. R. J. Reynolds (‘R.J.’) and his wife Denise have been staying for a week in a desolate motel room, waiting to hear whether Denise will be able to get their baby daughter back from foster care. The social worker Helen Mackie comes to check on them, in particular to see whether Denise has given up prostitution and drugs, for which she has a conviction. Helen leaves and comes back drunk, having bought a gun. Since her mother reported her to the police, Denise considers murdering her. Helen returns and warns Denise that she may not get her baby. Helen cuts her hand and faints from loss of blood, her head hitting the toilet bowl. Denise and Phillie the alcoholic motel manager bury her body, and he is sent off to kidnap the baby. Phillie loses his nerve, and Helen, who was merely unconscious, crawls out of the mud and gets herself to hospital where she takes time to recover from her head injury. She still hopes to reform Denise, who stays on with R.J. for another six months in the motel room, but Denise is not optimistic: ‘things don't work out.…Not for people like us. They just get worse.’
 * 2) //Criminal Genius//. Petty criminals Rolly Moore and his son Stevie have been given the job of torching a restaurant. However, fearing they might hurt somebody, Rolly decides instead to kidnap the female chef and owner. Shirley ‘the Pearl’ Katakis comes to their motel room, furious at Rolly, because the chef is Amanda Castle, the daughter of the man who had contracted the arson attack on a rival restaurant, so that Amanda would ‘come back to her father's loving embrace’. While Phillie demands payment for the room, Amanda and Stevie escape, and Rolly belatedly goes off to burn down the restaurant. Amanda joyously burns down her father's restaurant in retaliation. She so hates her father that she lays plans to kill him. Later that evening, Rolly, Stevie, and Phillie have run away from a gun battle. Shirley and Amanda return, having killed seven of her father's guards, and threaten to shoot the three men for running away. Amanda's father and the remaining guards come to the motel and shoot all five dead.
 * 3) //Risk Everything//. Some time after the events of //Problem Child//, Denise brings her injured mother Carol to their motel room. Although Carol claims that she was beaten up by her occasional lover Ray, Denise realizes that her mother was injured by Steamboat Jeffries for cheating on a deal involving $68,000. However, Murray Lawson has supposedly absconded with the money. Awaiting Steamboat Willie's revenge, Carol consoles herself in bed with Michael, a pornographic film director who was shooting a movie in the neighbouring cabin. Denise is shocked and throws him out. R.J. goes in search of Murray Lawson, encounters Steamboat Willie, and returns with explosives strapped to his body. Michael returns, also wired with explosives for attempting to intervene on Carol's behalf. Denise plans to take R.J. so that they can ‘explode all over Steamboat Willie’, but are seized by him as they leave the motel. Carol admits that she has the missing money, grudgingly hands it over, and the two men have the explosives removed. Denise cannot believe that her mother would risk everything for the sake of money.


 * Brooke McGovern**

Why does Walker use one motel room?
Walker’s Suburban Motel cycle actually began as one play, //Problem Child//, about Denise and R.J. and their problems with Child and Family Services. Once this play was finished, however, Walker was inspired to keep going using the same setting which he found “incredibly liberating. Because I don’t have to recreate the world. The world is that room, and there’s nothing between me and the characters, no narrative pressure, because the story is only what happens in that room. It can’t be anything else”

What kind of motel room is it?
Info [|LINK]
 * “Furthermore, the motel is a kind of neutral space: virtually //anybody// can walk through that door. But the sort of neighbourhood in which Walker’s motel is located is not a vacation spot, and this is not the sort of motel to which vacationers would go, for a holiday, or to stop between home and a resort destination. This is the sort of motel where one can find hookers ( Sandy in //The End of Civilization)//, porn movie producers (Michael in //Featuring Loretta// and //Risk Everything//), crooks doing a job (Shirley, Rolly and Stevie in //Criminal Genius//), people looking for work (Henry and Lily in //The End of Civilization)//, people having an extramarital affair (Jayne and Max in //Adult Entertainment//). For most of the characters, the motel’s detachment from the usual routine, from either home or place of work, makes it “carnivalesque” in that behaviour which would not be “allowed” elsewhere is permitted here. All the characters regard the place they are in as the locus of a temporary state of affairs, and almost all come to the motel because they are looking for futures better in some way than their desperate presents. They all fail. They are all “on the edge”, on the outskirts of life as well as of the city. In this deceptively unremarkable place, a drab, camouflaged circle of hell with an ice machine, we meet people, blue collar people, standing toe-to-toe with life; groping it, throttling it, pulling it closer or fending it off, and in the process coming to some greater self-awareness that usually scalds as it entertains. Can any of this be funny? Yes, very. (De Raey 5)”**

What is the Factory Theater?
It was founded in 1970 by Ken Gass and is the first company in the history of this country to only produce Canadian Plays! In 1998 Walkers Suburban Motel brought the Factory Theater to life and the theater took off from there, allowing Gass to have enough money to buy out the candle factory he was renting and from then on the Factory Theater had a name in Toronto!

Info [|LINK]

Who is George Walker?
He got his start at the Factory Theater when they were searching for new authors and as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Factory pretty much got their start when George Walker came up with a good enough play to help them take off. He has been attached to the Factory since The Prince of Naples in 1972.

Biography which may be repetitive but this is where I got more information.

Playwright born in Toronto's East End working class district, Ontario, August 23, 1947. He was a taxi driver when he heard that Factory Theatre was looking for new authors. He sent them his first play, The Prince of Naples and the company performed it in 1972. He has been linked with the house ever since. Mr. Walker experiments with form and language, fitting odd concepts and words into the mouths of characters that, as strange as it sometimes seems, profit from the anomaly. In Zastrozzi, for instance, Walker uses a strange hybrid language between modern and written/literary/romantic to create a dark comedy about obsession. However, he switches gears to a more contemporary idiom in Criminals in Love to tell the tale of a bunch of urban losers who are occasionally wise, often witty but are nevertheless victims of circumstance. He revels in surprise, sometimes using it to trip up and comment on the form he has chosen for the play (as in Problem Child). Walker, one of the savviest writers in the land, walks a tightrope between pure artistic achievement and commerciality. He does it very well. He has become, in the process, one of the rare Canadian writers who has had a made-in-Canada commercial production of a work with Nothing Sacred. He has twice won the Governor General's Award and has four Doras and seven Chalmers Awards (the latest for The End of Civilization, of Suburban Motel, 1999). His plays have been performed across the country as well as in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago (among other cities), in over 100 productions in English and several in translations to German, French, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish and Czech. Mr Walker also directs, including his own six-play cycle, Suburban Motel - of which Problem Child is a part (Factory Theatre, 1998). In January, 2000, Mr. Walker's play Heaven, figured in a controversy when Canadian Stage, the company premiering the work, transferred the work from its mainstage to its smaller hall after the leadership of the house decided the work was too controversial. Said Martin Bragg, artistic producer, in an interview with CBC, "George wants to make people angry ... and what he doesn't realize is that a good portion of the Bluma Appel audience wouldn't have the interest in getting beyond the first five pages of the script." He said, himself (in interview with Kate Taylor ), on the production, "First and foremost, an audience wants to be connected . . . They connect emotionally." And in the same interview, about why he directed his own plays, "I want to make sure they have a pulse. I don't want the intellectual approach to my work that I think is a big deal in Canadian theatre." He has three children and lives in Toronto with his second wife, actor Susan Purdy. Other plays include: Tough!, Escape From Happiness, Theatre of the Film Noir. An archival collection on this subject is available at the LW Conolly Theatre Archives at the University of Guelph, Ontario Info [|LINK]
 * Walker, George F.**



Answers to Russ' Questions **

- His plays are often influenced by the works of Eugene Ionesca and Samuel Beckett.


 * Eugène Ionesco** was a Romanian/French playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.
 * Samuel Barclay Beckett** (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant garde writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist. Samuel was a student of James Joyce, and also wrote for the Theatre of the Absurd.

Both of these passages being from wikipedia show me that Walker may have been influenced by them in the way that he portrayed his characters as low grade, bottom of the barrel people. Making them to be the people and feelings in which Beckett and lenesco see and feel about people and how they portray them themselves.

About The Rattle Stick Theater
RATTLESTICK PLAYWRIGHTS THEATER is a multi-award-winning 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and recipient of the 2007 Ross Wetzsteon Memorial Obie Award, which recognized us for work and our mission: developing and producing innovative new plays.

Rattlestick’s core operations are composed of its mainstage Off-Broadway productions. In addition to our Mainstage season our Emerging Playwrights Program, run through our literary department, organizes 40-50 public and private readings, followed by talkback sessions for the playwright with our artistic director and literary managers. This enables writers to develop their plays further and provides networking opportunities with directors and actors. We also offer week-long workshops for writers and have recently added a ten-day retreat at the Westin Theatre in Vermont during July where writers can go to workshop their plays.

We have produced over forty world premieres in the past fourteen years. Now in our 15th Anniversary Season, Rattlestick has introduced new writers and received critical acclaim for its innovative work. Rattlestick’s Advisory Board participates in The Emerging Playwrights Project, which matches a new playwright with an established artist for an experienced eye and creative support. Playwright and artist mentors have included Edward Albee, Jon Robin Baitz, Zoe Caldwell, Arthur Kopit, Craig Lucas, Joe Mantello, Terrence McNally, Marsha Norman and Adam Rapp. Previous plays include, among others: Two Boys in a Bed, Message to Michael, Carpool, Volunteer Man (Obie award), A Trip to the Beach, Ascendancy, Stuck, Vick’s Boy, The Messenger, Saved or Destroyed (Obie award), Neil’s Garden, Faster, The Last Sunday in June ( GLAAD Award-nomination), St. Crispin’s Day, Where We’re Born, Five Flights, Boise, Finer Noble Gases, The Pavilion (Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Play of 2005) God Hates The Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny (Drama Desk Award nomination), Miss Julie, Acts of Mercy: passion-play, Cagelove, It Goes Without Saying, Dark Matters, Stay, American Sligo, War, Steve & Idi, Lady (Drama Desk Award nomination), Geometry of Fire, That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play and The Amish Project. []