Armin Wiebe's The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz

I love watching theatre plays and so I was excited when I found out that I'd be watching one for school. Last weekend I headed over to the Rachel Browne Theatre on Bannatyne Street to watch Armin Wiebe's The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz.

When I first heard of it I didn't really know what to expect of the play. I was torn between thinking if it would be a boring classical play about Beethoven, or if it was going to be a play about Beethoven with a twist of humour. Thankfully, it was humourous and wasn't actually about Beethoven himself.

When I first entered the theatre, I found myself looking for a seat amidst the sea of a white haired audience. I found myself a good seat right in the top centre of the audience. And that was when I got a good look of the set. The set was really simple and even looked cartoonish to me, which I liked. I liked how they attached curtains inside the house to make walls if they needed to.

They play was set in the Prairies during the 1930s. They had very different accents which I had a hard time understanding at first, but eventually got used to it by the first ten minutes or so. That was also the first time that I heard of any accent native to the Prairies. But according to the little pamphlet that I got from the play, the accent is supposed to have come from Mennonites.

I really liked the play because it was different from plays that I usually watch. This one was particularly interesting because I am still getting to know the Prairies, and through the play I think that I learned some things about it. Like possibly how the people back then used to dress, and of course, how they used to talk.

During Wiebe's visit to Red River College on April 14, he was asked about the accents of the characters and whether or not he planned them. He became a bit defensive saying something along the lines: that of course he meant for the characters' accents to be like that because he wrote the play and everything he put there was meant to be there. Well, I liked the characters having those accents, even though I had trouble understanding them at first.

I also read some of Wiebe's literature that was related to the play. And I think that gave me a better understanding of the play because it gave me background information on some of the aspects of the play such as the piano.

One thing that I still find weird though, more than the peek at lesbianism in the play, was that the Russian pianist stayed and lived with the couple while he fixed the piano, which took months. But I liked having him there anyway, because I liked that he could play the piano for Susch.