PLAYTIME’S OVER IN POST-APOCALYPTIC DRAMA
Theatre veterans play nuclear physicists reckoning the consequences of their actions
In Centaur Theatre’s latest production, The Children (Nov. 6 to 25), there aren’t any. Children, that is.
Rather, in Lucy Kirkwood’s intimate, post-apocalyptic drama, we get three seniors eking out their time in a coastal English village ravaged by a nuclear accident.
It’s a sci-fi story of sorts, an unusual genre for the theatre, though increasingly common in this era of sci-fi mutating into scary sci-fact. What’s perhaps more unusual for a play in these young-and-hip-oriented times, especially for one written by a thirtysomething playwright, is its exclusive focus on 60-something characters, here played by Fiona Reid and Laurie Paton, both of them Shaw Festival veterans, and Geordie Johnson, a familiar face at Stratford.
They play three retired nuclear physicists, two of whom, Hazel (Paton) and Robin (Johnson), are married, the other, Rose (Reid), being an old friend from their hedonistic youth who turns up one evening for mysterious reasons.
So, given the autumnal age of the cast, what’s with that title? Well, according to Reid, it refers in part to the characters’ failure to grow up. In an email exchange with the Montreal Gazette, she says of her character: “She’s together enough to become a nuclear engineer and even a university professor in America, but she’s remained stuck in terms of her life and relationships. It’s as if she meant to mature and somehow forgot.”
And in a call from Toronto, Paton says: “As the evening goes on, and after much parsnip wine, they do act like children, all three of them. It’s very funny, but it’s very provocative as well.”
Just what it is specifically that provokes in The Children is something audiences will have to find out for themselves: I’m sworn to silence over a shock revelation in the final stretch. But what can be revealed is the title also touches on the morality, or otherwise, of having children. It was an urgent question in the characters’ formative, Cold War-era years — and now more so, what with climate change’s stealthier but perhaps surer threat of extinction.
“Regarding the play’s title,” writes Reid, it’s asking “what about our children and their future? The first line is (the childless) Rose’s, ‘How are the children?’ The theme of fecundity ripples through the play.”
On the face of it, as Johnson points out, also on the phone from Toronto, it’s a kitchen-sink drama. But Johnson praises the set design of Eo Sharp (who recently won a META for her work on The Mountaintop) for the way she skews realism to provoke unconscious fears.
“The stage is uneven and it’s placed on detritus such as cinder blocks and plastic bins. There’s a cyclorama that sort of spoons around, and under the floor is this sort of green, iridescent glow. The concept is that the cottage is placed within a huge nuclear cooling chimney, and the iridescent green is reminiscent of radioactive sludge.”
Lively talkbacks at Canadian Stage have raised the question as to whether Kirkwood (who scored an Olivier Award with her political thriller, Chimerica) is denouncing a baby-boomer generation that has left millennials teetering on the edge of global extinction.
“We’ve had (older audience members) being quite defensive, saying, ‘Well it seems to me that she’s pointing a finger,’” says Paton. “But I don’t think she is. She’s 34 years old, so she’s writing about the concerns of her generation, but she raises the questions without imparting blame. But since I started working on this play, I’ve thought every night about my parents’ generation, comparing them to ours. We all try our best, but in some ways we’ve been such a wasteful generation with such a sense of entitlement.”
As part of the research process, Holmes arranged for the cast to visit the Pickering nuclear power station in Toronto.
“I was expecting old men in white coats, and we were presented with these four lovely, young, very hip engineers,” says Paton. “They spoke about how what they do is similar to being an actor. When they’re working on a problem, their answers have to be right on the money. And when they discover the answers, that’s sort of a creative burst of energy for them, like when you’re working on a problem in a play.”
Of course, the consequences of getting it wrong at Pickering will likely result in something more serious than bad reviews.
Has working on and researching into the frightening implications of this play keep them up at night?
“I would say being in this play has brought me to a better understanding of how nuclear energy actually works and what the inherent myths and risks are,” writes Reid. “It doesn’t take much to keep me up at night, but as I think increasingly about how weather events and rising oceans are affecting us, it’s impossible to not be very concerned about the lack of political will in some circles.”
The politics of generational divides are also very much at the forefront of Birthmark, the latest play from Stephen Orlov. Produced by recent META winners Teesri Duniya Theatre, it’s a sequel of sorts to his 2001 play, Sperm Count, which dealt with the cross-currents between families of the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora living in Montreal.
Orlov, who co-edited (with Samah Sabawi) the groundbreaking anthology Double-Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora, insists Birthmark works as a stand-alone play.
“Birthmark takes place two decades after Sperm Count,” Orlov explains. “The ‘sperm’ character is now a 21-year-old McGill University student who wants to join an ultra- Orthodox settlement in a remote area of the West Bank. Which of course sends up fireworks for his father, who’s a secular liberal Jew. There’s also a carry-over to a Palestinian single mother who, in the first play, is only referred to or spoken to off stage. Ultimately the politics is the backdrop. The heart of the play is family drama with some dark comedic moments.”