by Clem Martini
DURVILE & UPROUTE BOOKS
2023/$29.95/256 pp.
We’re all dying, a little more each day, and everything around us is too. If the question is “So, what do we do about it?”, the answer, more often than not, is “Pretend it isn’t happening.” Calgary playwright and novelist Clem Martini is one writer who refuses to pretend. The two plays in his latest collection, Cantata & The Extinction Therapist, each take a look at what happens when the people and things we love start to disappear.
Cantata is the more obviously personal of the two plays and it has an emotional intensity that I found hard to handle in the absence of other people. Part of its impact on me was just a matter of coincidence—the elderly mother in the play dies of a combination of Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, as did mine, and was caught up in the awful bombing attacks of the Second World War, as was mine. But beyond that, the play got to me because of its extreme, reverent attention to the details of family relationships and of life as it plays out its final act.
Cantata is based on Martini’s own family. He knows what it’s like to simultaneously deal with an underfunded healthcare system and a no longer rational parent, and how it feels to have that wretchedness compounded by worry about his brother, a schizophrenic whose mother’s death leaves him living alone for the first time in decades. That sounds bleak—and why shouldn’t it?—but as you’d expect from a devotee of ancient comedy, Martini focuses not only on the tragic aspects but also the moments of love and laughter that get you through.
Martini is a master at moving back and forth between dialogue and soliloquy. He’s also a genius at coming up with interesting dramatic situations—most famously, perhaps, in his play The Life History of the African Elephant. He combines these talents to great use in The Extinction Therapist, much of whose action unfolds in a group therapy session for creatures—both ancient and modern—on the verge of extinction. There couldn’t be a better setup for the combination of comedic conflict and meditative monologues that ensues.
The soon-to-be-extinct creatures range from the adorable (a very libidinous woolly mammoth) to the ghastly (the smallpox virus). What they all have in common is their therapist, who’s busily tending to his clients’ fears while ignoring the extreme dysfunction in his own life. Both the therapist and his clients get a glimpse at how similar they are with the introduction of a new member of the group—the newly appointed Minister of the Environment, who seems content to let them die. The Extinction Therapist is the rare comic play that keeps you laughing while never losing sight of the seriousness behind the comedy.
Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views
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