A lighthearted look at small-town life through newcomers’ eyes

If you’re looking for a piece of lighthearted and culture-based humour that doesn’t delve too deep, Prairie Nurse is the show for you.

The play, written by Marie Beath Badian and showing in Rosthern’s Station Arts Centre, is a fun romp through the cultureclash hijinks caused when two young Filipino nurses come to work in a small-town prairie hospital in the 1960s. The show is inspired by the experiences of Badian’s mother, and there are some lovely and earnest flashes of the immigrant experience that shone through in Sunday’s performance. So much goes right in this production right off the bat. The set is almost perfect — the smalltown feel is there immediately — and the costumes were simple but effective in setting the tone.

The humour in the show revolves around culture shock for the new nurses and a case of mistaken identity when lab tech Wilf (Nick Preston) falls in love at first sight with Puring (Yulissa Campos), but thinks he’s actually in love with the other new nurse Penny (Andrea Macasaet), since he can’t tell the two apart.

Campos and Macasaet both did well as young women thrust into a new culture, but the highlights of the show came during ensemble moments instead of individual performances. When Wilf and Dr. Miles Macgreggor (Andy Trithardt) burst out to greet the new nurses wearing an old-school hockey goalie mask and carrying a rifle, respectively, it was a startling and hilarious way to kick off the show.

There is a deft touch required to paint the small-town picture like this. Trithardt’s Dr. Macgreggor was funny every time we saw him, thanks to an eccentric but still grounded performance as a smalltown outdoor-loving physician. And the strikingly different reactions from Puring (Campos) and Penny (Macasaet) to their new surroundings gave the audience an honest and refreshing breadth of experiences to witness.

The show hits a storytelling speed bump in that it doesn’t really progress after the first act. The entire second act continues to play on the “mistaken identity” joke and never goes too far beyond that.

The brash Penny begins to show a softer side in the first half of the show, but nothing ever comes of it. The lovable buffoon Wilf is shown to have a serious secret — but when it finally gets revealed, the rest of the cast is outraged for about 15 seconds before it is left forgotten. Small things are built up to tease us that we’re getting more from characters but then it simply didn’t come to fruition.

The show was, simply and unquestionably, fun. The jokes hit home; the acting felt genuine; and there were some great laughout-loud moments that captured a real part of Saskatchewan’s history. It just had the potential to be more.

Prairie Nurse runs until Aug. 5.