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written and directed by Christopher Morris

Human Cargo/National Arts Centre, Factory Theatre, Toronto

April 14-24, 2011

"Unclear"

In Christopher Morris’s play Night, the beauty of the production is more effective than the drama.  The play was developed over the course of three four-week creation workshops held over three years starting in 2007 in Pond Inlet, Nunavut, and Akureyri, Iceland.  One can only wonder how so much effort could have been used to so little effect.

The play suffers from a conflict of intentions.  We first meet Gloria (Reneltta Arluk), a 16-year-old in Pond Inlet, who speaks the message that everything has gone badly for her and her father since the disappearance of her grandfather in the South.  If her grandfather could only come home, perhaps all would be right again.  Rather too late in the play we realize that Gloria’s message was, in fact, an e-mail she wrote on behalf of her best friend Piuyuq Auqsaq (Tiffany Ayalik).  In response to the e-mail, Daniella Swan (Linnea Swan), a Toronto anthropologist, arrives in Pond Inlet with a numbered metal suitcase containing the bones of Piuyuq’s grandfather who died of tuberculosis in Toronto.  Daniella has taken the bones from the museum she works and has travelled to the North without permission.  What Daniella and Gloria imagine will lead to the restoration of the Auqsaqs’ happiness does not have the intended effect.

Morris spends far too much of the show’s 75 minutes on trying to make Swan look ridiculous.  Not only has  theme of the White Man out of his depth in a native society has become a cliché  but Morris’s own plot does not justify it.  Daniella has acted on her own initiative in response to the message Gloria sent in order to right a wrong she feels was done.  To make fun of her for not knowing the ways of the North on her first visit there is ungenerous.  Morris as a director tries to make Daniella appear patronizing when nothing she says or does justifies that approach.  She is an anthropologist.  She is trying to help.  She is trying to fulfil what she believes is Piuyuq’s wish.  Why make her seem a fool?

Morris’s focus on Daniella is odd because he leaves so much about his Inuit characters unexplored.  One would think that the point of presenting the play in both English and Inuktitut would be to show us two sides of life in Nunavut.  But the whole back-story of why the Auqsaq family is so unhappy is blurted out in about two minutes.  Why not show us scenes of the unhappiness before the bones arrive?  After all, Gloria sends the e-mail because that unhappiness upsets her?  Why not show us in more detail the meaning of the bones to the Auqsaqs?  Gloria thinks she has made everything worse by summoning Daniella to the Arctic, but is that really true?  Hasn’t her arrival with the bones forced the Auqsaqs to confront some uncomfortable truths?  And then, why do we know nothing about Gloria?  Why does she go about in clothes that are not warm enough?  What is her background?  Why exactly does she react to the results of her “good deed” in such an extreme way?  Morris leaves all of this unclear. 

Besides this, it is odd that a play that is advertised as dealing with life in the Arctic during its winters of 24-hour darkness never brings this up as a topic except that Daniella has brought a day lamp with her.  In a fashion typical of playwrights who are unsure of themselves, Morris ends the play with Piuyuq directly exhorting the audience to give up blaming boredom or the past actions of white people as an excuse to escape life through substance abuse or suicide but instead to enjoy the beauty that life in the North offers.  This is an admirable sentiment but the play itself should have conveyed this idea and not required a speech from the stage to make it clear. 

If the play itself is not very effective it is no fault of the actors.  Swan does make Daniella a comic figure  even if we wonder why.  She is also very funny as the the local white school teacher who is exasperated in trying to get her students to write a hip hop song.  Arluk successfully portrays Gloria as withdrawn and troubled even if we never find out what the cause.  Ayalik, in contrast, makes Piuyuq quite an effervescent character, so that we are surprised that she harbours such suspicions of her father.  Fisher is highly effective in distinguishing his three characters.  When he first appears as the Hungarian-born store owner, the Candyman, you can hardly believe he is played by the same man as Jako Auqsaq, a man suffering some sort of existential distress.

 

As a director Morris vacillates between the realistic and non-realistic.  While his cast is adept at both modes, one wishes he would settle on one, perhaps the non-realistic, to give the production consistency and to heighten its dreamlike aspects. 

Most impressive is the set design by Gillian Gallow, who through minimal means--an oval of white snow and a telephone pole--conjures up the vast expanses of the North.  Lighting designer Michelle Ramsay deserves the high praise for bringing out the the full array of moods in the piece as well as distinguishing between dream and reality.

What Morris’s play does most is to remind us that there is a whole realm of Canadian life that never appears on stage.  The best effect his play could have would be to inspire those living in the Far North to create plays about their own lives and their own stories.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Reneltta Arluk, Tiffany Ayalik and Linnea Swan. ©Chris Gallow.