It takes too long to land but this production does, finally, make it home.
Robert Chafe’s script, Between Breaths, is a meditation on death and joy, confinement and freedom, as embodied in the experience of real-life academic and conservationist Jon Lien.
Lien, who taught psychology, animal behaviour, and ocean studies at Newfoundland’s Memorial University, also freed more than 500 whales and other marine mammals from fishing nets, and became known as the Whale Man. Lien’s technique for this kind of liberation became the global standard.
After being injured in a truck accident in 2002, Lien’s health declined. He developed dementia and died of heart complications in 2007, when he was 71.
By starting the story when the Whale Man is already hospitalized and near death, then moving backwards through time, playwright Chafe sets himself a tricky task. Storytelling is about the accumulation of meaning, which is easier to achieve when you’re moving forward chronologically. In an ordinary progression, we watch the protagonist pursue their goal, test out their strategies, and learn from their failures and successes. Meaning accumulates. Because Between Breaths doesn’t offer this kind of linear, goal-oriented narrative, we look (deliberately or intuitively) for other forms of accumulation, including character development and thematic resonance.
For too long, in Between Breaths, I watched Jon rail against — and deny — his diminishing mental capacity. A lot of this involved Jon yelling at his long-suffering wife Judy. I began to wonder if that was all the play was going to provide. Then, in the script’s relatively long middle section, I felt at sea, almost literally, as I watched scenes that illustrate both Jon’s friendship with Wayne, a former whaler, and his techniques for saving whales. I appreciated the tone of the friendship: Jon and Wayne’s love language consists of insults and expletives, but is no less tender for it. Still, I didn’t feel like I was getting close to the core of anything, the depth of anything, until the play’s final movement.
There have been hints of it earlier, but that’s when the central metaphor of Between Breaths fully surfaces. Jon has talked about how incredible it is that creatures as massive and powerful as humpback whales can be brought down by something as seemingly insignificant as a fishing net. It’s apparent that the playwright is also talking about Jon in this — his forcefulness and vulnerability. But it isn’t until the script’s climactic passage that this metaphor really pays off. I won’t tell you how it does that exactly, but I will say that the fruition involves both sorrow and joy. It’s a bit of a cheat in the way that it imagines demented consciousness, but it’s moving, nonetheless.
Throughout, Steve O’Connell delivers a detailed, authentic-feeling portrait of Jon. And, playing his character’s gruffness with paradoxical openheartedness, Darryl Hopkins offers emotionally inviting work as Wayne. Bernardine Stapleton (Judy) overacts in my opinion: her line delivery is self-consciously precious.
But I loved the three-person onstage band. Relying mostly on vocals and stringed instruments but adding a harmonica and bodhran (Irish drum), Andrew Laite, Valmy Assam, and Josh Sandu perform music composed by a band called the Once. In its humility and lyricism, that music manages to be both haunting and transcendent.
I wasn’t always sure that Between Breaths was going to cohere, but I left the theatre with a sense of fulness — and I’m grateful for that.
BETWEEN BREATHS by Robert Chafe. Directed by Jillian Keiley. An Artistic Fraud production presented by the Firehall Arts Centre. At the Firehall Arts Centre until November 23. (Tickets and information)
PHOTO CREDIT: Darryl Hopkins (left) and Steve O’Connell (Photo by steelcut media)
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