Review: 1939 at Canadian Stage

As the lights go down to start Canadian Stage’s production of Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan’s 1939, Wayne Kelso’s sound design features a chorus of children’s voices singing what sounds like “The Maple Leaf Forever.” Once you start paying attention, however, you might notice that this is no jingoistic hymn: the words have been changed to paint a much darker portrait of the nation and how it’s treated the indigenous populations whose land it enjoys.

The next thing you might notice is the large chalkboards that form most of Joanna Yu’s set, surrounding a Northern Ontario residential school classroom that becomes a rehearsal space for a unique production of Shakespeare. Two things quickly become clear: art can be a tool of propaganda, but a change in the narrative can be used to give vulnerable people agency when their stories have been silenced. As the characters erase and rewrite the messages that both literally and figuratively surround them, shaping the story with little other than chalk and resolve, Lauzon and Riordan’s complex, beautiful play surprises in its ability to create joy in the midst of heartbreak.

While the title “1939” situates us in time, perhaps bringing to mind the war abroad, the war here is really a war at home for the lives and futures of the students and the soul of a country built on stolen land, hell-bent on cultural genocide while it purports to fight a genocide in Europe. Five students have been chosen to represent the school for the upcoming royal visit; they are to present a production of All’s Well that Ends Well to the king and queen, while wondering for whom it all actually ends well.

Taken from their families and punished for speaking their native languages or referring to any cultural practice, the student are all richly drawn characters with a different relationship to their captivity and treatment. Joseph (Richard Comeau), the oldest, hasn’t been allowed to leave despite graduating, forced into a kind of indentured servitude to “pay off” his education. He and his sister Beth (Grace Lamarche) must keep their family relationship secret, as family members aren’t allowed to interact within the system.

Other than keeping this dangerous secret, Grace has taken the advice to hide her Indigenous identity to heart, and longs to be a teacher; she’s willing to throw her fellow students under the bus to retain her status as teacher’s pet, while her brother mourns the spirited girl he used to know. Lamarche is captivating in showing us that spirit, redirected; her strident words wobble as she walks on a knife’s edge, scared when the role she’s constructed for herself to survive threatens to crumble.

 Jean (John Wamsley), a Metis “half-breed,” is a star on the school hockey team, but feels a lack of belonging with his fellow students or his white teachers; his gradual coming into his own through his role is the gentle heart of the play, and a scene where he reads a forbidden letter from a relative, realizing what’s been kept from him, is gutting.

Evelyne (Merewyn Comeau), the proud granddaughter of a medicine man, sparkles with obvious delight as the first to embrace putting a part of herself into the production. And Brefny Caribou’s Susan is a quieter character, a mirror reflecting the other teens’ worries and insecurities as well as the violence of their supposed educators.

The profound nature of the abuse and trauma the children suffered is ever-present in their characters and the stories they half-tell before fading to silence. It’s subtle as a closed, twisting mouth, and obvious as the wound on Susan’s back from corporal punishment that opens again and again, and it rears its head in the modern-feeling sound design, full of mysterious, melancholic rhythms and voices.

Lauzon and Riordan, though, seem more interested in focusing on a story of self-discovery and resistance through the practice of theatre, and that’s where the well-structured, tightly-written show comes fully alive and even invites healing laughter. Don’t fear if you’re not up on All’s Well That Ends Well; there’s enough context to make those connections obvious. Much like Tarragon’s production of Ho Ha Kei (Jeff Ho)’s Cockroach, the show interrogates the value of performing Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake, versus making one’s own sense out of a classic. The use of the lesser-known play is refreshing and deliberate, as the timeless parallels between its characters and theirs become clearer and clearer as rehearsals progress, particularly after an intrepid reporter breaks the story and the masses begin to demand the “Indian Shakespeare” the faculty wished to avoid.

These faculty include enthusiastic English teacher Sian Ap Dafydd (Catherine Fitch) and somewhat less enthusiastic Father Williams (Nathan Howe), who perks up when he’s assigned a role and perhaps a chance to show the powers-that-be of the Church that he’s surmounted his stage fright problem that leads to intestinal distress. The fart jokes may go a bit far, but as the characters gleefully remind us, Shakespeare had those too.

Ap Dafydd is wonderfully nuanced, a bridge between oppressor and oppressed, neither hero nor villain. Growing up in Wales at a time where Welsh was a persecuted language, she’s experienced the violent pressure to assimilate. Yet she now encourages her charges to do the same because she feels their lives will be easier and more successful for it, praising Shakespeare to the skies while insisting his works only be performed in a refined British accent. (A droll moment where we remember that not all British accents sound the same, and in themselves are strict markers of class in this hierarchical world, provides a smart bookend for the teens’ later reminder that “Indigenous” is also not a monolithic identity.)

In a pointed piece of commentary, Ap Dafydd remarks that the teens’ Christianized names are easier to say and spell than the “long” ones they were born with, only to immediately experience everyone’s inability to pronounce or spell hers. Her traumatic past and complicity in current oppression war within her as she attempts to ameliorate the students’ sadness with the only recourse she finds available, art. Fitch’s face lights up as she sees them mature into their roles, then falls when she discovers the cultural memories that got them there. Despite a growing closeness, the gap between her and the students remains present and realistic to the time.

The cutting of identity, from names to hair cut short, is underscored by Asa Benally’s costumes, which range from the dull, sack-like uniforms of the school to the outlandishly stereotyped garb created by the local Women’s Auxiliary for the play that adds one final insult to a lifetime of injury. Wamsley’s look of disgust as he lifts a long, braided wool wig meant to replicate his own now shorn hair speaks volumes.

To mark the scene transitions, characters write, draw, and erase various meaningful sentiments on the imposing chalkboards. Most lines are from Shakespeare’s text, but other statements stand out: a letter, starting “DEAR MAMA,” gets erased the next moment; later, a drawing of a trillium disappears, to be replaced with the declaration, “I WAS HERE.”

In a truly nifty piece of stagecraft, symbolic line art appears as if by magic at the top of each chalkboard, turtles and hooves drawn by an invisible hand. Subtle but impressive, the mysterious appearance and unusual permanence of these drawings give the play an air of the supernatural while picking up the theme of art’s ability to get at unspoken and universal truths.

The scars of the residential school system are similarly indelible; they can never, nor should they ever, be erased. 1939 speaks to these scars, but also the importance of resistance and reconciliation. It is thoughtful and sharp and joyful, a glittering fragment of a broken dish with one spoon. See it.

Photo of Richard Comeau, Merewyn Comeau, Brefny Caribou, Nathan Howe, John Wamsley, Grace Lamarche and Catherine Fitch by Dahlia Katz

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