Style is a tricky thing. There’s a bunch of it in playwright Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade, but director Donna Spencer and her cast don’t always know what to do with it.
In Women of the Fur Trade, it’s “eighteen hundred and something something” and we’re hanging out with three women in a fort that’s not exactly Lower Fort Garry near a river that’s not the Red but the Reddish. Anachronisms are as plentiful as the wood ticks. Marie-Angelique, who’s Métis, is stanning Louis Riel: when he returns one of her letters, she practically faints. And Cecilia, who’s white, is hot for the “bangin’ beach bod” of Riel’s Irish frenemy Thomas Scott. Eugenia, who’s clearly familiar with Riel’s bangin’ prairie bod, talks like she’s straight outta Compton.
And, in the best displacement, for me, we’re clearly in the theatre, in the anything-can-happen-but-what’s-real land of makebelieve. Like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit — but not exactly, it’s more Sartre-ish — Marie-Angelique and Cecilia have tea parties and chat, but they can’t leave the fort. When Eugenia does head out, they have no idea where she’s going.
This is all a comment on the entrapment of women within sexist structures, including their erasure from history, and it works.
So does the production — sometimes. Playing Marie-Angelique, Kaitlyn Yott knows exactly what she’s doing. Her screwball performance is loose, but authoritative in its confidence. Yott commits to Marie-Angelique’s passions, her horniness, her naïveté and disillusionment, her belief that the stick she’s holding is a gun, even when other characters tell her it’s a stick. As Thomas Scott, who develops a secret passion for Marie-Angelique, Evan Rein occupies the same, perfectly pitched stylistic world. And, because Scott is a traitor to Riel’s fight for self-determination, there’s another level of spin in Rein’s performance. When he’s accused of being racist, for instance, he replies with a squirmy “Yes, but” that travels through his whole body. And, when Riel, bests him in a fight, Rein’s Scott whines like a kid in a schoolyard. He’s feeling the suffering, he means it, but it’s big and self-dramatizing, so it’s funny.
If only all the actors achieved this level of success. Playing Riel, Wayne Lavallee is, frankly, awful. He can’t get through a sentence without breaking up the phrases meaninglessly. Enough said.
Kate Besworth’s Cecilia is more complicated to talk about. Besworth has clearly made a bunch of choices, but, for the most part, they feel deliberate and premeditated, more the products of analysis than intuition. As I see it, Besworth is commenting on her character — condescending to it sometimes — as opposed to spontaneously inhabiting it. She gives Cecilia a mincy little walk, for instance, turning her into a cartoon of prissiness and false buoyancy. No other actor on the stage is in this world.
Danica Charlie’s portrait of Eugenia is understated but true.
A director’s two big jobs are casting and establishing a consistent style. Director Spencer cast Lavalee as well as Yott and Rein, so her achievement there is spotty. And, although I acknowledge that style can be difficult to identify and bring to fruition, she has missed the boat on that front.
Kimira Reddy’s set is disappointingly rudimentary.
There are riches here, but also dross.
WOMEN OF THE FUR TRADE By Frances Koncan. Directed by Donna Spencer with Cheri Maracle’s assistance. A Firehall Arts Centre production at the Firehall Arts Centre until February 23 (tickets and information)
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Kate Besworth, Danica Charlie, and Kaitlyn Yott by Jon Benjamin)
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