Ideas, images simmer long After the Fire is quenched
Alberta-based playwright Matthew MacKenzie has made a splash in Toronto in a short time with his sharp signature perspective: as a Métis writer from Edmonton, MacKenzie blends Indigenous stories with his province’s oil industry, reckoning climate change with this environmentally centred mode of belief. MacKenzie’s Bears, which won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award in 2018, did this in an abstract way, tracking an oil worker’s journey through the western forests, transforming into a bear as he travels. His followup script, After the
Fire, places this same tension between industry, environment, Indigeneity and capitalism within a more mundane human world — beginning with, of all things, a little-league girls’ hockey game.
To drive it home, the opening image of Brendan McMurtryHowlett’s production consists of a Tim Hortons cup and Timbit box sitting on top of a large pile of dirt and wood chips. It takes place in Fort McMurray a year after the devastating fire that destroyed over 2,500 homes. Two couples Laura (Kaitlyn Riordan) and Barry (Sheldon Elter, who appeared in Bears), and Carmell (Louise Lambert) and Ty (Jesse Gervais) — the women are sisters, the men are both Métis — are trying to continue with their old lives, despite the fire’s effect on not only the land but them as well. Each has fundamentally changed since the fire. Carmell, the alpha female played with brisk humour by Alberta-based actor Lambert, has left Ty and is now dating an environmental activist simply referred to as “Greenpeace.” Ty is rudderless and angry without his family, and leans heavily on an unhealthy crutch. Barry is rediscovering his connection to nature with an eerie fascination with insects, rodents and other small forest wildlife. And Laura has had the biggest breakdown of all, though she keeps it hidden, and is the reason why all four adults are out in the wilderness late at night.
The sisters trek into the bush with a purse to destroy, shim- ming along the edges of set designer Alison Yanota’s in-theround performance space, and the men remain on the central dirt pile, digging into the earth for an unknown reason.
This leads to the more frustrating aspect of MacKenzie’s script, which has ideas and images that are far smarter than its structure allows.
The dual scenes between the sisters and the men interrupt each other in a way that’s clearly meant to build tension, slowly revealing character and plot de- tails, and leading up to the final twist as the audience learns the reason for their late-night excursion. But it’s easy to feel the script trying very deliberately to lead us on, to tease, to obstruct our perception of the couples’ situations.
It’s an alienating sensation, especially when the big reveal can be predicted early on. The play does get its darkly funny ending and is pleasing tonally, but it comes after 75 minutes of stumbling around in the dark (literally for the characters, mentally for the audience). McMurtry-Howlet t also doesn’t quite find a way to let his characters escape their limited locations: endless digging gets a bit tiring for everyone.
In the final moments of the play, when all four characters are finally in the same space after a long night, MacKenzie and McMurtry-Howlett find a dazzling synergy of image, atmosphere and message.
As Barry says early on, “They say the fire’s still burnin’. Beneath the ground. They say it could stay burnin’ … for years.” These people stare into their fishbowl cocktails knowing that the worst is yet to come. They’re still on top of this mound of earth, with the fire and now something else waiting to rise up and potentially consume them.
MacKenzie is a gifted writer and can create lasting moments, if only he could sometimes get out of his own way.
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga