The Peterborough Theatre Guild is wrapping up its 2023-24 season in May with a production of Morris Panych’s award-winning satirical comedy Girl in the Goldfish Bowl.
The two-act play tells the story of a precocious 10-year-old girl named Iris who, proclaiming “she’s in the last few days of her childhood,” lives with her depressed parents Sylvia and Owen in British Columbia’s ocean-side fishery town of Steveston in 1962. Adding to the dysfunctional family is sharp-tongued and sharp-eyed boarder named Miss Rose, Iris’s godmother, who works at the fish cannery by day and drinks at the local legion at night.
Iris believes the world has been held together by her pet goldfish Amahl. That belief is strengthened by what happens when Amahl dies: Sylvia threatens to leave the family and the Cuban missile crisis takes place, with the former Soviet Union placing nuclear missiles in Cuba and creating the imminent threat of nuclear war with the U.S.
Shortly after Amahl dies, Iris finds a strange man named Mr. Lawrence washed up on the beach, who she thinks bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead goldfish. After she brings the mysterious Mr. Lawrence home, she becomes convinced he is the reincarnated Amahl who will fix everything that has gone wrong in Iris’s world.
First produced at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver in 2002, Girl in the Goldfish Bowl won a Jessie Richardson Award for achievement in professional theatre in Vancouver in 2022, a Dora Mavor Moore Award in Toronto 2003, and the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 2004.
Born in Calgary and now based in Vancouver, 71-year-old Morris Panych is an actor and one of Canada’s most celebrated directors and playwrights. As an actor, you may recognize him from his roles as F. Emasculata and the Grey-Haired Man in six episodes of the iconic science-fiction series The X-Files.
As a director and playwright, Panych has directed over 90 productions across Canada and has written 30 plays that have been produced throughout Canada, Britain, the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand in a dozen languages.
Panych first rose to prominence as a playwright with 1989’s 7 Stories, a dark comedy about a man standing on a seventh-story ledge of an apartment building, whose suicidal despair is ignored by various self-absorbed people popping their heads out of the windows around him.
His plays have earned him 14 Jessie Richardson Awards and five Dora Mavor Moore Awards. In addition to his Governor General’s Award for Drama for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, he won the same award in 1994 for his play The Ends of the Earth. Panych’s latest play, Withrow Park, premiered at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in November 2023.
In September 2022, Panych was in Toronto to direct the Tarragon Theatre production of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl, where he spoke with NOW Magazine’s Jon Kaplan about why he chose a child to be the main character in his play.
“I wanted to write about a child, and I can’t escape the fact that everything that happens to a child seems deeply dramatic, if not downright tragic,” Panych told Kaplan. “Iris believes deeply that something is in control of the universe, and that it’s somehow tied to a force created by her goldfish’s centrifugal movements in its bowl.”
“It’s also inspired by the girls that Hayley Mills played in Disney films like The Parent Trap, with those dream scenarios where she works to get her parents back again,” he added. “I was in love with her when I was a child, in films like The Moon-Spinners or The Trouble With Angels.”
According to Panych, Iris’s belief in the power of her goldfish is not only a metaphor for the existence of God but “my own utter, complete disillusionment with the Catholic Church.”
“In fact, the play deals with disappointment in any security, truth, absoluteness and safety,” he said. “It turns out to be your deep belief in such things that then catches you out.”
Directed by 4th Line Theatre’s Kim Blackwell with assistance from Indigo Chesser and Mikayla Stoodley, the Peterborough Theatre Guild production of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl stars Lindsay Wilson as Iris, Nancy Towns as Sylvia, Peter Dolinski as Owen, Lisa Devan as Miss Rose, and Stew Granger as Mr. Lawrence. Production managers are Beth McMaster, Pat Hooper, Bob Campbell, and Kate Suhr.
The play runs at the Guild Hall at 364 Rogers Street in Peterborough’s East City from May 3 to 18, with evening performances at 7:30 p.m. on May 3 and 4, 9 to 11, and 16 to 18 and 2 p.m. Sunday matinee performances on May 5 and 12.
Tickets are $30 for adults, $27 for seniors, and $20 for students and are available by calling 705-745-4211 or online at www.peterboroughtheatreguild.com.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2023-24 season.
