Frank Barry - St. John's, Newfoundland

the atlantic basin project - volume one

Frank Barry is a well know Newfoundland writer, playwright, director and actor. He has been creating original theatre since the 1970's, including scores of collectively produced works and six of his own plays. One of his recent plays Wreckhouse was published by Creative Book Publishers in 2003. The Atlantic Basin Project asked Frank to discuss his work and give his impressions on the current state of the arts in Newfoundland.
Image of Frank Barry as Bus Stop Man by Rhonda Pelley

When did you begin and what course did it take?
When I was very young I would spend hours looking at the paintings in the Arts section of the family Encyclopedia Britannica. Strangely enough one of those paintings, "Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus" by Rubens, that had a dark affect on me as a child, recently resurfaced in my mind and is playing a part in the discovery period of a new play I am writing about Torture. After Britannica - school. Mind numbing spirit killing school of the black hearted Nuns and not very Christian Brothers. Dropped out of high school. And then a protracted Kerouac period although I hadn't read the book yet. Many jobs. My first performance as a dancing hunch-backed mute in a travelling Mummer's play wasn't the National Theatre School, but it led to a life, and presumably death, in the theatre.

I was a co-founder of the collective Sheila's Brush Theatre Company. We drank too much and fought too much, but we did do some exciting theatre and invented a lot of peculiar stage craft. We toured just about every cranny of the island when it still was one. One of the most important things we learned is that the stage is a place where you can be free to do anything. An absolute license to create. We even evolved a sub-group of plot police who would come on stage and arrest ourselves when we participated in illegal plot twists. This speaks to originality, which is alas, on the local scene, becoming a dying cause. You second rate CODCO imitators hear me! Now I write by myself and work with others when it's possible.

How has collaboration informed your solo work and vice versa?
Collaboration gave me a recognizable and original style, which I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to defeat. But the important thing is the idea original.

What is MEAT? What inspired you to write it and where is it now?
MEAT is a play about people being ground up by an unfeeling, greed driven social system. They are refugees from one horror show or another happening in various parts of the globe. Appropriately and truly enough, they all work in a meat plant. One of the largest in the world. Thousands of cows a day come in one end, get disconnected, and hundreds of thousands of wieners, burgers and roasts etc. go out the other end. In the middle of that are the people working in what is essentially a vast meat grinder. I believe 'meat grinder' became a euphemism for the trench warfare of the war to end all wars.

It started when I read a newspaper article about this town in western Canada that was being inundated by thousands of foreigners who had come to work in this gigantic meat machine built just for them. They were from Honduras, the Sudan, Pakistan - you name it. All the hot spots for the human practice of human indignities. And some of those foreigners they were complaining about were from Newfystan. What they all had in common, besides desperation and plundered resources, was their willingness and ability to slaughter and process animals for food. So I went there and talked to a lot of folks, black and white and indifferent, and then came home and wrote the play which I'm still struggling to get produced. Apparently, one of its problems (according to a local producer) is that it's shocking. People working for slave wages in a meat grinder? Shocking!!!? Oh dear, oh dear. Shut up and have another Big Mac bye! I have to confess here that the experience turned me into a vegetarian. So from here on nothing else I say will probably really matter.

How has the cultural life of Nfld. changed since you began your career?
"Cultural life" is too broad a term to have any real meaning. Both grave diggers and kite fliers have cultural lives I suppose, but they rarely meet until the kite flyer trips up and falls down a well and the grave digger has to bury him. And the idea that I was embarking on a career never occurred to me. But there are many, many art careerists tripping over one another here now. And celebrities? My God the celebrities! Their local-ness! I had to pull one out of my armpit the other day. Common as lice. And the hyperbole! If you were to heed NTV, the Herald and the CBC weekend arts show we're up over our arses in Picassos, Pinters, and Puccinis. Island of geniuses - we salute us! I'm half afraid to open the door of the fridge for fear that a local celebrity might be in there giving an award to .. well another local celebrity. Also, it's hard to accept, that your fellow artists accept, the idea that, what artists do, what they do, should be designed as a product for a market defined by government funders and feeders. Yup! let's trust the government to define what Art is and fund it accordingly. Because when it comes to Art who better to trust with the question of what's meaningful and beautiful in Art than the bureaucracy and its toadies? ?

Look what a great job they're doing with the Rooms. Yawn. (For anyone not from here the ROOMS is our brand new multi-million dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to run, Culture Palace. It's called the ROOMS in honour of our now departed fisherfolk who used that term for the places they stored their fish after it was salted. Fishy is right.) Just recently, the ROOMS Art loving administrators refused to let pictures of female nudes go up in the gallery. Pictures of female nudes? In an art gallery? What next? Photographs of black male cocks? Mapplethorpe who? Unless of course you're an irreproachable local celebrity like.. uh.. like Christopher Pratt. I guess the elite only paint naked saints.

But to speak specifically to theatre. We have a grand big fine arts college now out in the Premier's riding. No shortage of bucks there. Purest pork. And churning out them cultural workers like links of sausages. The problem is though, all these poor sausages are being dropped into the cold grease of a virtually non-existent arts economy. Just more poor bastards fighting for a piece of the same under-funded cultural cream pie. At least in the bad old days only mad persons need apply. Now they're got degrees in supplication. There is Canadian Idol. And there does seem to be lots of work at the tourist cum dinner theatre operations serving up congealed banquets of our fantasy past. (I don't know where these food metaphors are coming from. I must need something to eat.)

Yes, the oh so romantic and heroic dead past. The oh so easy to lie about the dead who are passed. It's a hard old place for anybody with something new to say about the present. And the futurists may as well shove their crystal ball up the Minister of Culture's backside. At least then some of the more shameless local celebs may get to see it glowing in the dark. But so it always is everywhere. We can only hope that time will separate the wheat from the chaff, and that wheat will form a dough, and that dough will become infected with a yeast that will then become a rising tide of... yeast infection? Hmmm. I may be going cracked. Or maybe I just need a nibble of cheese. I think there's a piece left in the trap. I can't bite the hand that feeds me. Brother can ya spare just one tiny sour grape? God I hope I get my grant.

December, 2007
by lizsolo

This first edition of the Atlantic Basin Project has been made possible by the efforts of members of the Independent Artists Cooperative and its in house collective Rock Can Roll Independent and through the generous support of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.