The Toronto Theatre Review: Canadian Stage’s 1939
By Ross
This is the second play in the last week where we are given a date in the 1930s to use as a guidepost for the exploration of extreme racism and intolerance. Fun, right? And although I found Arlekin Players Theatre’s Our Class at Classic Stage Company emotional and completely relevant, staged with creativity, and presented at a time when the world is facing an increase in antisemitism across the globe, there is something far more emotionally detailed and magnificent that lies inside the casual dialogue delivered by the characters in Canadian Stage‘s production of 1939. This beautifully written portrait of a fictional residential school that finds itself grappling with the outcomes of forced assimilation of the Indigenous population in Northern Ontario is as deeply emotional and darkly entertaining as a play can be, while also unpacking a heartbreaking undercurrent that sits heavy in my card-carrying Indigenous heart. And it’s also a comedy, of sorts; smart, sharp, and wildly engaging.
Written quite brilliantly by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan (Portia’s Julius Caesar), 1939 is a profoundly moving piece that will also have you laughing, as you also feel the tightness in your heart. It shines a solid illuminating light on those survivors of the Residential School system in Canada, that horrifically worked hard at wiping away any trace of Indigenous culture from the students and children who were forcibly removed from their families. All so that the Catholic Church, who ran these schools, could make them into “good little Canadians“. These school jails censored and tried to erase their words, their connections, and their language, much like the compellingly complex visuals that are so dutifully presented in this play as directed with care by Lauzon (Soulpepper/Native Earth’s Where The Blood Mixes). Words and phrases, written in chalk on the three boards that make up the backdrop of the set are, before they even have time to register, are erased with a casualness that is striking and upsetting. It’s that undercurrent of control that sneaks into the framing, created with simple elegance by set designer Joanna Yu (Stratford’s Salesman in China), with sharp lighting by Louise Guinand (Stratford’s Casey and Diana), that elevates the construct, giving the production a certain weight and meaning.
“You have to forget all that nonsense,” these children are told with authoritarian force when memories of their past lives sneak into the conversation in front of the two adult characters who represent the school and the systems that have brought them there. Father Williams, the school’s anxious priest, played cleverly by Nathan Howe (Crow’s Red Velvet), and the complex creation that is the equally ‘neutered’ Welsh teacher, Ms. Ap Dafydd, played with a cool relevance by Catherine Fitch (Factory’s Prairie Nurse), do their prescribed job, trying to teach the children language and Christian morals, while eradicating the memories of their cultured past so that they may find “hope in the white man’s world“. But it’s inside the personal framing with the Indigenous students, away from these two, where we find the play’s quiet power.
The central characters; four girls and two boys are presented, without consent, with the task of performing Shakespeare’s problem play, All’s Well That Ends Well to a scheduled audience that includes the visiting King George VI. An honor, they are told, that if performed correctly, in the British model of acting and annunciation, will make the visiting dignitaries proud. “I don’t want to make ‘them’ proud,” one of the more forthright girls proclaims, much to the dismay of their English teacher and director who makes it clear to the students that this is not an ‘ask’, but a ‘tell’ situation, laid on these particular students who are considered the most successful in the school. Which really means, they can be trusted more than the other kids, the ones with all those “complicated names“, to behave themselves and to do what they are told, with the dangled-before-them hope of being given permission to return home.
As they begin to rehearse, galloping their way forward into memorizing lines and privileged British accents, in the way that Shakespeare ‘should’ be performed, the complex and layered humor of the piece makes its way stealthfully to the surface as each of these students find unspoken parallels between their characters and their lived experiences. It’s a surprisingly strong layering that we begin to see and feel throughout, with sharply defined contrasts of sensibility and honesty finding their way into the forefront. A few clever examples of this reside in the casual way Ms. Ap Dafydd comments on the difficult unpronounceable names of many of the students, as we watch these students struggle to say her name, which I don’t think I could parcel out if I was required. The play also sneaks in the idea that this teacher’s Welsh language and culture were irradiated by the British, as she works to do the same to these Indigenous children inside the Residential School system under her supervision, without batting an eye about the horrificness of this controlling action, that was done to her, and now, that she does to others.
Her rigid ideas of how Shakespeare ‘should be’ performed are challenged as the news spreads and her Indigenous students start finding fascinating parallels between themselves and the characters in the play, setting out to make Shakespeare’s bitter-sweet comedy defiantly their own. Performed with strong childlike standings, accents, and frameworks, these six fine actors; Brefny Caribou (Theatre Rusticle’s The Tempest) as Susan Blackbird; Merewyn Comeau (Urban Ink’s Les Filles du Roi) as Evelyn Rice; Richard Comeau (Stratford’s Hamlet-911) as Joseph Summers; Grace Lamarche (Paprika’s Weltamultiek) as Beth Summers; and John Wamsley (Stratford’s Grand Magic) as ‘half-breed’ Jean Delorme; unpack and deliver so much unique pain and suffering that they experience at the hands of these religious adults in the quiet casualness of side talk. It’s an extraordinary construction, parceling out comments and asides around harsh punishment, sickness, death, and the longing to escape this forced labor camp that calls itself a school. It’s deeply disturbing, these passing comments, as they wonder about their future, and particularly, how long it will take for their hair to grow back, “if I get home“. Or watching one student secretly administer Indigenous medicine to the wound inflicted on the back of another, by one of their many teachers and religious guardians.
The use of Shakespeare to formulate this construct of parallels brings to mind Woolly Mammoth Theatre/Folger Shakespeare Library’s Where We Belong, which studies and explores the connection of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the character Caliban, and colonialism. In her one-actor show, Madeline Sayet dutifully weaves together ideas that both acknowledge history alongside modern equivalence and conceptualizations. This is especially true when she dives firsthand into the depiction of The Tempest‘s Caliban, a character typically described as “half-human, half-monster“, a “wild man“, a “deformed man, or a beast man“, or even “a tortoise“. She sets forth the idea that he could be more wisely seen and directed as an Indigenous man, standing bent over within the context and under the weight of colonization. He is the only human inhabitant on this tempestuous island that is otherwise “not honour’d with a human shape” (Prospero, I.2.283) and is forced into slavery. Like the play 1939, this is a powerful place to begin the difficult, complex, and intimate examination of Indigenous language and culture, especially from a constructed colonial world that in all honesty “wanted it gone” and worked hard within the Residential School system to erase it.
In 1939, the actors brilliantly do this subtle unpacking, all the while delivering forth a play that could be seen as a comedy if it wasn’t filled to overflowing with brutal reminders of the pain inflicted on these children, both seen and unseen. We have to remember throughout that these students, as portrayed with smart brilliance, are the favored ones; the ones that won’t try to run away or will not betray the school with comments about the trauma they are experiencing when people, like the visiting female journalist, Madge Macbeth, played to perfection by Amanda Lisman (Stratford’s Titus Andronicus), come into the room and start to ask questions. We can only imagine what the other students would say or do in a similar situation. But these five have found a way to pretend to be broken-in, and not be actually broken for good, even though they live in a nightmare situation, with heartbreaking memories and hidden knowledge that begin to float up from deep within as they discover the paralleled characters they are playing.
After Macbeth’s story is published, reframing the Residental School production as “Indian Shakespeare“, the school, the teachers, and all involved are forced to allow the authentic student selves to enter into the room, even as they are being told to wear ‘generic Indian” outfits that were made by the ladies of the town. Designed with a powerful wit by Asa Benally (Woolly Mammoth’s Where We Belong), these “feather and drum” style costumes only heighten the shameful weight laid on these young Indigenous students’ heads, filling them with frustrations that they are not allowed to voice too strongly. We hear words like ‘savages‘, ‘primitives‘, and ‘half-breed‘, thrown out and about with utter oblivious abandonment, yet we can hear and understand the dark complexities of these racist attitudes; beliefs that are held firmly inside the powerful that run the Residential Schools. And it makes our skin itch with indignation.
The longing for home, family, identity, and cultural authenticity are woven into the fabric of this unraveling, which gives the piece its added weight and important power. The students laugh and engage with one another behind the backs of those who might be listening and those who would scold and punish them into submission. “Isn’t there room for both,” says Comeau’s Evelyne as we watch her connect with her grandfather’s spiritual medicine teachings as she performs her part, Helena, a gentlewoman with healing powers in the Shakespeare play, and we see the parallels she is trying to make as she delivers her lines ever-so magnificently, with so many layers of disturbance and grace.
We also find an earthbound connection to the hidden brother and sister pairing of Comeau’s struggling Joseph and Lamarche’s obedient Beth, as they, together, hold their familial secret tight, even as they create fantasy hopes and dreams for very different futures. So many provocative rules are shifted out into the light inside the dialogue of 1939, that both disturb and cause pain to those paying attention. Brothers and sisters are forbidden to talk or see one another in the Residential School system. It’s too dangerous as they believe, “the longer they hang on to their old ways…” the harder it will be to break them down. If any of these students dream of becoming teachers or nurses, they know that they will lose their Indigenous status. If they marry white men, like my own mother did back in the 1930s, they also will lose their status. And then, there is the internalized shame that is casually thrown out by Joseph to Wamsley’s half-breed Métis identity, when he says, quite simply, “Don’t get the idea that you are a real Indian or anything.”
Those moments hit home, being half Scottish/half Mohawk and a card-carrying status Indigenous person myself, but fortunately, my mother was able to regain her status many years later after losing it when she married my father and became a nurse. But that was only because of Canada’s new constitution, which deemed that practice illegal and unconstitutional, mainly because of the new gender equality laws within the constitution. Years prior, my uncle married a white woman, and not only was he allowed to keep his status, but his new wife was given status just because of her marriage to my Indigenous uncle. Thankful that practice has been altered, but not really for the most obvious cultural reasons.
Also, nibbling at my emotional senses throughout this play was the knowledge that my mother or one of her siblings could have been one of the many children snatched up by the RCMP on their way home from school, and ‘reassigned’ to live in one of the many residential schools that dotted this country. It’s a horrendous construct to contemplate, that history, our country’s history. Designed strictly to ‘teach’ the culture and language out from under their skin, those atrocities that happened in those schools are a complicated horrifying fact to wrap one’s head around (one that I write a bit about when discussing the documentary “The Fruit Machine“, Canada’s other dark secret, their horrific treatment of LGBTQ+ populations – click here), but not a surprising one. The only surprise here is that it took this long for the discovery and knowledge to be taken seriously in the light of day, and seen for the horror it truly is.
“You taught me to be ashamed,” Beth says to the teacher who thinks she is helping, and the honesty of that line lingers like chalk dust in the air, right next to the bravery of these young students using your own language and songs in the final moments of the play with the play. Those moments of confrontation against conformity and control, pushed up against the bookmarked “maple leaf forever‘ school songs, elicit a strong reaction. The lyrics of those school songs piped in at the beginning and end leave their mark, brought to sharp focus thanks to sound designer and composer Wayne Kelso (Stratford’s Grand Magic), and that mark is deep, painful, infected, and in need of attention. Canadian Stage‘s production of 1939, initially produced at the Stratford Festival in 2022, delivers forth this complexity with the utmost honor, humility, and humor, giving this smart piece of theatre, filled with passion, defiance, and an understanding of the pain inflicted on these young Indigenous children, a strongly defined stage to write its message most solidly on. Without it being wiped away and erased by others.
