Mackey a master of the stage in TNW play
The Occupation of Heather Rose is a symphonic demonstration of the occupation of Julia Mackey. Mackey is accustomed to one-actor plays. She is the writing and performance force behind the nationally acclaimed one-hander Jake’s Gift in which she simultaneously portrays an elderly Canadian war vet and a small French child as easily as tossing a ball between the left hand and the right.
On the Theatre Northwest stage this week she once again stickhandles through all the play’s characters by herself like Gretzky on a coast-to-coast rush.
It’s her voice cadence that allows her to do it.
It took me until the second half of the Heather Rose marathon to finally put that together (plus four or five viewings of Jake’s Gift over the years). She has a sing-song quality to her delivery but one that never unties from the core material she’s conveying. She only ever gives over momentarily to a single mood, and even then it’s only for big emotions like the hottest of anger or brightest of joy. That way, like an athlete poised on the balls of her feet, she can step or spin, jab and evade, towards whatever is coming next in the script.
She also has some heavy script to work with here. Playwright Wendy Lill wrote this in 1985, and builds in one of the great outburst monologues in Canadian theatre history. You wanted to give Mackey a standing ovation as soon as you sense that’s over, but more drama keeps coming so you tell yourself you’ll save it to the end. But when the end comes, it’s on such a thrashing wave of emotion you’d be forgiven for just sitting there, run through with blades of your own emotion that it takes a few beats to even muster the realization that it’s over.
But is it over? This play is about the one thing that keeps Canadians from being able to boast, the one thing that keeps us from hailing our culture to the ends of the earth. Canada is the best country that is, the most progressive that ever was, except for .... Except for .... This.
What is sad and alarming is how true this play still is, more than 30 years after its debut. We still have not accepted the truth or achieved reconciliation with the hundreds of First Nations on whose blood and tears our Canada is now built. Not bandaged blood. Not dried tears. The prison of reserves, the trauma of residential schools, the injustice of broken treaties, the theft and extortion of money and lands from our founding brothers and sisters is today’s shame, not yesterday’s news.
It can make you crazy (acting out with violence, abusing substances, turning aloof to the core, etc.), but no, crazy is too frivolous a word. In fact, the stress and extremities exhibited by Heather Rose and her neighbours are signs of pure sanity. Sane people are poor handlers of isolation, alienation, marginalization and mindless injustice. Canada’s Aboriginal nations, and the few like Heather Rose who walk awhile on their side of the white privilege line, are the definition of sane for reacting badly to these circumstances imposed across Canada, by Canada.
This play is a classic “stranger in a strange land” story. Lill framed the plot themes with traces of Alice In Wonderland and Heart of Darkness, both of them adventure stories where a lone observer goes deeper and deeper into the pits of human nature. So, too, does young nurse Heather Rose into the beautiful wilds of an all-toocommon rural reserve where she is one of few white residents among Indigenous dwellers – but not freely self-actualizing Indigenous dwellers. The colonial Canadian occupation has altered them, twisted them, and brainwashed those who aren’t a part of that reality. When some of them, like naive Heather Rose, float into that current, they are ill prepared for the surrealism and the horrors that await.
I couldn’t forget, though, that as much as this was a snapshot of reality about Canada’s Aboriginal mishandlings, it was also a story – just like Alice in Wonderland – about human beings as they come of age. This is a tale about what youth can expect as the current of time pushes them into adulthood. It is about shock, disappointment, anger, injustice, all the emotions a parent can tell their kids about but the kids won’t truly be able to comprehend it until they face it themselves – the sinister and sneering ricochets of sex, friendship, travel, libation, education, adventure, even the beauty of the landscape. These things all seem wonderful to the eyes of youth, and they are, but they all have an equally powerful counter-side and you can’t live your life without plowing headlong into them. And that is going to hurt your heart, burn your mind, and shake your core beliefs. As much as The Occupation of Heather Rose is about the angry sores of our national character, it is also about the painful work of building personal character.
That’s what makes this play such a delight to take in. It hits you like a wave, yes, but after the spluttering and shock, it also feels refreshing and ecstatic. There is laughter, there is hope, there is electric connection for the audience to enjoy.
Speaking of electric, kudos to lighting designer Darren Boquist and director Dirk Van Stralen for using the lights almost like a silent voice, a music-less score. It cheers and glowers as needed by the scene, and at one point achieves what I never considered possible. It made the dancing northern lights into something momentarily terrible. I muttered “horrora borealis” as I saw them looking down on the scene they were supporting.
As charged as that moment was, it again reminded me why even dark moments in a play are part of the revelation and entertainment of live theatre. How one actor with a simple set (three trees, a desk, a bulletin board and a sky) can make us all feel so many profound things is a form of magic.
Is Canada a terrible culture for all the hurt it has inflicted onto Aboriginal people? Yes. Is Canada wonderful for the strides it is taking to heal and help, to be an egalitarian example to the world? Also yes. This play is about the complex range of conditions within our country, and within ourselves.
And at the centre is Mackey who somehow serves every course of this banquet, the hot and the cold of it, all by herself.
It hits you like a wave, yes, but after the spluttering and shock, it also feels refreshing and ecstatic.