Here’s the thing: Sarah Gartshore is one of my dearest friends. So, you will need to read this and think about whether or not I am biased. (I am, so I’ll just be honest and admit it.) I love a lot of things about Sarah’s work, but I especially like that she speaks from (and for) the margins, and you’ll likely recall the blog I wrote in the fall about “Project ArmHer,” which she wrote collaboratively with local sex workers. That piece was, in so many ways, socially groundbreaking. She goes where other playwrights won’t go, and her work is richer for it. The result it that the ripple effect, for the audience, is much more rich, too. You never leave a Sarah Gartshore play as the same human who walked into the theatre two hours before, and that’s a very good thing.
Her work vibrates with intensity of thought and craft. Her monologues are quick witted, pointed, and meant to make you feel uncomfortable in your seat. If that happens, and it should happen in a Gartshore piece, then you’ll start to think about your place in the world, and about what defines you, and about how we are all related to one another. At the core of all her work, and this is really what I love about it all, is that she tries to show how we really are more alike than we think, regardless of gender, race, or social status. If we could get there, to that place where we truly see the human souls in one another, then maybe we’d live in a better world.
A few weeks ago, I saw “Streethearts,” Sarah’s play about Sudbury’s homeless population. It has, as all her work does, a rhythm, rhyme and word music about it that ripples through your bones and settles into your heart. On Thursday night, in the early evening, I sat in on a staged reading of “Debwewin,” an Ojibway word meaning “truth.” The entire piece revolves around the notion of Canada 150, and how it really isn’t about 150 years. As the PlaySmelter program says, “The truth is that this land and its Indigenous people have a relationship that stretches back much further than the 150 years that many Canadians are celebrating in 2017. The truth is that Canada, as we know it, is at the beginning. The next short 150 years will be shaped, in part, by this time of truth telling as we navigate our way towards reconciliation.”
One of the most beautiful things about Sarah Gartshore’s pieces is that she integrates her mum, Lois Apaquash, into her plays as an actor. Lois is a real presence on any stage. Her voice is so evocative and there is such a sense of soul when she acts or reads. I love watching her work. In “Debwewin,” in one of the monologues that Lois performs, her character is a woman who was placed in a residential school. Her character says, “I am ’88’ and I am 40.” Oh my God. That line killed my heart. What some people don’t know is that First Nations children were taken forcibly from their families, put into residential schools, and then were given numbers. There were no names, only numbers, and no child was allowed to speak their traditional language or practice their traditional spirituality. To do so meant risking physical abuse and torture. That it was all kept secret for so long is part of the pain. That monologue, the ache of the mother speaking about her daughter, and of her daughter having been assigned a number too, echoed across the small theatre space. No one seemed to breathe. Numbers, not names. You can’t be more reductionist than that. Erasure is simpler if you can take away a person’s identity and give them a number. But these numbers are people, and the damage done still ripples across Canadian society today. That’s the lateral violence and intergenerational trauma that we weren’t taught about in school. That’s why we need truth and reconciliation.
Like Heiti’s textual and theatrical dance between what is ‘hole’ versus what is ‘whole,’ and between what is ‘absence,’ and what is ‘presence,’ so too does Gartshore ask us to consider what is seen and what is unseen, and what is said and unsaid. This is especially true of the residential school system. When I think that, as a child in elementary school, I was never taught about this cultural genocide, it makes me shake my head. As Sarah writes in “Debwewin,” “What came first? The genocide or the egg?”
Hearts are always central to Gartshore’s work. Symbolically and spiritually, hearts are what she’s perhaps really most interested in. (Now, she’ll read this and we’ll have to have wine and discuss it…because she may or may not see it.) The monologue in “Debwewin” that sits with me longest, deep in my own heart, is the one where a heart speaks. The character speaks about how she would do a number of things….keep a house clean, read self-help books, drink less wine, sit in a circle with other broken people…if only she could manage it. She can’t, though, she says, “because my heart hurts.” The refrain of “my heart hurts” echoes throughout the piece so that you feel the pain that seeps into things. In another monologue, Gartshore writes “The truth is numbers don’t lie; neither do hearts.” Then, with what is probably one of the strongest lines in the play: “Memory for memory, we are different, but heart for heart, we are the same.” Here, it seems to me, is the core of what Sarah does in all of her work, asking us to find our common places, our shared hearts. This makes me think of the phrase “all our relations.” When one character is asking someone if they’re coming to visit a reserve, she says, in a matter of fact tone, “Please bring water.” You could feel that line in the audience, mostly because there’s a truth there that shouldn’t be ignored. Clean water shouldn’t be an option, a box to check off at will. All Canadians deserve clean sources of water, not just the ones who don’t live on reserves in the far north.
The other person whose work I’ve just discovered is Eli Chilton, a First Nations playwright from Moose Factory. His work, “The Sandcastle,” speaks to the importance of family and community. The symbol of the sandcastle, as something that you build up to be solid, but then as something that gets so easily washed away by water, speaks to the notion that life is temporary, fleeting, and should be valued. Nothing is forever, and time passes. What lives throughout it all, one hopes, is the love that you find on the journey. Elsa Whitefeather is an older woman who seems to have a unique gift. She is either a medium of sorts, or she is falling ill. At the “talk back” after the staged reading, Chilton spoke of how he wanted to see how the two possibilities might work together, and how the house itself quickly becomes a character, perhaps even being haunted by entities that don’t always make themselves clearly known to the family and friends who visit Elsa and then witness her speaking to someone they can’t see.
This read had seven actors, but it was condensed down from an original eleven characters in the script. When the play is produced fully, at some point in the future, there will likely be eleven actors on stage. The point of having that many would be to suggest the size of the community and how everyone seems to know everyone else’s business. As George, Elsa’s husband, says at one point in the play, “Don’t mistake my lack of drama for indifference.” I nearly laughed out loud at that line. Seriously. Some people in life seem to enjoy cultivating drama, and then love pulling others into that vortex with great gusto. I’ve never been one of those people, so I found that line resonated with me. You can care deeply about someone or something, but also choose not to engage with the drama that might go along with it. You can choose to avoid negativity, or at least keep yourself at an arm’s length, especially if you protect yourself that way.
My friend Shelly Moore-Frappier played Barb, so it was fun to see her acting. Her delivery was right on and her comedic timing in delivering lines (as all of Shelly’s friends already know) is a gift for any good actor. She’s good!
Lois Apaquash played Elsa, taking the lion’s share of the lines for the hour and a half as we sat there listening. She made Elsa seem powerful, loving her family members and friends, but still tentative in tone when interacting with the unseen world. Elsa’s character walked between worlds within the play and Lois conveyed that aspect so beautifully.
At the end of the play, I got a bit teary. Preparing for a funeral, the characters speak of photographs, and of picking the ones that best reflect George’s life. I have photographs in my basement, in giant Tupperware containers. I avoid them. They’ve been here for four years this July, when I moved into this house. Opening up those bins always breaks my heart. I can’t do it more than once a year. I don’t even know what to do with all of those photos, mostly because they are all full of images of my ‘lost ones,’ as I call them. I come from a big Irish Catholic family, but all of them are gone now, so that I feel a bit lost without them. My great-aunts and grandmother were strong women who had a hand in raising me. All ten of the Kelly children are gone now, and they were my great-aunts and uncles. I spent lots of time with them growing up. We were always treated as if we were adults, invited warmly into conversations about books, music, and politics, as well as story telling sessions around the kitchen table at 160 Kingsmount. Three uncles have gone, two at the age of 50 and one a bit older than that. My parents. My grandparents on both sides. In any case, photos, for me, cause pain. There are just too many people I’ve loved who have died.
Eli Chilton’s play, especially near the end, made me ache for the people I’ve lost in my life. Too many died too early. I loved them all deeply, so even if they died later in life, which some of them did, I still ache with missing them. Most of the time, I can just sort of pretend that the ache isn’t that bad, that I can manage it, but grief has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it. When you were once part of a big family tree, but now feel you’re a single branch, well, it can be a hard go. I felt a bit of a longing sitting there, wishing for a family again. There’s a deep beauty in Chilton’s “The Sandcastle,” simply because he recognizes and honours the love that weaves itself between people in a home, a family, and a community. I’m hoping this play gets produced next year because I’d love to see it.
This wraps up a week of fine plays. As I left tonight, one of the members of the producer’s unit said, “Wow. You’ve been to every one, haven’t you?” I smiled. “Nope, I missed one, but I learned so much from the other four…” I’m sad PlaySmelter is over. It made me forget my hands in my lap, stopped me from breathing once or twice, made me laugh out loud, and then get teary in other quiet moments.
This is why I love theatre.
peace,
k.
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