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    Bolsheviki
    Bolsheviki
    Bolsheviki
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    Bolsheviki

    By David Fennario

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    About this ebook

    Set in a hotel bar in Montreal on Remembrance Day, Bolsheviki has World War I veteran Harry “Rosie” Rollins telling young reporter Jerry Nines about his experience in the trenches. Rollins recalls men pissing their pants, losing limbs and planning a revolt against their officers. The character of Rosie Rollins is based on World War I veteran Harry “Rosie” Rowbottom, who was wounded at Vimy Ridge. Fennario taped an interview with Rowbottom in 1979 in the old “King Eddy” Hotel in Toronto over a bottle of Bushmills whiskey.

    Rosie’s meandering monologue delivers a blistering de-glorification of war as it shifts back and forth between his wartime recollections and the present. The veteran’s clattering, fast-paced description of life—and death—on the Western Front reproduces the chaotic sounds and rhythm of battle. This cutting-edge drama, profoundly in opposition to conventional histories of Canadian troops in World War I, debunks every sentimental notion of duty, heroism and nationhood. “Birth of Nation” they called it on TV but I didn’t see nobody getting born just a lot of people dying so we could sit there on top of another shit hole of mud with Captain Rutherford still pushing for that DSO or the MC or the MCB or the YMCA with Triangles—just give him a medal will ya? Cast of 1 man.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateApr 15, 2012
    ISBN9780889227149
    Bolsheviki
    Author

    David Fennario

    Anglophone playwright born David Wiper in Montreal, Quebec, 1947. He was raised in the working class district of Pointe-St-Charles, an area he would make the centre of most of his plays. He was one of six children, his father was a housepainter. His pen name, given to him by a girlfriend, was part of a Bob Dylan song, “Pretty Peggy-O.” David Fennario has described his life as: Born on the Avenues in the Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal; one of six kids growing up in Duplessis’ Quebec, repressed, depressed, oppressed and compressed. “School was a drag. My working experience turned me into a raving Red calling for world revolution. The process of becoming a political activist gave me the confidence to be a writer. Up to then, I thought only middle-class people could become artists, because they were not stupid like working-class people, who were working-class because they were stupid. But reading Socialist literature convinced me that working-class people can change themselves and the world around them. We are not chained to fate, Freud, God, gender or a genetic code. We can make ourselves into what we want. I’ve been trying my best to do that ever since, and have had some success as a playwright and a prose writer.”

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      Book preview

      Bolsheviki - David Fennario

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      Contents

      Production History

      Playwright’s Note

      Performance Notes

      Bolsheviki

      Source Notes

      Canadian Volunteers Executed During the First World War

      About the Playwright

      Disclaimer

      Copyright Information

      Bolsheviki by David Fennario was first produced November 9 to December 5, 2010, by Infinithéâtre at Le Bain St-Michel in Montreal.

      Cast: Robert King

      Director: Guy Sprung

      Costume and Set Designer: Veronica Classen

      Lighting Designer: Eric Mongerson

      Sound Designer: Julien St. Pierre

      Video: Brian Morel

      Stage Manager: Jen Jones

      A second production by Alternative Theatre Works ran February 8 to 12, 2011, at Factory 163 in Stratford, Ontario.

      Cast: Robert King

      Director: Guy Sprung

      Alternative Theatre Works Producer: Peggy Coffey

      Stage and Lighting Design Adaptation: Stephen Degenstein

      Technical Director: Stephen Degenstein

      Stage Manager: Peggy Coffey

      Sound and Lighting Designer: Kody LeSouder

      Bolsheviki was first produced in the United States on January 20 and 21, 2012, at the Mary Gray Munroe Theater of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

      Cast: Donald McManus

      Scenic and Light Designer: Zoe Gopnik-McManus

      Projections: Hilary Gopnik

      Dramaturge: Lisa Paulsen, Director of the Playwriting Center

      Stage Manager: Maureen Downs

      Master Electrician: Rob Turner

      Managing Director of Theater Emory: Rosalind Staib

      Artistic Director: John Ammerman

      Playwright’s Note

      The character Rosie Rollins in Bolsheviki is based on Harry Rosie Rowbottom, a First World War veteran who lost a little finger in the Battle of Loos and was wounded at Vimy Ridge. I interviewed him on tape in 1979 in the old King Eddie Hotel in Toronto over a bottle of Bushmills.

      And the longer the war lasted, the more we realized that the real enemy was the people who were ordering us to shoot the other people who didn’t want to shoot us any more than we wanted to get shot at …

      Rosie was in a military hospital in November 1917 when news broke out about the revolution in Russia. He said he could see the news spreading from bed to bed along the ward like an electric shock − that Russian soldiers were deserting en masse in their millions: And we knew then what we had to do … put an end to the war before it put an end to us.

      Performance Notes

      The actor performing Bolsheviki should never at any time pretend that what is being demonstrated is actually happening.

      Do not create funny voices for the characters.

      You are telling the story.

      Do not act as if you are on camera.

      You are the person on stage.

      Do not act as if there is an invisible wall up in front of you.

      Be there in the moment, sharing the creation of the characters with the audience.

      Show what you are showing.

      Bolsheviki

      PERFORMER enters and helps set up the stage with the stage manager, then sits down at a table. He opens his notebook and gestures into the character of JERRY NINES.

      So it’s 1977 on Remembrance Day and I’m a skinny-ass, twenty-three-year-old, freelance reporter working on a human interest story for the Montreal Gazoo-Gazoo-Gazette. I’m taking in the ceremonies at the cenotaph memorial in Dominion Square on the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge …

      Make sure ya get their address, kid … and the phone number …

      Yeah yeah … So I’m working the crowd trying to get some quotes here and there from these old farts drooling in wheelchairs …

      Mimes old vet.

      Vimy Ridge? … Dunno? … Is it time to go now?

      So I cross the street over to Mother Martin’s − before it got gentrified? Great old place, been there forever, with the pickled eggs in this big glass jar getting more and more petrified along with the customers and Claude the waiter – Hein? − getting more and more deaf and me not yet knowing I’d still be with the Gazoo shovelling semicolons thirty years later, but then sitting there with this notebook and a quart of Molson − Claude brought everyone a quart of Molson, didn’t matter what you ordered. Skinny-ass, twenty-three-year-old, soon-to-be-international-media-star me … thinking, well, don’t look like I’m gonna get much from the old farts out there … so, maybe I can just do a … background piece? … yeah … on … on? … The cenotaph? … Do you know what cenotaph means? I looked it up … got my old notebook −

      Reads from the notebook.

      It means, A monument to one who is buried elsewhere. Sixty-six thousand of them they’re talking about. How many Canadian soldiers been killed in Afghanistan?

      Waits for audience response.

      Yeah, too many.

      So, yeah, use that as my angle … buried elsewhere … scribbling this down in my notebook in the bar, with Pierre Elliot Trudeau on the TV up there at the Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa pontificating − Honoured for Their Supreme Sacrifice.

      Honoured? says this older guy − big busha white hair at the table next to me – Honoured for what?

      Lest We Forget …

      Forget? How can he forget when he wasn’t even there to remember?

      Glorious Dead …

      What’s so fucking glorious about being dead? Snooty-nosed son of a bitch …

      And then he looks at me …

      You like Trudeau?

      I think his mother dresses him funny.

      Oh, yeah?

      And I could tell he’s the kinda guy that never cracks a smile but if he could smile it woulda counted as a (smile) and then he sticks up his hand. Hey, Doctor! he says. Hey, Doctor! And when a guy calls a waiter Doctor? Hmmm-mmm?

      Sticks up his hand.

      Hey, Doctor − docteur − même chose icitte pour mon ami et un autre Bushmills and cream soda – no, pas Molson − CREAM SODA …

      Molson makes me burp, he says.

      Yeah,

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