BONE CAGE by Catherine Banks (Hart House Theatre, 7 Hart House). To October 5. $10-$28. 416-978-8849. See listings. Rating: NNN
Catherine Banks’s 2008 Governor General’s Award-winning play about endemic emotional isolation in a small Nova Scotia logging community makes a depressing opener to Hart House Theatre’s season, but the bleak story shows how our treatment of the environment affects how we treat each other, and vice versa.
The contemporary story focuses on naive high school senior Krista (Lindsey Middleton) and short-tempered logger Jamie (Nathan Bitton), who are about to get married despite an uncertain economic future and the advice of Chicky (Samantha Coyle), Jamie’s half-sister and Krista’s maid of honour.
The beginning is the weakest section: after a confusing country dance number that feels half-hearted and tacked on, the first few scenes suffer from slow pacing and wooden East Coast accents.
But these problems disappear when Jamie’s best friend (and Krista’s brother), Kevin (Kyle Purcell), turns up seriously beaten and abused. We’re also introduced to Clarence (Layne Coleman), Jamie’s shell of a father, who lives off disability payments and is obsessed with bringing Jamie’s kid brother Travis back from the dead via cloning.
The emotional fireworks take place on and around Elizabeth Kantor’s striking and symbolic multi-level wooden set that’s part beaver dam, part bridge and part clear-cut stumps. The design captures the worsening human impact on the surrounding forest, and tellingly excludes the colour green. The stumps that populate the stage also double as household items – a sofa, fridge and TV – furthering the connection between environmental destruction and consumer culture.
Banks’s script is rich in symbolism: Jamie’s pipe dream of becoming a helicopter pilot and Clarence’s Frankenstein-like preoccupation with resurrecting his lost child nicely evoke the frustrations of everyday life in declining industrial towns. But a number of intriguing plot points are curiously kept offstage. For example, Jamie and Kevin spend a scene concocting a revenge prank whose outcome is never revealed.
The disturbing subject matter and recurring scenes of physical and sexual violence begin to wear by the two-hour mark, but this is the price of truthfully exploring some social realities.
