Jan 232012
 

Okay—I think if you cross Aristophanes with Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco, you might end up with something like Lynn Coady’s irreverent fringe play Mark. Or, if you cross tag-team wrestling with the Battle of the Sexes—the play actually has a club called the “slap-stick” and a very large phallus. Mark is a delight and a lovely addition to Numéro Cinq‘s growing collection of plays and screenplays, a section of the magazine that is unique as far as I can tell.

Lynn Coady‘s is an amazing novelist, also deservedly popular. Her fiction has been garnering acclaim since her first novel, Strange Heaven, was published and was nominated for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction when she was 28. Strange Heaven was followed up by a best-selling short story collection, Play the Monster Blind (2000) as well as the award-winning novels Saints of Big Harbour (2002) and Mean Boy 2006). Lynn Coady grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and now lives in Edmonton. Her most recent novel is The Antagonist, which was short-listed for this year’s Giller Prize. Mark will be published with another of Lynn’s one-act plays called Skydiving by Scirocco Drama later this year. Mark ran at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in the summer of 2009 in a production directed by Rob Appleford. The photographs herein are rehearsal photos from that production.

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Mark

By Lynn Coady

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Characters:

Two WOMEN, CANDACE and BELINDA

Two MEN, ALISTAIR AND DEXTER

One Male ATTENDANT

One JUDGE, hooded

A DRUMMER

Actors: Bradley Bishop & Tom Blazejewicz

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PREAMBLE:

Stage:

Two large plinth-boxes, DSL and DSR, two stools DSR, one stool UCS with two GONGS on either side, with a single MALLET and a SLAP-STICK on either side of the stool.

The DRUMMER enters with DRUM: louche, Upper East Side, too cool to be in this play. He ambles to a DSR stools and sets up

WOMEN’S FANFARE.

Enter Two WOMEN from SR, one bearing BASKET: they are dressed in canvas shifts tied at the waist with a rope. High Energy! Rite-of-Springy pirouettes! Rose petals! Prom dance excitement! They settle at the DSL plinth-box.

A BEAT. Then the MEN’S FANFARE.

Enter Two MEN, from SL, one bearing BASKET: they are dressed in canvas jockstraps tied to a rope around their waists, with canvas sweatbands around their heads. Macho strut! WWF Smackdown! Calisthenics! Dynamic Tension Stretches! High Fives! They set up at the DSR plinth-box.

A BEAT. Then the JUDGE’S FANFARE.

Enter JUDGE, hobbling on the supporting arm of the ATTENDANT. The JUDGE is slowly led to the UCS stool. The ATTENDANT puts the MALLET in the JUDGE’S palsied hand and picks up the SLAP-STICK.  The ATTENDANT wears a silver WHISTLE around his neck.

The JUDGE bangs the DSL GONG (henceforth known as the WOMEN’S GONG) ONCE.

The WOMEN pull out a GARLAND from their BASKET which is placed on the head of BELINDA.

Much girlish excitement.

The JUDGE bangs the DSR GONG (henceforth known as the MEN’S GONG) ONCE.

The MEN pull out a large PHALLUS with a hook on the base from their BASKET.  DEXTER  hooks the PHALLUS on his belt. Much macho celebration and admiration of length/width/tumescence.

The ATTENDANT cuts the frivolity short with a loud THWACK of the SLAP-STICK on his open palm.

Both teams get ready to rumble. BATTLE FARFARE from the DRUMMER..

Another THWACK! FANFARE stops.

BELINDA and DEXTER approach each other CS and begin to circle each other menacingly in a clockwise direction, looking for an opening.

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