by Maureen Hunter
Directed by R.H. Thomson
At Tarragon Theatre
January 2-February 10, 2008

   War’s wild mouth is ravenous, but so is lust. That, apparently, is one of the messages in Maureen Hunter’s engagement with World War I—or, at least, that war’s impact on a small English family living on a farm near the fictional town of Standfast, Saskatchewan. Trouble is that her play (inordinately long at a running time of two hours) doesn’t have much to add to the repertoire of war plays. Not that Wild Mouth is really a war play, except in the sense that it is about war dead and the aftermath of coping with loss. For a powerful sense of the pity of war—the pitiable waste of young lives—there’s probably nothing better than R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End. Canadian plays about the Great War have tended to concentrate more on the cost to the women or family members left in Canada, and to this end, John Murrell’s Waiting For The Parade is an interesting contribution. Hunter’s play is about a family (originally from England) who loses a son in the war, and of the father’s sister who comes to their farm to try and recover from the loss of her soldier-son (her only child). Anna’s anti-war bitterness is branded treason by Jamie, the family’s youngest—a boy with false ideas of war heroism. Logan, the head of the family, is a decent chap who came to Canada with false expectations of a paradise after having read a book called The Great Lone Land. (He should have read Roughing It In The Bush). His wife, Roberta, is plagued with anxiety about their young son overseas and about their nubile daughter, Claire, who is in love with Bohdan, a rough-hewn Ukrainian who has returned from the war with deep emotional scars. There’s another character—old Aloysius—who doesn’t say much but who observes everything quietly around the family table. Were it not for Anna’s presence, Wild Mouth would be merely another dreary prairie drama. As it stands, however, it is a different sort of dreary as it attempts to show a mighty collision between Anna and Bohdan. However, it is circumscribed by so much minor domestic detail, and so many clichéd characters, that it never really amounts to much. Moreover, the conflict between Anna, the grieving mother, and Bohdan, the rather generalized scarred victim-hero, degenerates into lust in a barn’s dust—rather like a western Canada version of Duel in the Sun—and that’s awfully close to parody.

   We are given interminable reminders of war and death. It’s 1917 and the war is overseas, but Hunter and director Thomson offer us bones of dead buffalo, barnyard slaughter (with dead chickens being plucked and a pig being killed, disemboweled and dismembered), references to dead horses and corpses in Europe, and even a dying tractor—just to keep close to the sense of rural Canada. Blood is smeared on hands, faces, even the barn wall and floor—especially in one savage scene where Bohdan, at the end of his tether, reacts with bloody savagery to Anna’s persistently hounding questions in tandem with her half-hearted rejections of his sexual advances. Though the war’s central issue may be that you sometimes have to defend yourself without really liking it, the battle between Bohdan and Anna appears to be that self-defence (on either’s part) can be a wild mouth all over you as horses snort on the soundtrack in a sort of breeding frenzy. Put that in your post-Freudian mouth and smoke it.

   Yannick Larivee’s sturdy wooden farm house set is so dominant that it cuts off the prairie horizon, though the designer tries to offset this by visual projections through the far rear window of the set. Todd Charlton’s soundscape includes very realistic barnyard noises, and Michelle Ramsay’s lighting runs the gamut from realistic indoor hues to expressionistic mood intensities. Everything, it seems, is meant to enlarge the text, though half of the text is scrupulously lifelike while another half is overblown, with some clunky dialogue and flashes of quoted poetry in the mix. The cast—Ian D. Clark as Logan, Brenda Robins as Roberta, Simon Rainville as Jamie, Sarah Allen as Claire, David Fox as Aloysius, Oliver Becker as Bohdan (in a terrible Ukrainian accent), and Sarah Orenstein as Anna—cannot be faulted when they fail to rise above the commonplace writing, though Ms. Orenstein attempts to take her character into areas that her playwright merely loiters near. It’s a waste. 

Photo: Michael Cooper
Sarah Orenstein and Oliver Becker


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