THE WATERSHED by Annabel Soutar (Crows Theatre/Porte Parole/Panamania). At the Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley). Runs to July 19. $15-$42. 416-368-3110. See listing. Rating: NNNNN
Crows Theatres last collaboration with playwright Annabel Soutar was Seeds, an urgent documentary play about genetically modified food. The Watershed, receiving its world premiere at Panamania, is an even more successful mix of the personal, the political and the artistic.
Thrilling on every level, and as informative as it is inspiring, the play expands the idea of what theatre can do.
Montreal-based playwright Soutar (played by Kristen Thomson) is working on a play about water to be performed during the Pan Am/Parapan Am games. After the city is flooded in 2012 cue a recreation of hysterical reports from Fox News a plumber (Eric Peterson, like most of the cast playing a variety of roles) explains to Soutar, her husband (Alex Ivanovici) and their daughters Ella (Amelia Sargisson) and Beatrice (Ngozi Paul) how water gets to their home.
This eventually leads Soutar to inquire into the publicly funded Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), the Kenora-region of freshwater lakes that has been the focus of invaluable scientific research since the 1960s. Now its funding is being cut. How? Why? Through calls, meetings and emails with scientists, civil servants, activists and politicians, she follows the trail, which eventually takes her and her family (and Hazel, the daughter of the plays director, Chris Abraham) on an RV road trip to the oil sands in Fort McMurray.
Exhaustively researched and performed with verbatim dialogue thats been edited from dozens of hours of interviews, the show switches between settings with miraculous ease. Abraham and his first-rate design team (set, costumes and props by Julie Fox, lighting by Kimberly Purtell, sound by Thomas Ryder Payne and projections by Denyse Karn) evoke everything from a cozy Christmas eve in the Quebec townships to a cold and lonely expedition at one of the frozen ELA lakes to a golf course in Florida.
Although filled with facts and figures, the play is also exciting. Soutar is trying to solve a mystery, see why someones disappeared, track down that MP who agrees to talk. At the same time shes dealing with the demands of her art a shrinking expense budget, the knowledge that its funding may be pulled once the feds know what her plays about as well as being a working mother.
What gives the play its heart, in fact, is Soutars insistence on empowering her daughters by giving them the tools to help in the investigation. She also carries on a series of tough, unsentimental conversations with her politically conservative father (Peterson). Its in these scenes that Thomson, whos onstage almost the entire time, radiates intelligence and strength as well as a spiky humour.
Underlying the play is the deeply humane idea of communicating and sharing ideas without resorting to hysteria. If we cant sit down and calmly discuss the issues that affect us, our families and the world around us, what hope is there?
Whatever end of the political spectrum youre on, The Watershed is must-see theatre.
