`IT HIT DEEP IN MY HEART'
Rez Sisters' Stratford Festival revival resonates after the horrific residential school revelations
On the day the news started breaking about Canada's residential schools and their unmarked graves, actress Tracey Nepinak was deep in rehearsals for the Stratford Festival's acclaimed revival of The Rez Sisters, the Tomson Highway classic about the strength and resilience of Indigenous culture.
In that moment, the emotional stakes rose higher for a production that was already resonating strongly with every cast member.
“It weighed on all of us, I think,” says Nepinak, who plays Philomena Moosetail, an Indigenous woman who dreams of owning a porcelain toilet bowl and figures that bingo may make that dream come true. “My mom went to a residential school — also my late husband and friends.”
All her life, Nepinak had been hearing the stories of “children going missing, babies going missing, people who had witnessed babies dying ... and the world now knows.”
Those outdoor rehearsals on the grounds of Stratford's Perth Museum would assume a new urgency, “We had a circle that grieved and cried and prayed for these little souls.”
Residential schools don't figure directly in Highway's tragicomic 1986 play about seven Indigenous women who leave their Manitoulin Island reserve to participate in “the biggest bingo in the world” in Toronto. But it can legitimately be argued that the schools and what they represented haunt a play that is a good deal more than a portrait of desperate, dead-end lives. It's also a celebration of fortitude and resilience.
Veteran actress Jani Lauzon, who plays Pelajia Patchnose, believes the renewed publicity surrounding the residential school tragedy sharpened the play's rehearsal process. “It deepened our resolve to tell its story and do a good job and make sure people were listening. We poured our hearts and souls into this production.”
The current Stratford revival, critically acclaimed and currently happening outdoors under canvas as a key component in a cautiously mounted post-COVID summer season, marks the first time that an all Indigenous cast has performed at the festival.
Stratford boss Antoni Cimolino believes director Jessica Carmichael delivered a remarkable production.
“She extracted more from the work than perhaps has ever been done before,” Cimolino says. “Emotions were high at the opening. I was in tears. It hit me somewhere very deep in my heart.”
The Stratford Festival began life in a tent in 1953 and grew into an international success story and the largest event of its kind in the western hemisphere. In 2020, it was ready to go with a gala season highlighted by the addition of a new state-of-the-art theatre to its family of playhouses. But the season had to be scrapped because of the pandemic — an agonizing blow with serious consequences not only for the festival, but for the local economy.
The Rez Sisters was one casualty of 2020, but when the festival decided to mount a modest 2021 season, it was back on the schedule, sharing the bill with innovative versions of Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Edward Albee's Three Tall Women and a number of cabaret offerings. And the historical wheel had turned full circle with two new tent theatres to meet safety guidelines.
“The crisis that we'd gone through required us to present work that spoke to us at this time,” Cimolino says. “So how do we do plays that keep people safe? And how do we do plays that mean something today? We wanted something about life and death and what it means to be human, and how our aspirations are sometimes lifted up and sometimes crushed. Tomson created a play that is about resilience and finding a reason to go on. And that felt very much like 2021.”
Lauzon, an Indigenous actress whose eclectic credits range from the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to a gig on CBC television's legendary Mr. Dressup, speaks the play's famous first line — “I want to go to Toronto” — and on opening night, she experienced a variety of emotions.
“It was about just being an actor again ... the fact that we actually had live theatre going on and to be in a relationship with an audience,” she says. “I actually enjoyed performing outside with all the complications that brings. It was such a beautiful space to be in.”
But there was also the fact that this was happening at Stratford.
“What's happening is that predominately white institutions like Stratford are now opening up their consciences and are ready to support projects that are creatively beautiful and finding ways of understanding how important these `other' stories are,” Lauzon stresses.
Nepinak, who has acted in two previous productions of The Rez Sisters, found the current treatment an “eye-opener” because of the new perspective that Carmichael brought to the material. “I'm looking at it differently with special eyes, yet we're still dealing with the same issues we were 30 years ago.”
Rehearsals were challenging. The cast members had to be masked and maintain social distancing throughout long rehearsals, and currently continue to be tested for COVID-19 three times a week.
But Nepinak knew the effort was worth it when the son of legendary festival founder Tom Patterson approached her on opening night and said — “My father would have been so proud to see this.”