“The Drawer Boy” at the Miniature Theatre of Chester

By Kate Abbott12:00AM / Friday, July 11, 2003Print Story | Email Story

In 1972, actors from the Theatre Passe Muraille in Canada interviewed farmers in rural Ontario to collect material for a play. The actors worked on the farms in the afternoons and met to rehearse in the mornings. Out of that work, they created and performed The Farm Show. Playwright Michael Healey met an original member of the show some time later. Out of that meeting, he wrote The Drawer Boy. He based the character of Miles on Miles Potter, another member of The Farm Show ensemble. Miles comes to stay with Morgan, the farmer, who runs a small dairy operation, with chickens and hay on the side. Morgan shares the farm house and work with Angus, the drawer boy, the artist. They were childhood friends and fought in World War II together. Because of a head injury he received during an air raid in London, Angus has no long-term memory. Angus does not remember people. He has not recognized anyone but Morgan since he was injured. He is bright, he understands everything in front of him, but he cannot hold onto anything. He juggles numbers at lightning speed and counts the stars in sections of the night sky. Morgan and Angus have established a routine over many years. Morgan comforts Angus with familiar actions and the familiar story of both their lives, told in simple, cadenced language. Miles does not fit into it. He wonders: when Angus enters the kitchen, why does he automatically touch the wall by the bedroom? When a tractor injures Morgan's arm, why does Angus feed Morgan spoonfuls of water? Miles has come to learn about farming. He finds that an egg costs more to produce than Morgan can charge for it; that if the price of steak had risen at the same rate wages had risen, it would have nearly doubled; that the government had given Miles more in student loans than Morgan had made on the farm in the past three years combined. He also discovers the perils of haying in shorts and without gloves. Morgan gets subtle pleasure out of assigning Miles jobs like scrubbing the gravel in the culvert or "rotating the crops": The corn on the east side of the field, that gets the morning light, needs to be dug up and moved to the west side of the field, to catch the afternoon light. "And it has to be done in the dark, so set your alarm for 3 a.m. - I don't want to have to call you." In the meantime, Miles learns a great deal about Angus and Morgan, about "love, in a strange way, the way we love, which is seldom what it seems," as Jay Patterson, who plays Angus, said. Kevin O'Donnell, who plays Miles, said that, for him, the play centered around the question, "What lies do you tell yourself to make it through from day to day?" Anderson Matthews, who plays Morgan, said the play was about "quiet sacrifices that you make. They aren't advertised. You don't necessarily even want them. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong. It's also very funny." "It's a good play," said director Michael Dowling. "When I read it, I thought it would be easy to do mediocrely. It's deceptively tricky...It takes on so many themes. It's great to read but hard to direct. You have to choose which to highlight: the transformative power of art, friendship, sacrifice, the cleansing power of truth?" The actors brought up a scene in which Miles tells Angus the story of Hamlet in the first person: I put on an antic disposition ... so then I killed my stepfather . The play dealt with reflections of art in life and life in art, they said. It addressed madness, both feigned and real. And after a point, they asked, did it matter which? Dowling said it was his favorite kind of play: "It gets you laughing and then changes ground. There's a great quote from Harold Kelman: "Audiences take the truth like castor oil: If you get them laughing, you can pour it down their throats.'" Matthews has acted at the Miniature Theatre in the past, some time ago, and has known Artistic Director Byam Stevens for years. The other two cast members are both new to it. Patterson said he knew Stevens socially; he met him in New York in 1981. Stevens recently bumped into Patterson at a party in Pittsburgh, and they got to talking. Stevens asked him about playing Angus a month ago. Patterson read the play and fell in love with it. He actually read for a production of it in California once, he said, first as Morgan and then as Angus. Matthews and Patterson have both acted on and off Broadway. Matthews spent 19 months as Boolie in Driving Miss Daisy and has performed, among many places, at London's Old Vic. Patterson has a number of television and feature film credits, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Places in the Heart, A Gentleman's Game, Nadine and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. O'Donnell has worked at a good many Shakespeare festivals and has performed his own Punch and Judy Show in several Fringe festivals. Matthews said the cast rehearsed in New York for two weeks and in Chester for a week. Chester had a small stage and enforced economy of movement."The play is so beautifully crafted, a lot takes care of itself," he said. All he had to do was "stay true to the character and not give away anything." There were often points where the audience thought one thing while Morgan was thinking another, he said. Patterson said that with Angus, Dowling kept telling him to avoid cliches. "We don't need Lenny in Of Mice and Men. We don't need a retarded person." He tried to avoid that. Dowling said the audience should not pity Angus. As Morgan tells Miles early on, Angus is fine. He is normal for someone who had done to him what Angus had done to him. Patterson said he focused on clean transitions. He never had more trouble learning lines, he said. The three actors are staying in the same house. They would cook dinner and run lines and get up early and run lines. Angus's lines all come in broken sentences or ellipses. Usually, one way to learn incomplete lines is to mentally complete them. In this case, Patterson said, Angus's lines had no logical thought progression: "I don't - Where is - What - He-" Patterson could not tie them to ideas. "Go now and - quick - there's some - something for sandwiches in - the thing." He said one of the easiest sets of lines to learn was the conversation about the price of beef. It was all numbers, but it made sense. O'Donnell said Miles came from the theater collective in Canada in the 70s; O'Donnell also had to get the feel of his character without being overly stereotypical. Miles was not a 2003 guy. He was a little hipped on Communism and communal farming, a little "Can you dig it?" O'Donnell agreed that the stage called for economy: "If you overdo anything, it seems magnified." "When the audience sees these characters," Matthews said, "the play does a lovely thing and doesn't explain anything." Miles walks in on two guys in an established routine: code words, spoons of water. Miles disrupts it. When the routine comes in contact with a wild card, it does not take long to unravel. But because nothing is explained quickly, the play takes the audience's imagination in all directions: who's the bad guy?; what's going on? The real answer is much more human than many of the surmises, Matthews said. The play built in a lot of surprises. "I hope because it's so entertaining, people will say, 'I don't know what's happening ... but I don't care.'" The title Drawer Boy can read two ways: a drawer as one who draws or part of a chest of drawers. "It depends on how you look at it," Matthews said. "It's in the eyes of the beholder," Patterson said, "like all good theater." Matthews said he hopes people take away many opinions about the show. "Everything comes out of good intentions," he said. Patterson said the stage manager had overheard two women leaving the theater, saying, "I thought the tall one was sinister, but it wasn't him. It was the farmer." "I'm not sinister," Matthews said. The play has an overwhelming drive to always find truths - everybody's truths, O'Donnell said. It explores consequences when truth is concealed and the consequences when truth is revealed.

“The Drawer Boy” at the Miniature Theatre of Chester

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