George walker
George walker"Walker is a down to earth blue-collar playwright with a vibrant, vivid, deliberate style of play writing; there's no dramaturgical chicanery in his work. But there is a rough and ready quality in it that is very refreshing."
- Neville-Andrews
George Walker is a Canadian playwright who has achieved a sort of underdog-like success. Walker's sharpened sense of comedic irony along with his unique patterns of thought have contributed to his success and his being one of the most widely produced playwrights today. The Art of War , Escape From Happiness, and Zastrozzi, are all very different plays from Walker, having all come from different periods in his career. Despite their differences, there are some underlying commonalities. One of them is language and character honesty, another has to do with power and the search for justice. Also, through the character's journeys, we are usually able to find some sort of empathy.
Walker has a way of setting you in the life of real people through their language and brutal honesty. Every one of the characters in Walkers plays speak in a stream of immediate thought and are all in their own little world of self-denial where they have perfectly valid reasons for the eccentric, oddball things that they do. In Escape From Happiness, we find a uniquely dysfunctional family with every character showing similar, but individual motivations towards something better for themselves or the people around them. This play in particular is surreal in this aspect and in the ways the individuals display their honesty. The three sisters are all strikingly different. Mary Anne is a comically heavy-hearted mother who takes everything the people around her say far too literally. She speaks with the honesty of her character in not understanding her sister Elizabeth's actions. She's abandoned her child yet again because she is at a "crossroads" in her life, which she seems to run into far too often. Gail her sister and also a mother would do anything for her former-thug husband Junior. She is incapable of believing that he could do anything wrong and when he tells her of the trouble he is in with the law she bursts in to uncontrollable laughter, denying his very words of truth. Elizabeth, their sister, is headstrong and independent and is relied upon to solve the family's issues that they create for themselves. Nora, their mother, rationalizes everything for herself resulting in the most forgiving person imaginable. Junior, Gail's husband and Tom's cohort, is weak, always relies on other people, and has a tendency to cry whenever things seem to be amiss. Tom, the ‘man upstairs", or the sisters' father, was once a raging alcoholic who tried to burn their house down with the family still in it. He recovered but has taken it upon himself to live as a feeble minded invalid,...
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