Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
by Daniel David Moses, directed by Michael Greyeyes
Native Earth Performing Arts, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
March 28-April 12, 2009
Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991) by Daniel David Moses is one of the few plays firmly considered as part of the canon of great Canadian drama, yet few people have actually had a chance to see it on stage. We must be grateful then that Native Earth Performing Arts has mounted a new production of the play, thus giving Toronto a chance to see it again for the first time in 17 years. While the production does not do full justice to the work, especially in its first act, it clearly demonstrates how important a piece it is.
On the surface, Moses’ play is about the short life of the Cree called Almighty Voice (1875-97), who was hunted down and killed by the North-West Mounted Police in Saskatchewan for killing a cow owned by the government. When Almighty Voice killed a Mountie while resisting arrest, the hunt escalated to the point that canons were used to bring him down. Moses invents White Girl, a wife for this unintentional hero and martyr, that turns the story into a 19th-century Native version of Fritz Lang’s film noir of love on the run, You Only Live Once (1937). The play’s unusual structure makes great demands on both the actors and audience. Act 1 presents the story in Brechtian style with White Girl (Cara Gee) announcing the scenes’ numbers and titles before each begins. Moses has written these scenes in a heightened language that achieves its poetry through minimalism. Act 2 retells the action of Act 1, but this time in the afterlife of Almighty Voice (Derek Garza) staged self-reflexively as a reverse minstrel show with both the hero and the emcee, here called the Interlocutor (also Gee), in whiteface. Here the Almighty Voice legend is dismantled and ridiculed in a series of overtly racist skits and songs. Moses clearly uses the legend as only one instance of how conquerors reconstruct the past to suit their ideologies.
To work properly the first act must be as beautiful and moving and the second is brash and offensive. Garza and Gee are in fine form for the second act but don’t achieve the necessary sublimity in the first. Partly this is due to gesture and diction that is too contemporary to capture the poetry of Moses’ language or the formality of its presentation. Gee, who really comes to life in Act 2, informs her words with virtually no emotion in Act 1 in contrast to the fierce intensity Garza maintains in both. The physical production designed by Jackie Chau is excellent, with stunningly realistic sound by Richard Lee and precise, inventive lighting by Sandra Marcroft. Fans of Canadian drama will want to see this productions despite its imperfections. Let's hope we don’t have to wait another 17 years for the next staging of this indispensable work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-03-31.
Photo: David Garza as Almighty Voice.
2009-03-31
Almighty Voice and His Wife