The Toronto Star from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 97

THE TORONTO STAR Sat Jan 29 1977 3 A tough kid playwright jolts the theatre scene Tm not interested Suspense and horror all in the spotlight in the Age of Therapy Never in Never spot ft THE LITTLE GIRL Who Lives Down The Lane stars Martin Sheen as a creepy child molester who the time in which everything from the best seller list to your local pastor advises you to reach for emotional free dom unhinge yourself and release your anger and frustration in the soothing ambience provided by the therapeutic profession entirely possible that the 1970s will go down in social histo ry as the era when holier than was transformed from a therapy into a social atmosphere was that nothing being trifling nothing being lawless their own urges and impulses were important as the solemn ideas their profes sors drummed into them They began to understand that reud had licensed a new form of behavior a form of egotism be yond anything imagined in the past They were the first to recog nize that the Age of Therapy had begun Now almost everyone knows it By MARGARET DALY Star staff writer Tom Walmsley is just turned 28 the author of two one act plays of which the longer runs barely an hour and two slim volumes as they say of poetry in paperback Under those circumstances this cocky neo perfect faith in himself as a writer the term by which he has unwaveringly characterized himself since age 10 ought to be hard to stomach However his confidence is laced with a wisecracking diffidence and gently clearheaded talent for 1 taking pokes at himself which com bine to make him only endearing clean cut good looks crooked grin battered looking nose and slightly hunched powerhouse build make him look like an ex high school boxing champion which he is an unlikely looking poet play wright and an even less likely look ing on again off again (currently off again) ex heroin addict which he also is It was reud who got it all going of course with his historic announcement that (as one of his biographers Richard Schoen wald paraphrases it) "nothing in the universe of the mind was tri fling nothing lawless" This was a marvellous discovery There are Jodie growing reputation as most gifted young teenager is not likely to be either en hanced or diminished by The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane She is fine in it but not much of a movie The film which opened yesterday at the Imperial Uptown and four suburban theatres is a suspense and horror item filmed in the Montreal area in November and December of 1975 The 90 minute production was made by American International Pictures of Beverly Hills in associa tion with Astral Bellevue Pathe Ltd of Canada The screenplay is by Richard Lochte and Laird Koenig from a novel by Koenig The director Ni colas Gessner is a Swiss whose previ ous English language films have in cluded The Peking Blonde and Some one Behind The Door Jodie oster who is 14 now was only 12 when she electrifyingly por trayed a 12 year old Manhattan hooker in Taxi Driver She was 13 when she did her work in Bugsy Ma lone as at hard boiled girl friend Tallulah This remarkable young actress nobody thinks of her as a gets her first starring in The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane She appears as 13 year old Rynn Jacobs a calm and intelligent blonde supposedly living with her poet father in a secluded cottage near a coastal village in the United States (Canada once again substi tutes for the US in this international production) Nobody in the village has seen daddy for months Every time anybody drops in and asks about him she always says see ing his publisher in New York or else' working in his study and be disturbed a school in the village but Rynn never goes there She says Daddy is teach ing her at home Rynn seems to be bothering no body Soon however her tidy exist ence is menaced by a mother and son team of nasty neighbors Mrs Hallet (played by Alexis Smith) is a rich and bigoted snob who drives a Bentley and owns the cottage that Rynn and her father have leased Martin Sheen appears as subject matter his poetry has been critically lambasted for the crime of being pornographic without titillat ing But even critics hated his plays conceded the raw vigor of writing talent al though The Jones Boy has been ac cused of being both too cliched and too extreme to be realistic That amuses Walmsley since the play is highly autobiographical Tom Walmsley was born in Eng land but grew up in Oshawa where Walmsley shook that with five or his father was a General Motors elec trician As a kid he was a little and in trouble with the He hated school and its authoritarianism He got back at his environment through acts of vandal ism He always read voluminously however and was recognized early as the perennial best writer in class the kid who could out write even the smartest kid He knew he would be a writer but saw no need for education to accomplish this dropped out Of Grade 10 and took to hanging out in Yorkville which was in its 1967 hey day thought all those pseudo artists were real that they were really there to write poetry or be musi cians how naive I Walmsley had a huge novel fin ished before quitting school on which he planned to do revisions and was writing short stories but not submitting them anywhere He did drop a lot of acid purportedly for the insights it gave him as a writer each to be the ideal solution A movement is a movement and is not to be denied by little problems like the facts Those things matter What did matter was that neuro sis as diagnosed by the shrink profession and reinforced by the literary and dramatic arts was a way of self dramatization Each of us could be an actor on a stage each a star in a spotlight We all want to be larger than we are psycho therapy is a way of bring ing that about The distinguished American po litical scientist Irving Kristol in a memoir of his Trotskyist youth that the New York Times publish ed last week makes a great deal of the fact that radical college stu dents of the 1960s and 1970s are different from those he knew in the 1930s It baffles and bothers him that radicalism in the last dozen years to be more a psychological narrative without unfairly disclosing too much of the plot But story flaws are not the only things wrong with The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane Alexis Smith and Martin Sheen both grossly overplay their villain roles Each has done good work in the past so the logical assumption is that director Gessner encouraged them in these excesses The passage of time from one scene to the next is often obscure And the village itself never becomes a real place that we can imagine neither Canadian nor American but some vague Land About real life will be about real life nof interested in adding to the list 'erf plays about middle class angst These people have had quite enough space and time as it is seen and read quite enough about the problems of a 35 year old guy mak ing $30000 a year who finds he walk into a room without taking a Librium How interesting is that? are certain things willing to hear a man out about if having a drink together in'a bar but quite another thing to get together $10000 and put it up oh a He grins like right now is for someone to say like to produce your next play and give me $500 or something to write it without wanting an outline or any thing like that do something like write an episode of Sidestreet for the money That may sound righteous given all the disgusting things I did to get junk but different: Writing is my work if I peddled that where would I hide? is a magical experience for me and very few things in life are magical So I afford to lose her creepy thirtyish son rank a known child molester whom power in the community has protect ed from punishment by the law Also involved in the story is Scott Jacoby as a crippled young amateur magician named Mario who be comes boyfriend a shot of them in bed together but all they seem to be doing is snuggling) I know any way of detailing the several holes in logic In the fine wishy washy Toward the finish there is a bit of reasonably taut suspense with a sur prise ending But the surprise has not been fairly planted in what has gone before Jodie oster alone emerges from this wishy washy production with her renown intact She handles her complex role with the cool adult professionalism that is her trade mark But the character itself is thinly developed in the script and re mains an enigma at the obligatory freeze frame fadeout Soundtrack footnote: The music is quite nice but nobody in the produc tion team can take much credit for that Most of it was written by Chopin always good fruit That was in the fall of 1974 and he had a habit since although he has taken the occasional shot The day The Workingman premiered ih Vancouver Rabies was published by the local Pulp Press and Walmsley was holding down a real day job anjl working on his second book of poe try Lexington Hero Lane impressed by The Working man lured him to a Banff play workshop last summer where he created The Jones Boy was the right time The atmosphere was right there anything tpr do there except write and dis tanced myself from the junkie's life just enough but not too much to be able to pour it all He has an idea for his next play which won't be about junkies but will' also be about in hopeless situations no extreme situations is but won't talk aboutiit specifically Two shockers He came to Toronto from Vancou ver last November to sit in on the production now running at the Toronto ree Theatre of his two one act shockers The Workingman and The Jones Boy The former a grotesque bit of fantasy built around some small time porno movie makers won a prize in a BC playwriting competi tion and was produced at a Vancou ver festival two years ago The lat ter an exploration of the hostilities among two heroin addicts and the streetwalker girlfriends who support their habits has never been staged before In fact Walmsley has been seriously involved in Canadian theatre only since last summer Al ready he has strong opinions about it: people all think theatre is incredibly he sneers in fact if all theatrical ac tivity in Canada' stopped tomorrow get about one letter to the edi tor from a 65 year old woman in Etobicoke of my friends ever goes to see a play and why would you? You pay more than at the movies generally uncomfortable you have to be quiet And very little chance going to relate to going on up there mean the theatre ever be vital of course it can And like to do something vital in the theatre I know I need to learn a lot about dramatic construction and what plays well and all the rest But I hope what I do is at least the real plays have been criti cized for filthy language and sordid You could argue that it all began in the 1960s when the teachings of Laing met the influence of Esalen Perhaps that was when the world began inex orably to turn into one enormous therapy group Laing from his psychiatric perch in Britain argued persua sively that schizophrenia far from being a living death we should shun like the plague was in some cases a natural response to the pressures of life particularly family life In certain circum stances it could be beneficial Esalen the California group grope centre that spawned imita tors all over the continent also had a clear message: If you have not experienced encounter thera py (or one of about 500 techniques included under that heading) dull lifeless lacking in spontaneity unable to Here were two interacting dogmas One said that madness was not so bad after all and if you could experience it or some thing like it such as LSD you might be all the better The other said that those who had not aban doned themselves to confessional emotional group experiences were probably stunted Under these twin influences the old ideal of western civilization the self contained carefql managed per sonality became a pariah Together the two dogmas creat ed the world of the 1970s what Tom Wolfe has called Me one completely disregarded con trary evidence Never mind that as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s nothing got accomplished Never mind that all the people who told you they had just found the answer to everything were to be heard a year later announcing that they had just found another answer Never mind that some people rushed breathlessly from fad cure to fad cure proclaiming thou was replaced by loonier than thou Mental instability in our time has become not a fad but a way of life and a means of as serting both self identity and self importance If crazy it means that my life has meaning (all those child hood experiences count) and that interesting Attention must be paid because my neuroses are valid And certainly more unusual than your boring twitches (There is a snobbery to mental illness like everything else) People whose parents com pared preachers at the local church now compare psychia trists and the arts of course mirrnr these tendencies and vigorously support them The big than a truly political phenomenon hit of the movie season is Net There is a desperate quest for self work in which the hero goes nuts identity an evident and acute in volvement of one political oeiieis with all kinds of personal anxieties and neuroses a consequent cheer lessness and But Kristol for all his brilliance fails to note that the students he reproaches are altogether in touch with their times What those stu few ideas more comforting than dents realized as reudianism the notion that even your silliest impulses carry psychic weight Like all social movements this Zj Robert menaces the existence of Jodie oster as a calm col lected teenager who lives in a secluded cottage irst shot It until he first hitch hiked to Vancouver that he began writing poetry a form avoided because met so many bozos in Yorkville that called themselves The cross country hitchhiking became apattern There was a brief marriage and a year of the straight life work ing on an auto assembly line in Que bec the inevitable break up' some more hitchhiking and a return to the Vancouver counter culture when I did my first shot of junk and I realized immediately it was what been looking for all my life can I describe it? an in credible sense of it doesn't of a detailed critique oi an entries winners or not He got his habit under some control and sat down and wrote The Workingman in three days It got third prize was chosen for production by New Play Centre and drew the attention of Toronto ree Theatre associate William Lane Walmsley had started using again but when he learned the results of the contest he said to him self it are you a writer or what and headed for the Okanagan matter That to me was the ap Valley to kick his habit and pick He started using a little bit regu larly but think of himself as a user one day I woke up a little achy a little nauseous you know And I said to my connection can really use a shot today I feel like got a touch of And he laughed and said a touch of flu got a chipping what called a chipping habit when not yet a real regular six shots of methadone and a trip to Montreal where he started writing hard again But for various reasons including woman trouble he drifted back to Vancouver went on welfare and picked up a full fledged habit Sat in house guy who was selling me the stuff was my landlord so I have to go out and find it right? So I sat in the house throughout the fall and winter of 1970 and shot junk go out every two weeks to pick up my welfare cheque I need anything I had my room I had my needle and spoon my girlfriend came by once in a while and slept with me and gave me money I still had the idea I was a writer lie around on the bed after fixing and talk into a tape recorder have these big ideas and tell myself sit down and fill them all in with the real hard work writ ing the next day This was avant garde Of course I was bulling myself but I did work all that stuff out of my system never had any urges in that direction again because clear to me how much so called ex perimental art is just laziness a pretty traditional writer now such things The destructive pattern repeated itself a number of times until I real ized I was getting too old to get by and not do any real writing so start ed to work on my first actual book of poetry Rabies do the tiresome things you do all day to get the money to score then come home' and fix and write poems But the idea was hardening that I wanted to do more than write stoned poetry With happy timing a friend drew a playwriting competition to his atten tion and he was struck by the offer 1 Clyde I Gilmour LSI Star photo by Erin Comb TOM WALMSLEY is a 28 vcar old writer who wants Boy currently at the Toronto ree Theatre is drawn to do in theatre His play The Jones from his own experience ift a heroin addict in writing about middle class 'It JlP JlrlE Art 11 'v JmmI a mm JI WW WWW a wfe lit A.