On Tuesday April 12th I had the pleasure of joining my lil' CreComm buddies at the Rachel Browne Theatre for a play written by a former CreComm instructor, Armin Wiebe. The play is called "The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz."
The story focuses on a young Mennonite couple who live on a farm and are trying to start a family. They had been married for two years and were not yet fortunate enough to have a child. The man of the house comes across an old detuned piano and brings it home. Shortly thereafter a visitor shows up, a pianist from Russia, who ends up staying with the couple.
The pianist ends up tuning the piano by pulling dead animals and feathers (I call bull-sh#%,) out from the casing where the strings are, and starts to play an excerpt from the Moonlight Sonata over and over again. This beautiful song starts to woo the lady of the house, and eventually she has an affair with the pianist during a night when her husband is stuck in town due to a snowstorm.
Of course the woman loves her husband, but she wants a baby pretty badly, hence the affair.
Being Mennonite myself and having come from a family where my sister, my parents, some cousins and aunts and uncles talk with Mennonite accents, I am quite familiar with how the accent should sound. But there is a difference in the accent depending on where in Manitoba a Mennonite comes from. Back home in Steinbach we would say the people that had accents like the female lead in the play had were from "yant seid," or, the other side. This basically meant that these people were from Altona, Morden, and Winkler. Their accents were always thicker and more pronounced than ours.
The male lead character's accent was poorly done in my opinion. He kept dropping words, and sounded Scottish or Irish to me sometimes. I found that the female lead had a good handle on the yant seid accent, although at times it seemed overdone. It's hard to fault these actors, the accent is very challenging to pull off - I can't even do it that well. But I did find the bad accent moments hard to take after awhile.
I found the dialogue to be spot on as far as typical Mennonite conversations go. When the characters inserted things like nai-yo or oba-yo into their sentences, I was taken back to conversations with my grandmother. I thought the dialogue was very authentic Mennonite.
I myself was drawn to the lighting in the theatre. The set was fantastic, and old log cabin style house with a straw roof. I loved how a light shone through the rear window and the darker blue lights that shone outside the house stage right. With my interests in film continuing to grow more and more, I have been spending a lot of my time looking at lighting when I watch a play or a movie or whatever.
In the artist talkback, I was surprised that Mr. Wiebe was not more well spoken. I mean, he was an instructor here at the college. Maybe he was nervous, not sure. But he should be happy, the show was packed on Tuesday and I heard that they added an extra show.
That's success baby!
j
The story focuses on a young Mennonite couple who live on a farm and are trying to start a family. They had been married for two years and were not yet fortunate enough to have a child. The man of the house comes across an old detuned piano and brings it home. Shortly thereafter a visitor shows up, a pianist from Russia, who ends up staying with the couple.
The pianist ends up tuning the piano by pulling dead animals and feathers (I call bull-sh#%,) out from the casing where the strings are, and starts to play an excerpt from the Moonlight Sonata over and over again. This beautiful song starts to woo the lady of the house, and eventually she has an affair with the pianist during a night when her husband is stuck in town due to a snowstorm.
Of course the woman loves her husband, but she wants a baby pretty badly, hence the affair.
Being Mennonite myself and having come from a family where my sister, my parents, some cousins and aunts and uncles talk with Mennonite accents, I am quite familiar with how the accent should sound. But there is a difference in the accent depending on where in Manitoba a Mennonite comes from. Back home in Steinbach we would say the people that had accents like the female lead in the play had were from "yant seid," or, the other side. This basically meant that these people were from Altona, Morden, and Winkler. Their accents were always thicker and more pronounced than ours.
The male lead character's accent was poorly done in my opinion. He kept dropping words, and sounded Scottish or Irish to me sometimes. I found that the female lead had a good handle on the yant seid accent, although at times it seemed overdone. It's hard to fault these actors, the accent is very challenging to pull off - I can't even do it that well. But I did find the bad accent moments hard to take after awhile.
I found the dialogue to be spot on as far as typical Mennonite conversations go. When the characters inserted things like nai-yo or oba-yo into their sentences, I was taken back to conversations with my grandmother. I thought the dialogue was very authentic Mennonite.
I myself was drawn to the lighting in the theatre. The set was fantastic, and old log cabin style house with a straw roof. I loved how a light shone through the rear window and the darker blue lights that shone outside the house stage right. With my interests in film continuing to grow more and more, I have been spending a lot of my time looking at lighting when I watch a play or a movie or whatever.
In the artist talkback, I was surprised that Mr. Wiebe was not more well spoken. I mean, he was an instructor here at the college. Maybe he was nervous, not sure. But he should be happy, the show was packed on Tuesday and I heard that they added an extra show.
That's success baby!
j
