I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked….” Such is the picture poet Allen Ginsberg painted at the dawn of the nuclear age — a time when, according to Underbelly creator Jayson McDonald, many artists felt the anger of a youth with no future.
“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry,” added On The Road writer Jack Kerouac to his friends’ post-World War II discourse.
“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death,” observed William S. Burroughs, one of The Beat Generation’s more obscure self-flagellators, dryly.
You don’t have to be familiar with the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac or Burroughs to appreciate the theatre of McDonald, however. And it’s easy to see how a playwright from small town Ontario, who grew up in the privilege and prosperity of the ‘80s, wouldn’t necessarily wish to have been born in the divested decade of the ‘50s, but could still be drawn in by the fearlessness of its artists. And the promise of a challenge.
“It is, at its heart, an exploration of an artist forged at that time, during the atomic age. What drove them, what moved them and what foiled them,” McDonald says of his poetic tour de force.
“They had just come off of the Second World War, which was a gigantic global nightmare, and now there was this brand new threat — nuclear Armageddon. And at the time it was still very new and very real. We’re a little divorced from it now, because it hasn’t happened since then. But at the time I’m sure these people felt that their future had been robbed from them. How do you plan for anything when everything could be annihilated?”
We could ask the same thing; how do you start the script?
In the various styles and cadences of The Beat Generation’s biggest names, but largely inspired by Burroughs’ unflinching, almost mythical ability to abandon editorial right — chopping up his prose and collaging it to create new meanings — McDonald takes you on a masterful, entirely original, slightly more accessible free fall.
“The idea was to really give it that flavour of the time. To make everything sound as though it could have come from that era, from those men. There’s some translation that needs to happen as you bring it forward through the decades.”
McDonald was lucky he didn’t get lost in that translation. Engaging with the work of William Burroughs is akin to swimming through space — if the blackness were molasses and the stars just an illusion of escape. But just when you think McDonald can’t possibly talk his way out of this one, Underbelly sees the sky for the mushroom clouds.
“It’s not super fun touring with this character. Usually I’m doing kind of a lighter show with some lovable character I can take with me. But now it’s just me and Burroughs propping up the end of a bar… lamenting things,” he laughs. “[But] even though there’s a lot of doom and calamity and misadventure involved, there is a very positive emotional arc in the show — it goes somewhere that is a lovely, pleasant place.”
Which is appropriate since, one way or another, the atomic age was always going to end with a flash of light.
Underbelly, Critics’ Pick winner at the Fringe, is March 18-30 (8pm) at The Historic Theatre at The Cultch. Matinees March 23 and 30 (2pm). Tickets $31. Tickets.thecultch.com; 604-251-1363
