This production is so unlikely and, in many ways, so successful.
In her adaptation, writer and director Estelle Shook uses the Chekhov farces The Bear and The Proposal to explore the historical relationships between Indigenous and settler characters in the North Okanagan, which is the territory of the Sylix people — so it’s resonant in unexpected ways. And, although it isn’t perfect, a lot of this production is hilarious. That hilarity is a huge accomplishment because farce is so hard to pull off.
In Shook’s version of The Bear, which she sets in 1869, settler Susan Allison, who has been in mourning for her husband for a year, insists that her life is over: she refuses to leave her house. But then a horse trader named Tatlehasket arrives and demands that Susan pay him a debt owed by her late husband. Tatlehasket has financial obligations so he insists that she pay him immediately, but Susan has no cash on hand, which infuriates him. Appalled by Tatlehasket’s raised voice, Susan calls him a bear, but she can give as good as she gets: when Tatlehasket challenges her to a duel, she charges off to get a pair of her late husband’s pistols.
The character Susan is loosely inspired by the real-life Susan Allison, a settler whose writings about the Okanagan conveyed her respect for her Sylix neighbours. She referred to the real Tatlehasket as “my good friend.” In Shook’s adaptation, the characters’ personal histories of Indigenous-settler marriage give a sense of the region’s complicated history. And the characters’ disagreement about financial obligations allows Shook to slip in startling facts about settler encroachment on Indigenous land.
About farce: it’s a beast to perform because it’s all about extreme emotion that has to be simultaneously credible and ridiculous. Sheldon Elter is playing Tatlehasket here and the guy’s a gem, turning on a dime from being furious to being shattered by his capacity for rage and then, when Susan’s fieriness charms him, to being instantly lovesick. Elter delivers one of the best farcical performances I’ve seen, and it’s made even more surprising by Shook’s interjection of pop songs. Tatlehasket gets the Limip Bizkit rap “Break Stuff”, which he delivers with wild, hip-swiveling dance moves.
Elter’s real-life wife Kristi Hansen matches him step for step in her performance as Alice. Hansen’s soulful singing of The Flamingos’ doowop hit “The Vow” is one of the highlights of the evening. (Fiddler Ajineen Sagal is the very able musical director.) Hansen’s Alice starts off in sincere, but outsized mourning, then flips back and forth between enraged outbursts and romantic desperation. Elter and Hansen make a great comic and romantic duo.
Jani Lauzon is less successful in the small role of Alice’s friend Emma Hutchy: her performance is appropriately broad, but it’s never emotionally grounded or idiosyncratically surprising.
After the intermission, the evening’s second play, The Proposal, has a couple more problems, but it still boasts real strengths.
In Shook’s version of The Proposal, the hypochondriacal landowner is named William Brent. (Again, the main characters are inspired historical figures from the area.) When William, who’s a settler, arrives at Marie Houghton’s family home to propose to her, his plan gets derailed when he and Marie get into a fight about who owns a few acres of meadow. Marie’s deceased mom was Indigenous, so this struggle over land is loaded.
Ryan Biel, who’s playing William, is a gifted farceur. As with Elter and Hansen, a lot of the laughs he generates come from his sudden changes of emotional direction, but, unlike the others, Biel uses deadpan as his bottom line, juxtaposing that flatness with absurd dance moves and sudden flips in physical focus — on William’s numb leg, for instance, or twitching eyebrows.
Kevin Bundy plays Marie’s father Charles Houghton with an Irish accent best described as approximate, but he commits effectively to the character’s outsized rage and delight.
Unfortunately, Amanda Trapp gets lost playing Marie. Because she hasn’t found a specific bead on the character, she plays generic bigness — volume and exaggerated expressions, but without eccentricity or surprise. That’s too bad because, under Shook’s direction, there are hints of what might have been: Marie is far more butch than the delicate William. If Trapp had followed through on that, it could have been fun.
There’s also a dislocation between the source material and the theme of Shook’s adaptation. In The Proposal, Chekhov is parodying financially convenient marriage. Shook, on the other hand, seems to be making a statement about land claims and reconciliation; because the marriage between Brent and Marie looks like such a bad match, this thematic path isn’t particularly satisfying.
Still, the evening as a whole works. And it’s hard to beat the venue, an outdoor stage on the Caravan Theatre’s farm, which is tucked into the rolling hills outside Armstrong. You’ve got to love it when an actor makes an entrance leading a horse.
THE BEAR and THE PROPOSAL by Anton Chekhov. Adapted and directed by Estelle Shook. This Caravan Farm Theatre production is running at the Caravan Farm Theatre near Armstrong until August 4. If you’re going to make the trip, you need to do it by this weekend. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: Sheldon Elter and a friend make their entrance in The Bear at the Caravan Farm Theatre (Photo by Viktoria Haack. Costume by Carmen Alatorre)
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