Book Title:  What Lies Before Us

Author:  Morris Panych

Publishing Company:  Talonbooks (www.talonbooks.com ) 

Year:  2007

# of Pages: 96

ISBN #:  978-0-88922-560-2

$15.95 Canada

$15.95 USA 

3 ˝  stars 

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner 

Two-time Governor General's Award-winning playwright Morris Panych's latest offering is What Lies Before Us.  Now available in paperback, the play's world premiere was presented by CanStage in a Crow's Theatre production on January 18, 2007. 

Ambrose and Keating are junior surveyors working for the railroad in the Canadian Rockies in 1885.  Alone with just their Chinese servant, Wing, the two men are in a tent waiting for the Major (or is it Godot?).  Keating, the earthy Brit, is a thorn in the side of the more intellectual Ambrose, a Scot.  Keating passes the time with his guitar, composing terrible songs for the girlfriend he left behind while Ambrose pens his thoughts and observations in a journal.  Wing, speaking very little English and understanding even less pops in now and again to receive commands he cannot comprehend, forcing Keating to perform some impossible pantomimes. 

A rock slide traps the men, and as it becomes more and more doubtful that there will be an escape or a rescue, their conversation runs the gamut of life's great questions.  Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the dialogue is both humorous and biting and, ultimately, desperate. 

There are some wonderful comic moments and a few insightful comments about life and religion.  However, when Keating concludes the Major must be on the moon waiting for them or, later, states he has had a dream that he “was an actor in a dreadful play that wouldn't end,” it seems Panych has gone a bit too far in attempting to be clever.  As the play ends with Wing in a monologue in Chinese (it is unclear whether the theatre audience will have the sub-titles that are provided in the written script), the audience may well wonder what has been witnessed.