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by Annabel Soutar, directed by Chris Abraham

Porte Parole and Crow’s Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

September 28-October 30, 2016

Soutar’s Father: “You have to have a crisis before you have change”

Annabel Soutar’s latest play The Watershed was commissioned by Pananmania, the cultural programme of the Panamerican Games held in Toronto in 2015, and ran there only from July 12 to 19.  Now Tarragon Theatre is hosting the highly acclaimed show back for a longer run that will kick off a national tour.  Soutar is a practitioner of non-fiction, verbatim theatre and those who saw her play Seeds (2012) will know how exciting that mode of theatre can be.  The Watershed is much more diffuse.  While it investigates Canada’s stewardship of its freshwater resources, the play is as much about Soutar’s struggle to gather the information for the play and cope with two children, personal finances and the theatre company’s budget all at once. 

At its most basic level The Watershed is a play about Soutar’s desire to write a play about water.  The action, all based on real people and events, starts simply enough with Soutar’s house leaking during a rainstorm and a discussion with a plumber about the vast amount of water that Canadians waste or pollute.  Canada, unlike other countries, has a enormous freshwater reserves – in fact, 7% of all the renewable reserves on the planet – which has led many to act as if these reserves were inexhaustible.  The problem is that 30% of Canadian households rely on groundwater sources for water which must be replenished from the surface, i.e. through precipitation.  Therefore, changes in climate (less precipitation) or in land use (especially for industry) can affect how much water is actually available. 

The realization that Canada’s freshwater supply could possibly be exhausted leads Soutar (played by Kristen Thomson) to get in contact with the graduate student (Amelia Sargisson) who is in charge of the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a research station unique in the world made up of 58 freshwater lakes in the Kenora District of Ontario.  The project originated in 1968 as a way of monitoring the combination of effects, including pollution, algae bloom and nanosilver toxicity, as displayed in the ecosystem of an entire watershed.

When Soutar overhears a conversation between the head of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) (Bruce Dinsmore) and the famed water scientist David Schindler (Eric Peterson) that suggests that the IISD will be taking control of the ELA, Soutar discovers she can find no one willing to talk about the subject.  When the Harper government announces in 2012 that it will defund the ELA, Soutar suspects that this is part of Harper’s general project of eliminating the annoying contrary influence of scientific fact from government plans for the exploitation of resources, particularly of oil.  That extracting oil from the oil sands of Alberta causes massive pollution was a point the government had denied.  When the Department of Fisheries and Oceans began dismantling scientists’ cabins at the ELA without consulting their owners, the event seemed to provide visible evidence that the government was actively suppressing science.

Act 1 of the play shows how Soutar begins with a very vague notion of her topic to develop what becomes a gripping exposé of a government conspiracy to further its own agenda of exploitation at the expense of preserving natural resources as fundamental as water for future generations.  What really is the IISD and as a NGO, who really funds it and why?  When David Schindler published evidence that oil extraction in the oil sands caused carcinogenic pollution of the water, why did the government try to ignore his recommendations even when they were independently verified?  Why did the government defund so renowned a project as the ELA? 

Finally, Soutar decides that the only way to understand the problem is to visit the oil sands herself.  So she packs up her actor husband (played by Alex Ivanovici, Soutar’s husband in real life), her two children Ella and Beatrice (Amelia Sargisson and Ngozi Paul) and their cousin Hazel (Tanja Jacobs) in a Winnebago to drive from Montreal to Fort McMurray.  Also, in Kenora she has found the first Conservative politician who is willing to talk about the ELA.  Act 2 thus becomes the tale of Soutar’s month-long journey to the oil sands and, thereby, she hopes, to some form of enlightenment about the interaction of government, business and environmentalism. 

To work well on stage a documentary play has to have a structure.  While Seeds had the tightly defined structure of a David-and-Goliath battle of one farmer versus a huge corporation, The Watershed has the more sprawling, episodic structure of a quest.  The actual journey depicted in Act 2 is really like a quest-within-a-quest in Soutar’s overall search for knowledge.    

It will not spoil the play to say that the answers that Soutar finds do not result in a tidy tying up of all the lines of inquiry that she has pursued.  Reality is not as tidy as fiction and that is one of the lessons of the play.  It is perhaps also why Soutar devotes so much of the play to her trying to educate her daughters in the art of instigative journalism.  During the course of the play the two girls grow from having no idea what a watershed is to being able to interview a stranger who is an engineer at the oil sands about what he does and what he knows.  The benefit of this subplot is to encourage parents to teach children how to sift what is true from what is untrue by realizing how information on the same topic will differ depending on its source. 

The Watershed’s great virtue is that it engages us with a topic we might previously have known nothing about, even though it is so vital to our existence.  The fact that the play arrives at no neat conclusion leads Soutar to turn her investigation about Canada’s water supply into a general inquiry into how the economics of continued growth has invaded institutions of all kinds so that science, education, medicine and the arts prioritize making money over increasing knowledge or understanding.  Soutar’s father (Peterson) states that “You have to have a crisis before you have change”.  Soutar’s play asks why it is we can’t avoid these crises through study and knowledge.

This description may make the play sound excessively idea-laden, but Soutar leavens the action by spending nearly half the stage time depicting her amusing, semi-chaotic family life.  In fact, given the play’s rather long running time, some may wish Soutar had cut back on the family episodes and focussed more intently on her investigation of the central topic.

The Watershed features a panoply of exceptionally fine performances.  As Soutar, Kristen Thomson gives a performances as wide-ranging in emotion as any of the best work she has done before.  Soutar shows us all sides of herself – the artist and the mother, both excited and depressed, calm and enraged, frustrated and insightful – and Thomson is able to encompass the whole range of nuance and changing emotions with a wonderfully natural ease. 

Alex Ivanovici, playing himself, at least doesn’t give the impression that he is playing himself.  He finds humour in his exasperation with both his children and his wife’s obsession with her work.  He knows that his role as Quarantine Doctor in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) will hardly bring him fame, but it will at least help pay the bills.  

Eric Peterson gives a fresh, honest performance as Soutar’s conservative father, whom Soutar allows enough time to express at length the conservative point of view of the necessity of exploiting Canada’s natural resources.  His is the portrait of the kind of reasonable conservative who used to win respect in politics, far removed from their extremist cousins in the U.S.  In other roles Peterson makes us wonder why an intelligent scientist like David Schindler seems so secretive and gives us a riotous caricature of a rabid FOX News anchor. 

For her part Tanja Jacobs plays a wide range of roles from an imposing Maude Barlow and earnest Kathleen Wynne to the mischievous little girl Hazel who accompanies Soutar and family on their cross-country trip.  Bruce Dinsmore plays a number of similar closed-mouthed politicos but his highlights include his Beatles-singing Stephen Harper and an disingenuous Jian Ghomeshi.  Laura Condlln doesn’t appear as much as one would like, but she makes a stark contrast between Hazel’s down-to-earth mother and Claudia Barilla, the ultra-sophisticated wife of Cirque du Soliel founder Guy Laliberté. 

Amelia Sargisson and Ngozi Paul are delightful as Soutar’s two daughters, Ella aged 10 and Beatrice aged 8.  They have all the gestures, excitements, sulks and fights of girls of those ages down perfectly.  When Sargisson appears as as the worried grad student in charge of ELA, it’s hard to believe it is the same actor.  Meanwhile, Paul does an hilariously accurate portrayal of Crow’s Theatre Artistic Director Chris Abraham, whom Soutar portrays as overly budget- and image-conscious.

Besides these fine performances, what really makes the show dazzle is the show’s direction and highly imaginative design.  For Act 1 these stage floor is entirely covered with wooden pallets and the only furniture is a white sofa, chairs of various sorts, and, important for the show’s theme, a sink, a bathtub and a toilet.  The advantage of Julie Fox’s plain set it that it can change instantly from one location to another with the precise coordination of Kimberley Purtell’s squares of light, Denyse Karn’s projections and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design.  Abraham moves through the myriad number of scenes with both clarity and rapidity creating a breathless pace that mirrors Soutar’s mounting excitement of the conspiracy she believes she is uncovering.  With actors playing multiple roles and miming all necessary props, the production is a showcase of theatricality.

By Act 2 the pallets have been ingeniously piled up in such a way as to create the impression of the Winnebago that will take Soutar and family across Canada with Karn’s projections showing us the scenery passing by the vehicle’s windows.  This new configuration doesn’t prevent Purtell, Karn and Payne from creating scenes played out on the Winnebago set that are located elsewhere.  One of the most exciting and most inventive scenes in Act 2 is when the family take a six-seater plane to look at the oil sands from the air.

With a running time of two hours and 40 minutes, the play could stand to be editing down both because the family scenes are not strictly necessary to the story and because the play comes to an open-ended conclusion.  The way that Soutar involves us in the sometimes arcane aspects of her subject matter and the way that Abraham and his design team stimulate the imagination with the production  make one wish that other urgent matters of public importance could be treated in this form of documentary theatre.  The Watershed brilliantly fulfils the ancients’ formulation of the goal of art – to educate and to delight.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Ngozi Paul, Kristen Thomson, Alex Ivanovici and Amelia Sargisson; Eric Peterson, Alex Ivanovici, Ngozi Paul, Bruce Dinsmore, Amelia Sargisson and Tanja Jacobs; Tanja Jacobs, Kristen Thomson, Amelia Sargisson, Ngozi Paul, Alex Ivanovici and Bruce Dinsmore. ©2016 Guntar Kravis.

For tickets, visit http://tarragontheatre.com.