Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✩✩
by Erin Shields, directed by Andrea Donaldson
Red Sky Performance, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
February 9-19, 2016
Speck: “Some people just get stuck in one feeling”
Erin Shields’s Mistatim, the latest creation from Red Sky Performance to visit Toronto, is a well-intentioned play about two eleven-year-old – a white boy, a Cree girl – coming to be friends while trying to train the wild horse of the title. The most attractive feature of the show is kind of physical theatre Red Sky is known for, in this case the performance of Carlos Rivera as the horse. Unfortunately, as soon as the play shifts from action to talk it becomes dull even though the topic of the conversations is important. Besides this, the central image of taming a wild horse doesn’t sit well with the central topic of the conversations about the residential school system.
Andy Moro’s design is very simple and marks Mistatim as a show meant for touring. The show has, in fact, already completed an eight-state tour of the United States and will embark on a five-province tour of Canada following its performances in Toronto. The stage is bare except for its main prop, the corner of a fence which in the course of the action comes to symbolize the separation of the two young people, of their cultures and of the human beings from the horse. The back wall is a huge projection of an open prairie sky that changes according to the mood of the play and the characters involved.
The action begins with Calvin (Brendan McMurtry-Howlett) trying without success to tame a wild horse (Carlos Rivera) with a whip. A native girl named Speck (Sera-Lys McArthur) rushes out and tells Calvin to stop. He’ll never tame a wild horse using such cruelty. The two immediately distrust each other and Calvin continues his whipping until he has enraged the horse so much he has to run away from it. They the two young people next meet, Calvin is more receptive to Speck’s ideas. She listens to the horse and hears it saying its name Mistatim (accented on the first syllable), which means simply “horse” in Cree. She wishes she knew Cree so she could speak to the horse, but her grandmother, who once knew the language doesn’t speak it anymore.
Her grandmother, like her mother, (both never seen) was a victim of the residential school system in Canada, where native children were forcibly taken away from their parents and educated to speak and act like white people. For that reason speaking one’s native language was not only forbidden but harshly punished. Because Speck’s mother would not give up speaking Cree, she was always being punished and eventually ran away from school.
Calvin says he never knew about the residential schools and Speck says that’s exactly the reason she has chosen to go to school on the reservation and not in town because she knows the school in town doesn’t teach both sides of the story.
As it happens, news of a “Cree horse” sparks Speck’s grandmother to start speaking in Cree again and teach Speck what to say. Armed with this knowledge, Speck speaks to Mistatim and helps Calvin tame him. Taming Mistatim is Calvin’s project to prove the horse’s worth so that his father (never seen) will not destroy it.
The second major problem has to do with the conflict in symbolism inherent in taming Mistatim. Shields goes out of her way to show us that Mistatim the wild horse is a “Cree horse” who somehow understands Cree. Using Cree, Speck is able to persuade Mistatim to be bridled and ridden. Thus, the Cree girl is helping the white boy tame a Cree horse so that it will fit in with the white boy’s father’s other tame horses. Speck’s actions already show a symbolic contradiction. Shields would like us to think the contrast is between Calvin’s harsh method of taming (the whip) versus Speck’s gentle method of taming (Cree speech), but the result is still taming a wild animal who is identified as Cree.
What makes this even worse is Shields’s attempt to link the story of Mistatim with that of the residential schools. The whole reason this abhorrent system was established and native children taken away from their parents was to force them to speak and act like white people – in other words to train them. To quote Sir John A. Macdonald in 1883, “Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men”.* By insisting that Mistatim is Cree, Shields unintentionally shows both Calvin and Speck symbolically participating in training a Cree being to act other than it naturally is – something Calvin and Speck have both already condemned when applied to people.
The prime virtue of the play is the outstanding performance of Carlos Rivera as Mistatim. With his majestic mask designed by Karen Rodd and his own and Sandra Lalonde’s evocative choreography and Rivera’s close attention to realistic detail, we almost forget that Mistatim is being portrayed by a human being.
As for the two young people, Sera-Lys McArthur is more successful at acting the part of an eleven-year-old in a an unforced and natural manner than is Brendan McMurtry-Howlett, who, though the main source of humour, often seems to be trying too hard. Both, however, do well at depicting the various stages that their characters go through in moving from distrust to understanding and friendship.
While the physical theatre component of Mistatim is wonderful to watch, the confused imagery Shields has created makes the play very difficult to use as a teaching tool. While Shields seems to think her audience will identify with the two young people on stage, children also naturally identify with animals. Given how Shields has written the play, it would be very difficult to explain how training a Cree horse is a good and worthy goal but training Cree children is bad.
For ages 6+.
©Christopher Hoile
*Quoted in Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. May 2015, p. 2 (http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf).
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Carlos Rivera, Brendan McMurtry-Howlett and Sera-Lys McArthur, ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann; Carlos Rivera as Mistatim, ©2016 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2016-02-10
Mistatim