Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
The versatile, two-tiered stage setting at the Monument-National is transformed into a ghostly prairie backdrop under Sarah Yaffe’s fluid arrangement of shifting light and dark. Vintage war-time melodies and haunting folklore vocals evoke a bygone era that is both mythic and real: Canada’s snow-covered prairies surrounding the communal hubbub of prairie farm-town life.
Perched along the train-line, the town of Unity is the playwright’s dramatic focus: spotlight on the lives of a handful of people as microcosm of the greater catastrophe—for the closing months of World War One bring news of the Spanish ’flu pandemic that will claim an even greater number of lives world-wide.
Kathleen Stavert plays the role of Bea, compulsive chronicler, evangelist and mother-figure to her sisters. With her calm clear diction and confident approach, it is Bea who, from the outset, holds it all together both at home and via her recording of events, whether trivial or momentous. Bea’s journal descriptions of her dreams, fears, illusions and desires also chronicle her underground ‘coming of age.’
Secretly pining for her absent sweetheart, Bea discovers that it is Hart, the blind, homeless, de-mobbed soldier, played by Aaron Turner, who is destined to change her life in ways she could not imagine.
Daredevil sister, Sissy, played by Jessica Rose, having tasted the tragedy of the times, in complete character reversal, transforms literally into a firebrand preacher who divines in current events—the world at war, whole towns and villages quarantined, de-mobbed military innocently spreading pestilence and plague—the Apocalyptic foreshadowing of the ‘end of days.’
A pivotal character, as well as one of the quirkiest, is the young female undertaker, Sunna, portrayed with great presence by Stephanie Chapman-Baker. Icelandic Sunna, a reluctant transplant to the Canadian ‘wilderness,’ dreams only of returning home. Socially isolated, taciturn and gruff, she is the play’s ‘centre of gravity,’ toiling like a Trojan at the only work she can do, preparing bodies for burial, mounting coffins from cheap wood, digging graves. Later, stunning in her bridal gown, she gives voice to lyrical reflections on the human body: its internal logic and symmetry of perfection; the mysterious essence that briefly sustains the ecology of a living being.
At the other end of the spectrum, Rose and Doris, telephonists at the Unity network exchange (hilariously played by Becky Croll and Gilda Monreal) are a pair of hyperactive gossipy moralists who operate in tandem, in stereophonic sound, stealing the show with their casual match-making, judgmental ‘asides’ and rapid fire relay-messages of calamity or celebration.
Still the deaths continue to multiply. A pandemic of terror follows. People regard one another with suspicion and fear. Despite the grisly images of disease and decay, Kerr’s dialogue and dramatic plot is nonetheless soaked to the brim with natural humour, more than the mere graveyard humour that can erupt as defensive protection in dangerous times. Sissy, for instance, in a fevered delirium, mistakes Sunna for the Grim Reaper; many such comic elements prove, later on, to contain their ironic, even tragic underside.
Meanwhile, the shifting mood, action, variety and pacing is tireless. There’s not a moment of tedium. An unflagging current of energy sustains and brings the story to its poignant and mysterious ending.
Playwright Kerr has been quoted as saying that he would hate to see a sentimental staging of Unity (1918). Persephone’s production is faithfully stark, hard-hitting, and even brutally candid. Despite ‘reality TV’ and news networks that usher real-time images of war into our living room, who that has not personally been there can truly grasp the impact of such cataclysms?
Unity (1918) is Kerr’s effort to explore a time in history—continuing to this day—when whole generations of youth were decimated, while the remaining survivors were left behind to remember or suppress the past.