The Dishwashers Front Cover

Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9780889225244
Pages: 128
Pub. Date: September 15 2005
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.375"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Drama / DRA013000

  • DRAMA / Canadian

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The Dishwashers

By Morris Panych

Of all our contemporary urban myths none is more absurd than the fiction of the “classless society,” and Morris Panych’s latest comedy penetrates ruthlessly to the shock and horror of the residue of hardened pesto soiling its porcelain heart.

Haplessly determined to have his own miserable authority vindicated, chief dishwasher Dressler presides over the steam-choked basement of an up-scale restaurant, a place of seamless existential drudgery so utterly remote from the light of day that its wage-slaves have no contact with anyone outside. Spouting an indiscriminate cornucopia of working-class ethic, an interminable babble of pride of craft, Marxist rhetoric and the virtues of individual entrepreneurship as celebrated by Ayn Rand, Dressler tyrannizes his co-workers relentlessly.

Unfortunately, both the “old hand” Moss and the “new guy” Emmett fail utterly to see things his way as they stubbornly and inexplicably pursue both their rejection of and aspiration to join “the folks upstairs.”

Short-listed 2005 Finalist for the 2005 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Play (Arts Club Theatre)

“Morris Panych’s dark comedy The Dishwashers is reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett work, complete with existential philosophizing and dialogue that prompts wince-inducing laughter.”
— Patrick Lee, Theatermania

"This microcosm of society at large is a brilliant and fascinating portrait of class as it exists at every level, even the relatively invisible.” — Curled up with a Good Book

“A big existential present lovingly packaged in grease and suds … An anti-holiday antidote for those who take their humour black.”
— Hour

“A brilliant extended metaphor for the way our society works. The dialogue is by turns quizzical, snide, sarcastic, defiant and servilely accommodating.”
— Bloomberg News

“The philosophical banter is original and fun. It brims with ideas that might nestle down well with the writing of Pinter, Beckett or Orwell.”
– BBC Shropshire