Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley
Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
April 18-May 6, 2012
“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”
Having seen Tempting Providence just last month in London on its tour of Ontario, I had high expectations for Oil and Water by the same team of playwright Robert Chafe and director Jillian Keiley. To say that Oil and Water did not meet those expectations is not a condemnation but rather an acknowledgement that perfect blending of writing, movement and minimalist staging is difficult to achieve let alone repeat. Oil and Water tells a fascinating tale but not aspects of the story gel and it should be unnecessary to summarize the moral of the story in the final lines of the play.
The play tells the true story of African-American Lanier Phillips (1923-2012), who joined the US Navy in 1941 in hope of escaping the prejudice of his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Instead, he discovered that black men also remained at the bottom of the hierarchy in the navy, which was still segregated at that time. On February 18, 1942, Lanier was aboard the USS Truxton, which ran aground in Newfoundland during a storm. Phillips was the only black sailor of the 46 who survived the disaster. People of the entire community of St. Lawrence cared for the sailors including a certain Violet Pike and her family who treated Phillips no differently than they did his white crew mates. Phillips’ two days in St. Lawrence was a life-changing experience for Phillips who realized that racism is not an inherent but a learned behaviour. The good folks of St. Lawrence never had seen a black man before and treated him as they would any other suffering human being.
Chafe structures his play in the now-popular style of “Guess the connection?” He presents three seeming unconnected stories and we, the audience, try to discover how they are related before the author reveals the connection. In one story set in 1974, a young black girl (Starr Domingue) in Boston is caught up in the riots that surrounded the forced integration of schools in that city. Her father (Jeremiah Sparks) tries to reassure her and convinces her to keep attending school despite the troubles. He is upset when she praises a black boy for stabbing a white boy.
In a second plot we meet Violet (Petrina Bromley), who is worried that her son Levi (Mark Power) has gone to join his father John (Jody Richardson) in the mines. John is already showing early signs of tuberculosis but won’t admit it to her or himself. In the third plot we meet Phillips (Ryan Allen), who tries to calm down his friend Langston (Mike Payette), who is seasick and angry about how the Navy treats blacks.
To anyone who knows the story, or who reads the programme notes before the show, the relation between the three plots is obvious. Chafe ends Act 1 with the spirit of Phillips’ mother (Neema Bickersteth) address the question, “What you gonna do?” to both the father and to Phillips as if that were a major revelation. Of course, it is not, and we begin to wonder why Chafe has built up such an elaborate structure for so little a payoff.
Once Phillips is rescued the story finally shines with the warmth and humour familiar from Tempting Providence. We see Violet attend to the while sailor Bergeron (Clint Butler) by carefully washing off all the oil that covers his face. When Phillips is rescued she does the same to him but Bromley shows ever so subtly the consternation Violet feels when she can’t wash Phillips completely white. When Phillips gently informs he that that is his natural colour, Bromley’s reaction changes beautifully to one of wonder and appreciation.
Act 2 feels too short. We would really like to know more about the interaction of the Pike family with Phillips and more of Phillips’ and Bergeron’s view of things. Chafe has spent so much time on the miners John and Levi that it’s disappointing that their story comes to no resolution. It is also difficult to see what parallels, if any, there are between their plight and those of the black sailors on the Truxton. Chafe makes clear that the older Phillips as a father tells his daughter about his time in St. Lawrence to teach her about the nature of racism. But Chafe’s narrative strategy makes it impossible for him to mention such notable facts about Phillips that he make an activist for black civil rights, march with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, and fought for equal treatment of blacks in the U.S. Navy, eventually becoming the Navy’s first black sonar technician. As it is, the play’s moral, spoken by the spirit of Phillips’ mother is no different from the well-known anti-racism song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”, in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical South Pacific.
Jillian Keiley stages Oil and Water with her trademark minimalism. Shawn Kerwin’s set is constructed almost entirely of various sized pails and wood planks. Upstage left and right are two ordinary ladders on the tops of which perch the spirits of deceased characters. Centrestage is a large metal ladder on rockers with a hoop at the apex. This devise is used to represent the ship and at times the cliffs of Newfoundland. For all the inventiveness of using the planks to make bunks on the ship, a bench or a bed for the survivors, the production is just not as concise or as ingenious as the even more minimal Tempting Providence with its table chairs and tablecloth as the only props.
All ten performers give fine performances although Bromley’s stands out for its understated emotion. Alison Woolridge provides a great source of humour as Violet’s friend Ena, who has just acquired a new camera and snaps away throughout the show. As the only character with aspirations approaching art, it’s disappointing that Chafe does not integrate Ena’s new hobby more metaphorically into the story. One of the great pleasures of the piece is the music by Andrew Craig that mixes gospel music with traditional Newfoundland tunes, climaxing in a beautiful a cappella version of “There Is a Balm in Gilead”.
Oil and Water is a big, warm-hearted show about the transformative power of an encounter with innocence. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help wishing Chafe had explored to a greater extent Lanier Phillips’ impact on St. Lawrence and St. Lawrence’s impact on him. Chafe’s depictions of mining, photography and the sea all have symbolic potential that Chafe’s play has not fully realized. Still, I’m glad that Artistic Fraud has brought Phillips’ story to the stage because it is one well worth knowing.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Petrina Bromley and Ryan Allen. ©2012 Peter Bromley.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2012-04-19
Oil and Water