Sam Free and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in AJ Hrooshkin’s Alphabet Line, Prairie Strange Productons at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Kaylin Schenk.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
“My name is Duncan J Hayes. I live in Yonker on the Alphabet Line. Is anyone out there?”
The recurring refrain in Alphabet Line is a call out into the wild blue yonder of the Saskatchewan prairies. Every day Duncan, who’s queer and living alone on his family farm in the 1940s — which equals alone times a hundred — attends to the cows, “re-coops” the chickens, and puts out the call by radio.
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Whether the refrain, a declaration of identity, belongs to a conversation instead of a solo declaration remains to be seen in the play by AJ Hrooshkin, the finale to the Fringe Theatre season. In the prairies the horizon is infinitely far away. At least with yodelling, the sound bounces back off an Alp or two.
Even Gilchrist’s poetic design is all about sky. It’s constructed with tilting disconnected canvases evoking the prairie sky, with flashes of green (Duncan’s favourite colour), and gaps that lighting designer Whittyn Jason fills with sunrises and golden afternoons.
But Duncan (Zachary Parsons-Lozinski) occupies only half the stage in Giulia Romano’s Prairie Strange production. And one day, to his surprise, his call is answered. It’s by Nicholas (Sam Free), a grad student from the city in exile for the summer on his aunt and uncle’s farm. And the opening scenes are a counterpoint of their daily rituals: the steady rhythm of Duncan’s chores with the animals he loves vs the frantic catch-up, fuelled by resentment, of Nicholas’s assignments. He snaps his rubber gloves, the voice of his hostile aunt echoing in his head as the daily grind begins. “5:54 a.m. Every. Single. Day…. ‘Make us breakfast’…. ‘Do you know what hard work is, Nicholas?’”
Sam Free and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Alphabet Line, Prairie Strange Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Kaylin Schenk.
Alphabet Line is a collision of worlds. Can the distances between the farm kid and the urbanite, the man who says “the land feeds me … I can see and smell everything” and the psychology grad student from the city who says “I hate this place,” be bridged? It’s a question that seems on the surface to be complicated by queerness. But it will also be clarified and focussed by queerness, both simplified and in its way enhanced, by the connection that one acknowledges and the other represses. This may be a love story but it’s not the Montagues and the Capulets and dangerous love at first sight.
Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Alphabet Line, Prairie Strange Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Kaylin Schenk.
As Romano’s production acknowledges in its languid pacing, the story has a long, slow build-up, through radio calls that become part of both characters’ daily routine, interspersed with soliloquized thoughts and asides. The characters are wary; it’s a relationship that has Proceed With Caution written all over it. And Duncan, who’s never been to a city much less a university, is intrigued but defensive about the urbanite scholar, a “head-shrinker” apparently slumming it out in the middle of nowhere. “I’ve met someone who thinks I’m worth talking to,” he says, with a tone tinged by wonder.
Nicholas is curious too. He thinks that Duncan has a “safe” quality about him. “I don’t want to solve Duncan, I want to know him.” He has a certain wry surface briskness that ruffles Duncan’s feathers.
Sam Free and Zachary Parsons-Lozinski in Alphabet Line, Prairie Strange Productions at Edmonton Fringe Theatre. Photo by Kaylin Schenk.
As Duncan Parsons-Lozinski negotiates the musing, self-awareness of a man who’s spent a lot of time, day after day, by himself, while hoping for a human connection that seems out of reach. And as Nicholas, the displaced urbanite having a terrible time out in the countryside, Free captures the alert wit of a man who’s used to concealment, from himself and others, as a way of life that the play considers part of the urban experience. The erosion of his well-built defences is charted thoughtfully by the actor.
Hrooshkin’s play is built on reverse expectations. Being gay and rural in 1946 would seem like the ultimate blueprint for loneliness. But it’s Nicholas who talks about loneliness; Duncan can live with being “alone.” It would seem to more easeful to be gay in an urban setting; Duncan, though, is the one who’s less fearful, better adapted to his natural habitat.
Most notably, it’s the philosopher farmer Duncan who’s the more articulate and experienced in relationships. He gets Hrooshkin’s longer poetic, lyrical passages, which occasionally veer into seeming “written” — not just odes to the land but ruminations on the self. “I am an open book and my door is flung wide,” he declares. Doesn’t he get lonely? Nicholas wonders. Duncan, who relies, he says, on “memory and imagination,” says of his truncated romantic history “just because it isn’t happy doesn’t mean it’s sad.”
The drift, as Nicholas puts it, is to get beyond “subterfuge and twisted speech.” It requires bravery in 1946 (and now, come to that) to “ask for time and intimacy” much less love across a rural/urban divide that seems pretty well fortified. And both of those, time and intimacy, also invite friction into the radio encounters between the characters.
Alphabet Line is an unusual play, not afraid to drift and settle while the ante gets gradually upped. The ending isn’t a surprise, by any means. It requires (and repays) curiosity and patience from the audience, like the relationship that gradually unfolds.
REVIEW
Alphabet Line
Theatre: Edmonton Fringe Theatre and Prairie Strange Productions
Written by: AJ Hrooshkin
Directed by: Giulia Romano
Starring: Zachary Parsons-Lozinski and Sam Free
Where: Westbury Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Friday through May 3
Tickets: fringetheatre.ca
