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written and directed by Andrew Moodie

Factory Theatre/Great Canadian Theatre Company, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

October 13-November 4, 2007

If you missed Andrew Moodie’s hit play The Real McCoy last year, be sure to see it this year.  If you saw the play last year, see it again.  You will find it richly rewards a second viewing.  As a playwright Moodie accomplishes the difficult task of finding the universal resonances in the particulars of history.  As a director he celebrates the transformative power of theatre where the same bare space can become anywhere from rural Ontario to Edinburgh and where actors take on multiple identities with minimal costume changes.

Moodie’s subject is the life of African-Canadian inventor Elijah McCoy (c.1843-1929), whose name became a byword for quality in the phrase “the real McCoy.”  Born in Colchester, Ontario, to runaway American slaves, McCoy showed so much promise in school that he won a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Edinburgh University.  When he moved to the US, however, where no one could believe a black man could be an engineer, he was set to stoking boilers.  His invention in 1872 of the automatic lubricator for steam engines revolutionized travel since trains no longer had to stop every ten miles for relubrication.  The device was sold worldwide with the marketers’ proviso that McCoy’s race not be revealed. 

Moodie sees in McCoy the inventor the embodiment of the 19th-century ideals of progress and efficiency versus the forces of decay and chaos in nature.  McCoy views his own success as a black man as part of that progress.  Moodie balances McCoy’s successes with the succession of his personal tragedies until McCoy must struggle with his own mental decline. 

On second viewing one appreciates how well Moodie has unified the action through the use of significant props like a simple basin of water and how the use of doubling for six of the seven cast members adds to the meaning of their separate roles.  Maurice Dean Wint plays the older McCoy as a self-absorbed intellectual whose scientific prowess isolates him from those around him, an aloofness that seems to presage his future dementia.  Kevin Hanchard brings out the joy in the younger McCoy and clearly relates both the comic and tragic sides of McCoy’s best friend.  Ardon Bess is a forceful presence in his main role as McCoy’s illiterate father.  New to the cast Ordena Stephens-Thompson clearly distinguishes her many roles including McCoy’s mother, his first wife and his very comic maid.  Marcia Johnson returns to play her main role as McCoy’s demanding second wife Mary.  Of the two white cast members, Bruce Beaton returns to play McCoy’s indomitable professor at Edinburgh, W.J.M. Rankine, while Darren Keay, new to the cast, distinguishes himself in many roles especially as McCoy’s business partner who realizes the shame of concealing McCoy’s race to improve sales. 

The play leaves you wanting to know more about specifics of McCoy’s life and especially how, despite the prejudice of the time, he came to be a favourite of so celebrated a man as Rankine and to achieve as much as he did.  Nevertheless, Moodie reclaims a fascinating man’s life from undeserved obscurity and makes it speak to our own attempts to define technological and social progress.             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-10-15.

Photo: Maurice Dean Wint and Ordena Stephens. ©Ed Gass-Donnelly.