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,
