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by Maria Milisavljevic, directed by Richard Rose

Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Extraspace, Toronto

February 15-March 19, 2017

Dad: “The water’s on fire!”

In 2015 the Tarragon Theatre presented the English-language premiere of

Abyss, a play by the young German playwright Maria Milisavljevic.  This was an outstanding drama about love, loss and obsession.  Now the Tarragon is presents the world premiere of Milisavljevic’s Peace River Country, written in English and based on a Canadian subject.  Milisavljevic’s style in Abyss was principally narrational and abstract with each of the actors serving as storytellers of an enigmatic tale that involved them all.  Peace River Country is much less successful.  Milisavljevic has basically taken the true story of Reverend Wiebo Ludwig (1941-2012) and his decades-long battle with the Alberta oil and gas industry and made it as abstract as possible.  In doing so she drains the characters of their individuality and makes the story so vague that it is hard to know specifically what procedures of the oil and gas industry the Ludwig figure is fighting or even what the result of his struggle was.

The play begins with a pious family sining a hymn, praying and then discussing planting a bomb.  The irony of peaceable religious people becoming eco-terrorists is Milisavljevic’s main focus.  Sound designer John Gzowski creates an explosive sound that could be construed as a thunderclap or a bomb detonating which leads to a series of flashbacks that move back and forth in time to explain how the strange first scene could have come about.

Only the the title and the situation of a religious family on a farm battling oil and gas companies gives us any idea that the action is related to the Wiebo Ludwig story.  The family is known only as Dad (Layne Coleman), Mom (Janet Laine Green), Joe (Benjamin Sutherland) and Jemima (Sarah Sherman).  Jemima had children but we never see them or their father or learn any details about them such as “How many children or where is their father?  We see how Dad teaches Jemima to listen to the wind and listen to the soil to learn what they are saying, for, despite being strict Christians, Dad has the view that God uses nature to speak to humankind. 

Scenes of Dad’s praise of nature are intercut with scenes of worsening conditions on the farm.  First a bad smell pervades the air and stings the eyes.  Then the water is undrinkable.  In fact, so much gas has leaked into the local aquifer that a person can set the water on fire.  The family realizes that it must be the water that is causing birth defects among their sheep.  Worse, Jemima delivers a stillborn child with the same sort of birth defect.  All requests for help or an investigation go unheeded.  Eventually, Dad takes this as a sign that he is to act to restore the balance in nature that the oil and gas companies have destroyed.  This leads to the first bomb the family explodes, simply as a warning.  But Dad is found out, tried and put in jail.  The rest of the family is shunned by the community and no one will listen to their side of the story.  

Clearly, Milisavljevic’s notion in presenting the Ludwig story so abstractly is to make it appear more universal.  Yet, James Joyce, who in Ulysses (1922) revealed mythological patterns in the everyday lives of his characters said, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.  In the particular is contained the universal”. 

By presenting the Ludwig story stripped of its particulars, all Milisavljevic gives us is vagueness.  We know Dad and his family are religious because they so often break into prayer at every disturbance.  We know that Mom takes on an archaic female role because she unquestioningly believes whatever Dad tells her.  We know that Jemima questions the status quo more than Joe, simply because the playwright gives her more scenes of that nature.  But of their inner lives, their quirks and habits, what they think of other than praying or fighting pollution, we know nothing.  This turns what might have been a portrait of a real family under duress into simply a group of people who symbolize a family, and it is very difficult to care about characters on stage who have no whiff of reality about them.  How the family can remain on the farm without potable water is a mystery.

The same is true of the oil and gas industry.  They become simply a symbol of villainous big business that has no care about the lowly individuals.  The fact that they pollute the family’s land is simply a symbolic weapon since the playwright gives us no details about how gas has leaked into the aquifer, what “venting” is, what kind of gas settles in hollows or whether all or only some of the farmyard animals are affected.  Does this situation happen to any farm located near an oil refinery or there something unique about Dad’s farm or the company’s practices?  We know the company is doing something bad but we don’t know specifically what or whether it can be prevented.  Milisavljevic doesn’t give us enough information to understand the story.

By turning a specific story from Canadian history into such a generic tale of evil versus good, big business versus the little guy, Milisavljevic has created a story that does not engage us.  Having little to work with to build even two-dimensional characters, the actors struggle to hold our interest.  As Dad, Layne Coleman, who has grown a beard to look very much like Ludwig, successfully conveys a simple man’s deep religious faith, how it is shaken and how it becomes a message to take action.  What Dad is like as a person we never know.  He seems to be a patriarchal authoritarian in his own house, but Milisavljevic does not criticize this.

As Mom, Janet Laine Green plays a religious, obedient wife.  Only once does Mom rebel against Dad’s authority.  Otherwise, Green shows that Mom thinks it her duty to support Dad in everything.  Green’s hymn singing reveals Mom’s inner strength, and it is primarily through her tone of voice that we understand how much she suffers.  Of the four, Green makes Mom the one character for whom we feel the most empathy, even though as with the others we know little about her as a person.

Milisavljevic gives Benjamin Sutherland’s Joe very little to do until about halfway through the play.  Then we find him blaming himself for something that may not be his fault.  Since the incident is not directly related to Dad’s fight, it feels like a scene the playwright has added to make give the otherwise paltry role some meat.  As Joe’s sister Jemima, Sarah Sherman plays her as inherently more rebellious than Joe and closer to Dad.  Sherman is fine in the scenes of Jemima’s youth when she is eager to pick up Dad’s wisdom, but in highly emotional scenes she tends to shout and, unlike the others, lose vocal control.  Milisavljevic doesn’t make it easy for Sherman to play a wife and mother when she neglects even to mention Jemima’s husband or explain why Jemima always eats with her parents rather than with her own husband and children.

While the story and characterization are less than interesting, the play receives a lovely physical production.  The Tarragon Extraspace is in an L-shaped configuration facing the family’s dining table.  Curtis Wehrfritz has filled the empty space surrounding the table from behind with hanging pieces of wood looking like dead trees.  The chairs of for the table are tree stumps thus indicating the family’s oneness with nature and its surrounding corruption.  Jason Hand has gorgeously lit the set in a ways that emphasize the interplay of light and shadow an in Dutch Golden Age paintings with the implication that the family’s way of life is being encroached upon by darkness.

The story of Wiebo Ludwig’s fight would make good theatre but Milisavljevic’s mode of writing judging from Abyss, about the often mysterious links between people, is almost completely the opposite of what is needed.  Annabel Soutar’s documentary style of theatre about the individual’s fight against corporations as in Seeds (2012) or The Watershed (2015) would be the ideal way to tell this story.  Soutar’s interest in the exact facts, figures and details of such a struggle are exactly what this story needs to bring it to life and to re-enrage people with how some industries have put and still put profit above human safety.  Let’s hope that after this lapse, Milisavljevic returns to the type of engaging storytelling in which as in Abyss she so excels.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Layne Coleman, Benjamin Sutherland, Sarah Sherman and Janet Laine Green; Benjamin Sutherland, Layne Coleman, Janet Laine Green and Sarah Sherman; Layne Coleman, Benjamin Sutherland, Sarah Sherman and Janet Laine Green. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.tarragontheatre.com.