Environmental themes treated with ingenuity

Bears

(out of 4) Written and directed by Matthew MacKenzie, choreographed by Monica Dottor. Until January 27 at Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen St. W. Theatrecentre.org and 416-538-0988.

Chase stories are a staple of cinema (think North by Northwest, The Terminator, Catch Me If You Can, the Bourne franchise).

Trying to transpose the format to traditional theatre sounds like a fool’s game — how to simulate the moves through various landscapes, the ingenious evasion of pursuers and the mounting tension necessary to the genre, when the actors and the audience are fixed in a shared location for a limited amount of time?

Bears, a production from Edmonton currently visiting the Theatre Centre, pulls off this improbable task using a combination of ingenuity, humour and the fire of political commitment. Its hero, Floyd (Sheldon Elter), is an Indigenous oilsands worker on the run westward after a workplace safety accident in which he is a prime suspect. The circumstances of that accident and Floyd’s role in it are revealed as the 75-minute play unfolds.

Playwright/director Matthew MacKenzie has written the piece in the third person: “If there was one thing Floyd loved, it was bears,” says Elter, about the character he is playing. The narration is shared — and this is where the inventiveness really starts to kick in — by a chorus of eight dancers, who are constantly transforming into various aspects of the natural environment through which Floyd moves, while also providing some fairly foul-mouthed commentary on the action.

The juxtaposition of their graceful and imaginative movement, as choreographed by Monica Dottor, and the saltiness of what they say is one of the production’s key sources of delight. Another is MacKenzie’s facility with an unlikely metaphor (“Chickadees were something a guy could count on, like caffeine and momentum”), though he flirts with overuse of this device.

Floyd’s relationship to nature is also at the heart of the production’s political and ethical message. In the play MacKenzie is exploring his fam- ily’s Cree, Ojibwe and Métis heritage; Indigenous ways of knowing flow through his script. MacKenzie’s own Punctuate! Theatre co-produced Bears with Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts, whose artistic director Christine Sokaymoh Frederick appears in the show as Floyd’s mother, a character called Mama Bear.

Along his journey, Floyd undergoes a physical transformation: he tells us that he sprouts body hair and grows bulkier, and eventually has an amorous encounter with a female grizzly in the coastal mountains of British Columbia (played as a sexy and beautiful dance between Elter and one of the chorus members).

To say he becomes a bear, however, would miss the point that he was one all along: his mama called him “little cub” and one of the first things we find out about him is that he loves to roll around in the brambles and gorge himself on berries. On his journey out of the oilsands and along the trail of the Trans-Mountain pipeline he embraces the non-human animal part of himself, underlining the continuity between all beings and the natural environment that is at the centre of Indigenous belief.

The unabashed agenda of the piece is to demonstrate how resource extraction is disrupting the natural environment, with tragic consequences. Floyd rebels against the destructive and hazardous nature of this activity and is hunted down by the forces of mainstream societal power as a result (at one point the chorus become the RCMP, riding stuffed toy horses).

Floyd’s is a classic hero’s journey of self-realization, and the Métis actor Elter brings great facility for emotional and physical expression to the role.

Frederick is a calm and confident onstage presence throughout, and the reason she only sometimes intervenes in the action is a plot point that contributes to the play’s themes and message.

Bears is playing at Theatre Centre along with Minosis Gathers Hope, a play for young audiences written by Frederick, directed by MacKenzie and also performed on Gruber’s set. This Indigenous-led double bill tours to various locations in Alberta and British Columbia through May; we in the GTA are lucky to get the first look.