Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✩✩
by Claudia Dey, directed by Brendan McMurtry-Howlett
We Will Meet Productions with Storefront Arts Initiative, Storefront Theatre, 955 Bloor St. West, Toronto
November 11-27, 2016
Dorris: “I mean to tell you that we are capable of shocking things”
We Will Meet Productions and Storefront Theatre are giving Claudia Dey’s first play Beaver its first revival in Toronto since it premiere at Factory Theatre in 2001. Dey would go on to write The Gwendolyn Poems (2002) and Trout Stanley (2004), both of which are much better works. Beaver suffers from an amorphous structure, unnecessary characters and scenes and a lack of incisive dialogue, but is does create a vivid portrait of the limited choices facing a young girl growing up in a small, isolated town like Timmins, Ontario, especially in this effective production directed by Brendan McMurtry-Howlett.
When the play opens, Beatrice Jersey (Chala Hunter) is only twelve. Her mother Rose has died – how precisely we don’t discover until much later. It is winter in Timmins and the ground frozen solid so that the burial will have to take place in spring. Nevertheless, Beatrice’s two aunts, the holier-than-thou Nora (Carmen Grant) and the prostitute Sima (Molly Flood), who haven’t spoken in years, have gathered with their deeply cynical mother Edna (Toni Ellwand) to mark Rose’s death. Beatrice’s father, Rose’s husband Silo (Jimi Shlag) has not joined them because he is busy as usual getting himself drunk at his local tavern with his friend Cowboy (Waawaate Fobister).
In Act 1 Beatrice is present but primarily silent. She stays longer than anyone else beside her mother’s future grave and she alone communes with her mother’s ghost (P.J. Prudat). While Beatrice’s aunts and grandmother do nothing but rehearse pointless, age-old arguments, the only practical mourner is Rose’s friend Dorris (Katie Swift), newly released from prison for burning down her family home with all her male relatives inside.
With an alcoholic father, a ghostly mother, aunts dedicated to the sacred and profane, Dey’s characters are not much different from those one finds in plays by Michel Tremblay. In particular, À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971) features two sisters who meet in the family home after the death of their parents. The pious Manon is the one who stayed at home and the sexually free Carmen is the one who left – a direct parallel to Nora and Sima in Dey’s play. Dialogue of the two sisters alternates with that of the ghosts of their alcoholic father and cynical mother. While people constantly speak of Beaver as an example of “Northern Ontario Gothic”, it is a style that clearly has precedents elsewhere.
Because of the baggy structure of Act 1, it is difficult to see what the focus is meant to be. One could easily think it is Nora since she is the most fully realized character. It is, of course, Beatrice who for most of the act is passive until a sudden and surprising burst of action at the end of the act. The key to understanding the play is in noticing how in Act 1 the principal characters regard Beatrice. Nora and Sima fight over who should have custody of her. Nora has already arranged without consulting Sima that Beatrice will stay with Nora since Sima’s lifestyle is so unsuitable. At the same time, Silo, despite his complete ineffectiveness due to alcohol, still loves Beatrice and wants her to stay with him.
Alternatives to the smothering care of relatives are Rose and Dorris. Rose’s way out was death. Dorris’s way out was destruction of what she hated and she presently wants to found her own country with herself as queen. Since Dey gives Beatrice little to say, we never hear her debate what she should do. Instead, she abruptly takes action, loses her virginity and re-christens herself “Beaver”.
Act 1 is sufficient in itself to illustrate a woman’s rebellion against her surroundings. This tends to make the shorter Act 2 seem like simply a repetition of the situation in Act 1, except this time with an articulate title character. In Act 2, Beaver is now 17 and intends to marry. Nora, for reasons that are totally unclear, also plans to marry, her would-be fiancé being Silo, who was her fiancé before he married Rose. Silo is unaware of Nora’s intentions. In Act 2 the same arguments reappear and the plays closes with Beaver again declaring her independence from everyone in a different manner.
The unnecessary second act dooms Beaver to be a lesser play, but strangely enough, the second is tighter in structure and funnier than the first. Dey doesn’t achieve mastery over structure and subject matter until Trout Stanley, which, unfortunately is so far her last work in a medium she seems to have abandoned.
Director Brendan McMurtry-Howlett doesn’t always exert strong enough control over the pacing and focus of the action, but he does have a great affinity for Dey’s willfully quirky sense of humour. Carman Grant dominates the play as Nora simply because she lends more detail to her character. Grant brings out the rich humour of a woman who thinks her piety and moral strictures should be those of everyone else without realizing how narrow she has made her world. Grant gives Nora the habit of pushing her glasses back in place as a kind of punctuation mark in the midst of her sentences.
Chala Hunter is a delight as Beatrice/Beaver. Dey gives her no voice during most of Act 1, but Hunter compensates for this with the intensity of her presence. Hunter shows us Beatrice’s distress as she sorts through the options she has, but her burst into action and speech still comes as a surprise. Once Hunter as Beaver can speak she reveals what a strong, engaging and vibrant woman Beatrice has become.
Katie Swift well plays one of the liveliest characters Dey has written. Dorris’s complete lack of guilt for her past crimes and her enthusiasm for her new project of founding a country make her the quirkiest of all the characters. Swift effortlessly inhabits the role and her appearances frequently perk up the action when it starts to flag.
Molly Flood does her best to make the caricatured sex worker sister Sima as individual as possible, but Toni Ellwand has trouble making the downbeat pessimist Edna humorous. In this she is hampered by Dey’s notion that having Edna make the same remark to everything is somehow inherently funny, when, in fact, it loses its charm with repetition. P.J. Prudat’s Rose remains an illusive figure throughout, likely because Dey gives her nothing to say that would elucidate Rose’s life or reasons for death.
Dey’s two male characters are underwritten. Silo remains drunk throughout the action and Jimi Shlag focusses so much on this single trait that his slurred speech is difficult to decipher. His best scene is silent when, trying belatedly to care for Beatrice, he delicately covers her with blanket after blanket. Waawaate Fobister’s talents are pretty much wasted as Cowboy, who at least is not drunk quite as long as Silo. Dey does give Cowboy the best speech in the play about the importance of art in showing people they know nothing. And the best single scene in the play is between Cowboy and Sima in full dominatrix regalia very well acted by both Fobister and Flood. It’s just too bad that neither scene is in any way necessary to the story.
The Storefront Theatre & We Will Meet perform a useful service in reviving Dey’s first play after a decade and a half. Revivals such as this are the only way to tell if plays from the past still speak to the present. In terms presenting the rise of a female hero, a play like Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1988) surpasses Beaver in both tautness of structure and richness of content. As a comedic tale of Northern Ontario lives, Dey’s own Trout Stanley surpasses Beaver in both tightness of plot and cleverness of dialogue. Nevertheless, it is good finally to experience this fabled play on stage and to judge for oneself where it fits into the canon of Canadian drama.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Katie Swift, Toni Ellwand, Chala Hunter, Carmen Grant and Molly Flood; Carmen Grant and Molly Flood; Katie Swift and Chala Hunter. ©2016 John Gundy.
For tickets, visit http://thestorefronttheatre.com.
2016-11-14
Beaver