Oil & Water drama takes a while to come together
Final third of play gets into heart of matter
Everything that’s wrong with Oil & Water, the Newfoundland drama based on true events involving shipwreck, compassion and transformation that opened the Magnetic North Theatre Festival on Wednesday at Vertigo, takes up most of the first two-thirds of the show.
It’s a long 60 minutes. In the remaining half-hour following intermission, however, it’s a different story. There, everything is right. We get to the real heart of the matter. But back to the beginning. The most recent collaboration between playwright Robert Chafe and director Jillian Keiley’s choreographically inspired Artistic Fraud of NewThe Magnetic North foundland
Theatre Festival company, presents the ArtisOil & Water tic Fraud of Newis set in two foundland producplaces and tion of Oil & Water times. Speak
by Robert Chafe ing of “set,” through Saturday at designer Vertigo Playhouse. Shawn KerTickets: 403-294win uses 9494. pails and ½ out of five boards, and a
large central “sextant” on rockers flanked on each side by a high stepladder, to ingeniously convey ocean, ship, mine, house and hill.
At the start of Chafe’s play, we’re in Boston — it’s 1974, a period still of general racial unrest in the United States, but of outright racist violence in and around the schools of Boston on account of attempts at integration through busing. We meet African-American Lanier Phillips (somewhat stolidly performed by Anderson Ryan Allen), the fiftyish father of young Vonzia, played with charming grade school frankness and precocity by Starr Domingue.
Both dad and daughter are at loggerheads over how to cope with the injustice and prejudice Vonzia sees erupting around her at school. When Vonzia expresses admiration for the response of a black kid who stabs a white kid, Phillips incurs her scorn for taking a conciliatory stance on the race issue as she sees it.
Lending entrenched and bitter historical bias of her own on the subject of race is Phillips’s greatgrandmother/guardian angel Adeline, a slave played here by Neema Bickersteth. Bickersteth’s is a consistently well-voiced portrayal — especially in the gentle vocal mix of gospel and Newfoundland folk tunes that comprise Andrew Craig’s pleasing score.
Interwoven with this line of narrative are the sadnesses laced with humour of a family in St. Lawrence, a bleak coastal community where fluorspar mining, the lifeblood of the town, is taking its toll on the inhabitants; and vignettes of the U.S. navy shipboard life of the much younger Phillips.
The time in both latter storylines is 1942. You wonder where everything is headed — because you don’t really get into the “issues,” or the characters — until you get to the running aground of the USS Truxton, near St. Lawrence, and the subsequent rescue of Phillips, the only black crew member to survive.
The townsfolk who ultimately tend Phillips to a rather quick recovery are Violet, the sharpwitted but illiterate housewife in the aforementioned family facing silicosis — a stirring performance by Petrina Bromley — and her shutterbug creative type of a neighbour, Ena, played by Alison Woolridge (also a strong performance in a cast that had no shortage of strong performances).
The reaction to Phillips on the part of these two women who have never seen a black man before — indeed, their entire scene with their shipwrecked charge (Jeremiah Sparks) — constituted a triumph of humanity and a transcendent moment in theatre.