Emma Donoghue’s Sweet and Tragic “The Wind Coming Over the Sea” Docks Solidly with Care at the Blyth Festival – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Ontario Theatre Review: Blyth Festival’s The Wind Coming Over the Sea

By Ross

He sits, our musical bearer of time and place; a narrator of sorts, in the warm glow of memories, playing us most magically into the world premiere of The Wind Coming Over The Sea, a beautifully tender, unflinching look at the promise and peril of emigration, stitched together like a warm, personal quilt laid upon a heartfelt Irish folk song. Overflowing with emotionally engaging traditional ballads and live Irish folk music, this new work of clarity and compassion, written by renowned Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue (The Grand’s Room), overtakes the air inside the historic Blyth Festival‘s Margaret Stephens Stage at Memorial Hall with its infectious toetapping Irish energy and tender care, sailing across the ocean like love letters born on the backs of violin and song.

This deeply connecting story, lovingly told and delivered by the Blyth Festival (in Blyth, Ontario), sings true, unpacking the difficult lives of Henry and Jane Johnson, an Irish couple who find themselves struggling to keep their faith in themselves and humanity after their grocery business fails during the famine times of Ireland. They had compassionately extended credit to their starving neighbours, but were not given the same caring, patient treatment by their own when no money was coming in and they couldn’t pay their bills. Arrested for being in debt, Henry, handsomely embodied by the silky-voiced Landon Doak (Canadian Stage/Dream in High Park’s As You Like It), sings a heartfelt jailhouse song from high above the stage as wonderfully as one could hope for, thanks to the superb work by music director Anne Lederman (Blyth’s Outdoor Donnellys) and music supervisor George Meanwell ((Groundling’s Lear) and we find ourselves captured as well by the gentle affection we have for the Johnson clan.

The show seeps into our skin, alongside these melodies, and as thoughtfully directed with love by the Blyth Festival Artistic Director, Gil Garratt (Blyth’s The Drawer Boy), the wind that comes over the vast and dangerous sea and beacons to these Irish folk to come, infuses and inspires this young adventurous soul to make the difficult decision to leave everything behind, including his family and devoted wife, Jane, lovingly embodied by Shelayna Christante (Toronto Fringe’s The Bluffs), and cross that same trecherous ocean in search of a new, and better life. It’s the heaviest of decisions for these two strongly attached souls to make, and we listen with love as they talk about the land where winter only lasts a few days, as the brochure says, supplying the brave optimist with just enough unfounded hope and truth to set his open-hearted sights on this faraway land.

The full house Blyth Festival audience at the opening performance giggles with awareness of just how wrong that piece of propaganda truly is, as we anxiously watch Henry board that ship bound for Canada, via New York, knowing that his crossing is going to be as trechorous as what awaits him in North America in 1848. There is no smooth sailing for this eager young lad, and as written with care by Donaghue, a writer of Irish descent, who has been a resident of my hometown, London, Ontario since her arrival to Canada in the late 90’s, her deep dive into the Johnson family history and what tore them apart started soon after discovering the saved written correspondence between this real life couple, Henry and his wife Jane. It was lovingly kept safe for generations and later published by members of the expanded Johnson family.

After reading these touching letters of love, longing, regret, and hope, Donaghue couldn’t stop herself from being completely enthralled, writing not only this play, but first, a story entitled “Counting the Days” in 1998, the year she settled in Canada. Held in the Archives and Special Collections of Western University, where Donaghue was at one point a writer in residence, the original letters seeped their way into Donaghue’s soul, and then, most masterfully into almost every scene of The Wind Coming Over The Sea, Donoghue’s “time capsule of a script.” The play, forged in the difficulties of that journey and what waited for the young Irish man in this unwelcoming wilderness country, is fleshed out most tenderly from the very lines found in those letters of love and ocean-spanning longing, between a caring couple of hopeful dreamers across a vast expanse of water that doesn’t always show as much kindness or hospitality as they had hoped for and dreamed of.

Boarding the ship of dreamers and sea-sick fools, some might say, including Jane’s parents, the determined young Henry strives forward, even as the settled folk call him a suspicious “ship-rat,” and a drunken beggar. Yet, he forges forward with three pieces of insurance and a letter of recommendation in his pocket. And we are right there with him, as The Wind Coming Over the Sea throws everything hard and difficult at him from the moment he steps on board. It’s a caringly well told crossing on that ship bound for this new land and his first winter in Canada, beautifully engraved in the solid, flexible staging courtesy of the inventive creative team of set and lighting designer Ken MacKenzie (Soulpepper/Signature’s Kim’s Convenience), costuming by Meghan Choma (Asst/Grand’s Pride & Prejudice), and a solid sound design by Adam Campbell (Assoc/Tarragon’s After the Rain), that registers on all levels from beginning to end.

Yet he stays the course, trying to create a new beginning for them all in the different towns of Canada that offer some care and cover in exchange for work. He dutifully writes with love to his Jane, who, along with their two young children, remains waiting in safety with her family back in Ireland. For a year, the two young lovers and partners of the strongest of orders send yearning love letters across the sea, creating this delayed engagement and missed connection complication that further ties them to our hearts as tightly as the ribbon that wraps the stack of Henry’s letters to Jane. Months and moments crisscross the ocean, finding and giving love, care, and hope to each other, while also breaking their hearts when addresses are unspoken or remain unknown, and immediate interactions are something that only the far future can know about.

But in between these carefully crafted moments of longing and misconnection, there are numerous well-delivered Irish folk songs and ballads, performed live by the crew of gifted actors who grace this story and the stage with their presence. The cast, including Geoffrey Armour (Shakespeare BASH’d’s Measure for Measure), Masae Day (Chemainus’ Once), music supervisor Meanwell, and Festival veteran Michelle Fisk (CS’s London Road), find care and connection through song and their embodiment of numerous characters who become part of the couple’s valent attempt to create a new life. And that attempt is a difficult one, both showcasing and embracing the emotional truth of the promise and peril of emigration.

It’s a deeply moving tale, wrapped in that same blanket that Jane patiently sews for their family, to find and deliver warmth and connection within their newfound land. Both a folk musical and a heartwrenching tale of love and perseverance, The Wind Coming Over the Sea continually inspires us with the touching true story of Henry and Jane Johnson, the determined young couple who emigrated from the town of Antrim in Northern Ireland to Southwestern Ontario during the Great Famine of the 1840s. And it registers strongly and clearly in our hearts throughout, especially now, as we watch immigrant families being ripped apart in the current United States by that fascist ICE squad and their cruel-hearted members of the regime. It’s an impossible concept to fully register, as the majority of us who are not 100% indigenous to North America are descendants of immigrants, like Jane Johnson, and her husband Henry Johnson, trying their best against all odds to find safety and security in this land, that wasn’t really theirs to take. It reminds us, through song and sincere connection, that there is a story like Henry and Jane’s behind every person who’s ever come from there to here, and tried to forge a new place to call home.

“When I first came to Canada, I found myself craving a sense of ancestry, so I started reading broadly about the great famine and the waves of emigration of which Canada is composed, and that’s how I came to discover the story of the Johnsons,” shares Donoghue. “Immigration has always been a complicated experience; there are always losses as well as gains, and reality rarely aligns with promise.  In that way the story of the Johnsons – this intimate and moving tale of a young couple making the passage from Ireland to Canada separately and struggling to reunite – is a timeless narrative of how people move around the world in search of the things we all want, safety, security, and a place to make a life.”

“I was taking my time and time ran away from me,” says the gentle, but determined young Henry, as he box-slams his optimism forward while shoveling hard against the elements. Holding true to the beauty and poetry of both the original letters and the land these two left behind in search of something better, this history folk tale, delivered with love and care by the Blyth Festival, finds its warmth, not in the welcoming of those who came before him, but in the stomping good jug of punch that this musical’s good nature shares with us. The sorrow of all who falters is an honest and heartfelt part of the wondrous The Wind Coming Over the Sea, but not its whole tale, as this is a story that is also about resistance against all the obstacles that a land can throw at someone, whose heart and determination are as vast as the ocean that separates them from love and family. It lives and breaths its tender-hearted soul on its sleeve, taking us on a journey like many of our ancestors, and leaves us feeling as full and warm as if Jane herself tucked us in with that lovely white blanket she made for the family that will follow. “May the wind scatter our seed,” and then some.

The Wind Coming Over the Sea, on stage at the historic Blyth Festival‘s Margaret Stephens Stage at Memorial Hall in a production directed by Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt, running June 26th through August 12th. For more information, visit blythfestival.com.