The stellar cast of Peace Country: Angus Yam, Sofía Rodríguez, Manuela Sosa, Kaitlin Yott, and Sara Vickruck.
(Photo by Pedro Augusto Meza)

Peace Country is a huge accomplishment. I love its urgency, its complexity, its humour — and its weirdness.

Its weirdness — well, its eccentricity — lies in the play’s structure. Pedro Chamale’s new script is set in an area also known as Peace River Country, an aspen forest that stretches from northwestern Alberta to the Rocky Mountains in northeastern BC. Rather than being driven by plot, as most scripts are, Peace Country offers immersion in the relationships of a group of friends who grew up in the Peace and mostly still live there.

It’s set in the near future. A new political party, the British Columbia Environmental Alliance, has swept to power provincially and it’s working to limit the impacts of climate change. The party has canceled the pipeline project that helped to keep the friends’ town afloat. Canfor, the logging giant, has left. Oil-and-gas company Suncor may be next.

So Peace Country is about the tension between the urgent need for long-delayed environmental action and the economic impact of that action on resource-based communities that are too often ignored or demonized in the discussion. [Read more…]