A dark walk on The Road of Tears
‘The Hours That Remain’ just not substantive enough in its storytelling
I wanted to like Keith Barker’s play, “The Hours That Remain.”
After all, it’s an attempt to say something serious about the disappearance of Indigenous women on The Road of Tears, that infamous 800 kilometres of Highway 16, between Port Rupert and Port Arthur in British Columbia.
Disappearances that took place there, going back as far as 1969, remain mostly unsolved. According to playwright Barker, they haven’t been given the judicial attention they should have had.
Certainly, there is material here for a tough, uncompromising play that challenges our thinking and concern; one that also pokes at the inertia of a judicial system and police for not taking stricter action about what is happening on this notorious highway of death.
Barker, however, merely alludes to such matters, in his sometimes dark unfocussed drama, that unfortunately walks a politically weak line, substituting a startling, albeit effective ending, for something far more frightening.
The play is sadly not substantive enough in its storytelling, even if it has won several regional awards for its Métis playwright Barker.
Because it walks such a surface line of emotional response to heavy hitting matters that aren’t just sad, but are truly horrific, it forces actors to speak lines that are not always believable, particularly in its first sometimes comic half hour.
So, although all three actors onstage in this Aquarius production work hard to make something insightful, even powerful perhaps, from Barker’s loosely strung text, they have to struggle mightily to ring out truth.
Denise, played with ingratiating charm by actress Cheri Maracle, is on a quest. She’s searching for her lost sister, Michelle, who disappeared after her evening’s shift as a waitress, when her car stalled on that infamous Highway 16.
Denise cannot let go of her obsession for truth about Michelle’s disappearance. She clips out newspaper articles and files them in folders, following the tragic stories of a number of missing women. These women begin to take hold of her very consciousness, their stories haunting her.
Her husband, Daniel, played by a controlled Ryan Cunningham, fears he is losing Denise to her world of desperation. Their love life and their very human connection is being eroded, as if Denise were not really there.
When Denise sees visions of her lost sister, played powerfully by actress Cherish Violet Blood, she is led to some terrible truths emerging from the battered bushes and strangled plants that sustain diminished life along a lonely stretch of roadside.
If only Barker’s play had the tough, poetic rush of its final 15 minutes much sooner in the evening, “The Hours That Remain” might be more satisfying and compelling.
As it stands, Barker’s play is one hour and five minutes of theatre that saves all of its wallop for its final devastating minutes.
In its setting, the Aquarius production of this dark, yet sometimes surprisingly tender drama, has followed a path of poetic realism that I think overpowers the play.
The mountains rising ominously in the background, the unspeakably drab little house where Denise and Daniel live, the highway that veers toward the audience sitting out there in the dark, all root the play in realism. But then, what about the red lines of illuminated blood that light up mysteriously in the ridges of the floor, reflecting grotesquely from the under-cushions of Denise and Daniel’s living room couch? These seem contrived and overstated images that work against the play’s sense of reality.
Such bold contrasts as these, fail to give the play an important anchor in truth.
Then, too, this is a production that might be served better by a brooding sense of minimalism, with less bloated visual design from Jackie Chau, and less overstated lighting from Jareth Li.
Director Mary Francis Moore has tried to give this drama a softer, fuzzy focus, even to the smoke that wafts in from the wings at key moments. It’s as if, like Barker, she’s saving the play’s full-frontal assault until the very end.
From what I could tell, leaving the theatre after the Saturday matinee, Aquarius audience was polarthe ized. Some expressed hostile, open dislike for the play’s darker theme and its sad, final moments. Obviously, they were not strongly in touch with a play that asked them to sit in a theatre and feel angry and disturbed.
Others, well satisfied with the play’s combination of early humour and later tragic outcomes, openly called the piece powerful and compelling.
Well, you pay your money and you take your choice.
And isn’t that what theatre is really all about?