Why We Run

There's a play by Tom Stoppard called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's been described variously as tragicomedy, surreal humour and black comedy, and compared often to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Following Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, supernumerary characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet who appear for a blip of a moment and are very unceremoniously killed off, Stoppard's work plays around with ideas of fate, theatre and the spectatorship of art, free will or the lack thereof, and, perhaps most importantly, death.It's a delicious absurdist dream of a play that follows the titular characters as they effectively fulfill their functions in Hamlet. Stoppard's genius is that he gives these otherwise un-meaningful characters centre-stage fullness. The characters are given agency, texture and eventual awareness of their fates, and they are made tragic by momentary bursts of hope and resistance — all the while, they talk and philosophize, they play games of wit and language. I've always found Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be uproariously funny, in an overwhelmingly sad sort of way — reading the play is the most I laugh in the face of certain death. Listening to Menno Versteeg's Why We Run, the artist's debut solo album released under his own name, I couldn't stop thinking about Stoppard's play, and for good reason.  There's an irreverent absurdism to Versteeg's latest project; it's tender and endearing, but also whip-smart. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead finds slight alleviation of the pain brought on by the knowledge of swiftly approaching death, Why We Run manages to laugh in the face of shitty certainties and crummy actualities.The album is ruled by sweet flourishes, clever word and image play, that are tongue-in-cheek enough to be endearing and self-aware enough to lift the album out of a dire and spiraling fatalism. If to hell in a hand-basket we must go, we might as well enjoy the ride, Versteeg seems to say. It's a reminder jauntily contained within the album's second track, "Don't Look Away." An upbeat acoustic guitar and bright piano keep time as Versteeg sings of a violent and scary world — the sky breaking apart, an exploding sun, a battlefield dotted by massacres. As it all falls apart, Versteeg curiously and insistently sings, "Don't look away." But when a lively electric guitar begins to dance, it becomes a search for "the grey," a middle between black and white, for meaning itself. It's like showing up to the dumpster fire in a yellow party dress — the search for meaning, the act of looking itself, creates meaning. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play games as they march toward the completion of their destinies in efforts to understand and pass the time, so the act of looking and spending breath here is life affirming.Why We Run overflows with awareness of life that is jubilant or sardonic, of moments big or small. "I Got a Dog" is a masterful little ditty, a love letter to a dyslexic mother that has tremendous fun with convention. Versteeg alone plucks his guitar and sings of a mother who failed grade 10 "like any good artist," who "faints plowers, like she saints pun-sets / Haints her peart when she bolds a hush," and who ultimately "assured me I would rind my dog / When I wasn't in a fush." Endlessly reminiscent of scenes upon scenes from Stoppard's play, where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pass the time by disordering words, — meaning and logic — accidentally and intentionally. Where the duo act out a modicum of autonomy between Shakespeare's conscriptions, "I Got a Dog," mislays conventional meaning, finding a god in a dog, puns in the sun, and saints in paint. Versteeg takes the fact of dyslexia and creates a syrupy sweet work of art with it.Track after track is freighted with and subversive of meaning as it wears the clothes of folksy ballads or the twang of traditional country songs. Each track feels like a life-affirming riddle, citrusy and invigorating. "1-2-3-5 no one gets out alive," begins "Shit Eatin' Grin," guns blazing. The raucous track articulates the lesson that comes to Stoppard's characters only at the end of the play, as they, understanding finally that death is inescapable, are slowly disappearing. "Let me enjoy the view from here / Before you roll us down the hill." One of the reasons I love Stoppard's play so much is it allows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moments of vibrancy, passion, confusion, fear and eventual understanding. Versteeg's Why We Run is a re-gifting of Stoppard's gift: "When the curtain falls / At the end of this long play / Let the storms bring understanding / A comfort in the grey."There is this to be found in the mess that is a life lived — this art, this funny juxtaposition, love, one's own heartbeat. And Versteeg teaches by example. On "Funny to Me" he celebrates phenomena that in their absurdity, like love and silence and losing one's mind, are funny to him; Maybe they'll be funny to us too, if only we would take a pause to think about them. "Change a Tire" not only teaches us how to literally change a tire, but also that we "gotta lift that middle finger when life flips you off the road."My favourite song is an apparently hopeless one. Coming after "12 Songs for the Price of 11!" (described aptly in the liner notes as "Like a minute or so of guitar stuff"), "Backwater, NW" feels mournful. A wailing fiddle and Versteeg's soft voice paint a watery portrait of longing and getting lost, of pain, and hope trashed, of being "shaking and lonely." But even here there is something to sing about, something to rejoice: "A porch light in the distance / Like an angel / Take me home." Whether literal or figurative, Versteeg conveys, there might be a place to call home.  Scholar Helene Keyssar-Franke best articulates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead's defining teaching: "If we, the audience, acknowledge our mortality, then we begin to know what it is to be [hu]man, and that what freedom we may have must be worked out within the parameters of this acknowledge, not in ignorance of or denial of them." It is only when we come to terms with the fact of death that we can begin to be free. Why We Run runs on this understanding — might as well live, attend to living, if we're going to die anyway. Even if you're"stuck living out the reruns / Like a dead sitcom star," or forgotten Shakespearean characters. Even if you're doomed to march toward death over and over again with the renewal of each day, you still have your freedom to smile, to feel the little bursts of rain on your skin, because "there's still a light on in you."