Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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created by Keith Barker, Chris Hanratty, Shira Leuchter, Jordi Mand & Trevor Schwellnus, directed by Chris Hanratty
UnSpun Theatre, Enwave Theatre, Toronto
May 15-18, 2014
“Not So Swift”
If you know anyone who holds the common belief that Canadian history is boring, do not take them to UnSpunTheatre’s The Speedy, now having its world premier as part of Harbourfront World Stage. The show will only confirm their belief. The show relates the story of the wreck of the battle schooner HMS Speedy in Lake Ontario in 1804, a tidbit of Canadian history most people know nothing about. UnSpun deserves some praise for bringing this event to our attention, but its show is much too diffuse, haphazard and repetitive to be effective. Gordon Lightfoot made much more of the 1975 wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in a single song the following year, than the five writers of The Speedy do in 90 minutes. Since the writers refer so often to the internet for source material, one should note that the Wikipedia article on the HMS Speedy is more informative and relates the story and its implications more clearly than does the stage play.
The basic facts are that the HMS Speedy, built in 1798, when Britain feared invasion from the US, started from York (later to become Toronto), then capital of Upper Canada, to sail to Newcastle on Presqu’ile Point, where a new courthouse had been built. The reason for the journey was to transport the prisoner Ogetonicut, an Ojibway, accused of murdering a trading post operator John Sharpe in revenge for killing his brother Whistling Duck. British law demanded that a prisoner be tried in the district where the crime was allegedly committed. The Speedy arrived near its goal, but sank with the loss of all on board, an estimated 20-39 passengers and its crew of six. This may not seem like a major disaster, but, as the show points out, loss of 35 people was a loss of a tenth of the population of York at the time. Moreover, since this was a high-profile trial, meant both to teach the natives a lesson and to legitimize the new courthouse in Newcastle with a view to turning the town into better capital of Upper Canada than the unseemly York, the Speedy was filled with everyone who would be involved in the trial – the prosecution and defence lawyers, the judge, the witnesses, the first Solicitor-General of Canada, the High Constable of York and others. The loss of so many educated people was a major setback for York and the wreck proved that Newcastle did not have a safe enough harbour to serve as the new capital.
There were many possible causes for the wreck. First, the ship itself was in poor condition. Having been built from green timber it was already leaking and suffering from dry rot when it set out. The ship’s captain Lieutenant Thomas Paxton did not want to sail her, but Lieutenant-Governor Peter Hunter insisted he do so. Second there was a storm. Third the ship sailed into the strange Sophiasburgh Triangle, where magnetic anomalies prevent compasses from working properly. Fourth, the ship struck and apparently toppled a rock formation called the Devil’s Horseblock that stopped only 20 feet from the water’s surface. Fifth, and least important except for those who prefer supernatural explanations, some claimed that the prisoner’s mother called Bittertongue was seen laying a curse upon the ship. But as Michaela Washburn, who movingly plays Bittetongue, makes clear, why should a mother condemn her only remaining son to drowning?
The story of the HMS Speedy might have seemed like a good focus to explore the various aspect of social, political and naval history that converge in its destruction, but as it happens very little is actually known. We don’t know what precisely caused the wreck. We don’t know what would have happened at a trial that never took place. As actor Kaleb Alexander points out, it would be great to make Lieutenant-Governor Peter Hunter the villain of the piece, but the historical record is conflicted whether he was a tyrant or a good leader.
The UnSpun Theatre writers could still have looked at the disaster as a mirror of Canada’s background. The destruction of everyone involved in what would likely have been a show trial of a Native Canadian could have been turned into a metaphorical judgment on European self-justification for colonization. But that is not the tack UnSpun takes.
Instead, the show spins off into two different paths. One emphasizes the “making of” aspect of the show by having the actors depict themselves gathering information for the show. The other emphasizes how the actors relate to the events of the story through personal experiences. Following the first path, we see Shira Leuchter’s difficulties in persuading an expert on Ontario shipwrecks to share his knowledge of the Speedy because of all the people who use that knowledge to raid and disturb sunken ships seeking for treasure. We also see Leuchter on the phone with a woman (played by Michaela Washburn) connected with the Ontario Heritage Trust which oversees the Provincial Plaque Program that sets up plaques marking historical places and events. Washburn plays the woman rather like Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator character Ernestine. It’s a disappointment, therefore, when the staged dialogue is replaced by the actual recording of the phone conversation where the woman is not nearly as funny as Washburn made her.
In an access of expertitis, Keith Barker wants to find out how losing one tenth of its population would impact a city and so consults a grief counsellor who specializes in places hit with large-scale tragedies. As one might expect, the expert has nothing but platitudes to offer and, disconcertingly, Hanratty the director has decided to have the onstage dialogue occur simultaneously with the taped recording meaning that neither is clearly audible.
The impact on the actors has variable results. Barker admits he knows nothing about sailing but that a relative did tech him to tie sailor’s knots, a skill he proceeds to demonstrate but to no useful end. Washburn reads a passage from a non-fiction book about Lake Ontario shipwrecks that gives a first-person account of what he sinking of the Speedy felt like. Since no one survived, this account is, of course, pure fiction. Rather than stopping at that, however, the cast then reads out reviewers’ remarks on Amazon.com praising the book – at which point we feel that UnSpun is really starting to run out of material.
The most effective sequence in the play is when all four actors relate experiences of drowning or watching a drowning. Of those, Washburn’s narrative of how a truck she was driving went through the ice on a lake and Alexander’s account of being a camp counsellor watching helplessly when a canoe overturns on a rapids are by far the more effective. The only problem is that these personal stories could apply to any story about people drowning, not specifically to the passengers and crew of the Speedy, and therefore don’t extend our knowledge of the supposed focus of the show.
The best aspect of the show it its set designed by Trevor Schwellnus that looks like a museum display of artifacts related to the Speedy and, indeed, does display the few articles that survived and are on loan from a museum. Upstage left in the performance space is a full-scale mast with unfurled sails and downstage centre a rope seemingly carelessly thrown down but in fact forming an outline of Lake Ontario.
If the point of the play is to make the dry (or wet) facts of history come to life, this simply is not what happens. There have been over 6000 documented shipwrecks in the Great Lakes and over 30,000 lives lost. Whitefish Point alone in Lake Superior claimed over 240 ships between 1816 and 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. What, then, makes the Speedy so special? We get the impression of a group of writers and actors struggling in too many ways to make a footnote in local history exciting and failing every time. The conclusion spoken by Washburn as Bittertongue is powerful but its question about who writes history and who is remembered and who is forgotten is well-worn territory that, again, is not specific to the Speedy’s demise. Time for UnSpun to have a major group rethink of this project to decide what it is trying to achieve.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Kaleb Alexander, Michaela Washburn and Keith Barker; Shira Leuchter. ©2014 Erin Gerofsky.
For tickets, visit www.harbourfront.on.ca.
2014-05-16
The Speedy