Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Mark Crawford, directed by Miles Potter
Blyth Festival, Memorial Hall, Blyth
June 22-September 21, 2018
“We’re all in this together”
With The New Canadian Curling Club, Mark Crawford has his third hit in a row at the Blyth Festival. Crawford’s new play breaks new comic territory since unlike Stag and Doe (2014) or The Birds and the Bees (2016), Curling Club depends almost entirely on character development rather than plot as a source of comedy. Unlike its predecessors, the play also deals with a serious social theme, racial prejudice, and does not shirk from a depiction of its consequences. Nevertheless, Curling Club achieves what may seem the impossible task of portraying its serious subject realistically and yet being warmly funny at the same time.
The set-up for the action is that the curler Marlene (who never appears) wants to generate more interaction with recent immigrants to her unnamed small Southern Ontario town and decides she will teach a group of immigrants how to curl with the hope they will both learn something of Canadian culture and be able to participate in the many curling clubs in the region.
The problem is that Marlene has injured herself in a fall on the ice and has commandeered her ex-husband Stuart MacPhail (Lorne Kennedy) into teaching the class. Contrary to Marlene’s optimistic expectations, only four people show up for lessons and none primarily because they want to learn to curl. Mike Chang (Matthew Gin), a medical resident from China, shows up because he and Stuart’s daughter are in love and Mike wants to get into his future father-in-law’s good graces. Jamaican-born Charmaine Bailey (Marcia Johnson) a store manager at Tim Hortons who has lived in Canada for 27 years, is there because she is friends with Marlene. Anoopjeet Singh (Omar Alex Khan), who emigrated with his family from India more than seven years ago, is there because he works for Charmaine at Tim Hortons and is hoping to get a promotion. Finally, Fatima Al-Sayeed (Parmida Vand), a recent Syrian refugee, is there because Charmaine’s church funded her settling in Canada.
The group’s lack of a real interest in learning to curl is compounded by Stuart’s inability to say anything without turning it into a racial slur. Stuart is so proud of his pure Scottish heritage that he even regards the Dutch who settled in town generations ago as newcomers. In surveying his pupils he notes he has a yellow, a black and a brown so all he needs is a red to complete the picture. While none of his remarks are as inflammatory as what comes out of the current US president’s mouth nearly every day, they all are remarks that are completely unsurprising considering that Stuart has never known any people of colour before and so recurs to the usual stereotypes that Whites have of non-Whites.
To Stuart’s eyes, his prejudices seem to be borne out by the total ineptitude of the group. Mike is the exception and eventually shows a natural aptitude for curling, but Charmaine’s pain in her knees prevents her squatting properly to throw a rock. Anoopjeet can’t seem to step on the ice without falling down. And Fatima, who has very little English and can barely understand anything Stuart says, also seems to pay little attention since she spends every spare moment texting on her phone with her brother back in Syria.
Welding a ragtag bunch of misfits into a winning team is a well-worn trope of both television and movies whether the subject is bank heists, World War II or superheroes. Were Crawford to follow this trope, his play would neither be interesting nor true to life. In cinematic fantasy the misfits are welded together through the efforts of a charismatic leader. In Curling Club, it is the leader who is the problem. Stuart is not just a bad teacher given his undisguised disdain for his pupils, but his offensive attitude gets in the way of his pupils even desiring to learn. Contrary to the movie trope, the group ousts Stuart as their leader in favour of Mike even though all Mike knows about curling comes from how-to videos on YouTube.
If the first impetus to the plot comes from Stuart’s unseen ex-wife, the second comes from Stuart’s unseen daughter. She gives both him and Stuart and ultimatum that if they can’t manage to get along, she won’t marry Mike and will cut Stuart out of her life. As a way of effecting some modicum of bonding, Stuart agrees to give Mike extra lessons since Mike does actually show potential in the sport. A side benefit is that the knowledge Mike gains he can then pass on to the rest of the group.
As with his previous plays, Crawford shows a keen ear for natural dialogue. The action of the play covers about three months and over that time we see how the four would-be curlers become easier with each other. Fatima’s English gradually improves and people discover that she has a gift for strategy in this game called “chess on ice”. Comically, Mike in taking over Stuart’s position becomes as authoritarian as Stuart was though, thankfully, without the racial slurs.
What Crawford depicts so well, especially under Miles Potter’s detailed and sensitive direction, is the healing power of time. Crawford shows that it’s very easy for Stuart to dislike the people he teaches in the abstract when all they seem to him are representatives of alien groups. Yet, over time Stuart gets to know all four as individual human beings not as embodiments of racial types. Knowing that they have had difficulties and dashed hopes just like he has, it becomes harder for him to see them as alien to himself.
Crawford even explores the racial dynamics within the group. Anoopjeet keeps confounding Mike with a Korean fellow he once knew. Charmaine wonders if Fatima won’t let her give her a lift home because Fatima’s father disapproves of Black people. Mike says that he thinks that his girlfriend’s family is more likely to accept him as a son-in-law than his family in China would ever accept a White girl as a daughter-in-law. Though racist views of Whites is Crawford’s prime focus given the small town Ontario setting, his mention of racial tensions among the others is not only realistic but helps to universalize his theme.
Just as time allows familiarity to erode Stuart’s prejudices against the group, it also erodes prejudices within the group so that they start to play not as individuals but as a team dedicated to a common purpose. Crawford’s band of misfits thus becomes an example not of the agency of a charismatic leader but of the power of multiculturalism where there is strength in diversity.
All five actors are so good that in an ensemble piece like this it is really unfair to single anyone out. Some like Johnson’s warm and witty Charmaine and Khan’s gawky but earnest Anoopjeet are sympathetic from the start. With others, once we learn what lies behind the aggression of Gin’s Mike or the inattention of Vand’s Fatima, we also become more understanding. Kennedy is excellent in detailing Stuart’s journey from bottled-up anger at having to teach people he views as inferior to the gradual softening of his rigid views as he glimpses his own struggles in each of them.
The relation of Crawford’s play to the audience is thus the same as the relation of the characters to each other. All five we first regard as alien – Stuart because of his objectionable attitude and the other four because they are so unwilling to speak. Yet, as time goes on, the more we know about each of them, even Stuart, the more we come to accept them and cheer them on. It was very heartening to see that this play celebrating multiculturalism should even halfway through its run in small-town Ontario receive a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation. Let’s hope that audiences take home the good will and insight that imbues Crawford’s play because the world will be all the better for it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Marcia Johnson, Matthew Gin, Omar Alex Khan, Parmida Vand and Lorne Kennedy; Matthew Gin, Lorne Kennedy, Parmida Vand, Marcia Johnson (standing) and Omar Alex Khan. ©2018 Terry Manzo.
For tickets, visit https://blythfestival.com.
2018-07-16
The New Canadian Curling Club