Neptune Theatre brings Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland’s play Between Breaths to the Fountain Hall Stage, playing now through November 10, 2019. Written by Robert Chafe and directed by Jillian Keiley, the play tells the true story of Dr. Jon Lien, a professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, who became well-known locally as “the whale man,” after he developed a successful technique for saving whales that had gotten trapped in fishing nets around the island and beyond.
I had the opportunity to speak to Steve O’Connell, who plays Jon, at Neptune Theatre last Tuesday afternoon. O’Connell explains that Lien came to Newfoundland from the United States in the late 1960s to study birds and animal behaviour, when he unexpectedly got a phone call from a fisherman in Fortune who had had a whale trapped in his net for three weeks. “He didn’t know anything about it,” says O’Connell, “but he thought, ‘I can go down and see…’ I dunno what it was, whether it was curiosity about how animals trapped in nets would behave; I don’t know what it was, but he went down, and he got on that boat with this frightened fisherman, and they managed to free that first whale. He developed a whole kind of method of it after that. One of the first parts of the method, and it comes out in the show, is it’s very important to get them to kind of calm down. The first thing he would try to do to get them to calm down is to… approach very kind of slowly, cautiously, and he would stick his head under the water- I don’t even think he had a mask the first time- and he would try to find the whale’s eye. And he would just look into the eye, and he would establish some kind of communication there and he said, ‘Once I got that, and once they knew that we were not a threat, that the animal almost immediately calmed down, and kind of let [us] work on trying to free them.’” He went on to save over five hundred whales this way.
It’s an amazing story, and the way that Robert Chafe first came upon Lien’s work was also a vivid series of serendipitous events. He was at a theatre festival in Trinity because his friend Petrina Bromley was doing a show there called This Marvellous, Terrible Place, which was a collection of sketches, songs, and stories, and there was a section in it about John Lien. “Robert keeps telling the story of seeing the actor [playing Lien] come out onstage and saying, ‘The thing about the humpback whale is…’ and not getting any further than that, and Robert just spontaneously broke down in tears,” says O’Connell, “And, I believe it was Iris Turcott, the woman he used to work with as his dramaturge, [she] said, ‘The next time that you have a gut reaction to something, you need to write about it. That’s your next project.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I guess this is it.’
Once Chafe began his research he realized that he already knew Lien’s son, Elling- he had started one of St. John’s newspapers, and O’Connell and Pat Foran (the play’s producer) had been in a show with Elling before. Chafe had gone to High School with O.J. Lien, Elling’s older brother, and O’Connell had gone to High School with Maren Lien, Elling’s older sister. “It was an interesting thing that Robert had this reaction to [the] play that Petrina had done, and that he knew so much about the family, and then he got into talking to people at the University who had worked with Jon and also approached (Jon’s wife) Judy and Elling to see if they wanted to share their story, and from what I understand, Robert started this process very early after Jon passed, and it was a tough thing at first, but the more they got to talking, the more they wanted to talk,” O’Connell says, “It’s really a kind of special thing to be part of because you feel this tremendous responsibility to these people that now are part of your other family. Me and Maren went to High School together, but we didn’t really know each other, but she’s been home from the States a couple times, and I was there at Judy’s farm in the summertime for her birthday, and Maren is like calling me ‘dad’ now! It’s so amazing and bizarre. I keep saying to her, ‘You’re six months older than I am, I can’t be your dad!’ It’s been an amazing experience, and I can only imagine that Robert had the same kind of things happen as he started this process.”
O’Connell first met the show’s director, Jillian Keiley, doing summer Shakespeare in 1992, and shortly after that he did his first show with Artistic Fraud, In Your Dreams, Freud. He didn’t have the opportunity to do many Artistic Fraud shows because he says he isn’t musical himself, and so much of the work Keiley does, like in Oil and Water, is so inherently musical that he wouldn’t have even gone out to audition for it.
The music in Between Breaths is integral to the storytelling, but comes from three musicians onstage: Brianna Gosse, Steve Maloney and Kevin Woolridge. In the early stages of the rehearsal process the Newfoundland-based trio The Once (Geraldine Hollett, Phil Churchill and Andrew Dale) listened to the first readthrough and came back with some melodies and phrases to add to the piece. O’Connell says, “by the end of the [first] week we did a staged reading for some of Jon’s friends and The Once played the music along with us. It wasn’t really kind of in any one place, it was just sort of to help with the mood and the atmosphere and the texture of the thing, and that’s what they left us with. Then, Kellie Walsh, who is just a genius Musical Director, she took all of that music and [she and Jill] found a way of bringing it all together.” The most difficult aspect for O’Connell was the combination of playing his character’s dramatic arc while making sure that his movements were carefully in time with the music. “That took a long time,” he says, “That took a long, long time, because- and it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever been a part of- because you can’t go through the motions and expect the music to do what you want it to do- you have to flat out go every single time, and in those early days I didn’t know how to physically do some of the stuff- we hadn’t figured out how we were going to tie the ropes, so every single time, if something didn’t work out, we’d have to go back and retie everything, and redo the take all over again. It was amazing in the end… I’ve always said, doing the show is easy, working on the show is hard. Because I’m not a musical person myself, so it took me a long time to figure out ‘oh, okay, now I know why that’s not lining up, because I’m taking too long or I’m going too fast,’ now that I’m starting to hear the music more and more, I’m able to fall into the pattern more and more of where Jill sees everything falling.” The Once auditioned the musicians for the show, “The three of those characters are every bit as important as Judy and Jon and Wayne. Every single time I hear that music, still, it just gives me chills. It’s so easy to do those scenes with that music. It’s just wonderful.” The opportunity to do Between Breaths was unexpected for O’Connell, who jumped at the chance to work on a new Artistic Fraud show and to do another play with Keiley, “she is just so supportive, and so kind of meticulous, and so detailed, and so inventive in terms of how she solves problems, how she gets people to very willingly do crazy things… She is a tremendous force to work with, and I said before this is the hardest show I ever worked on, and it’s absolutely the most rewarding, and its every bit of her and Robert.”
Between Breaths plays at the Neptune Theatre Fountain Hall Stage (1593 Argyle Street, Halifax) now through November 10th, 2019. Shows are Tuesday to Friday at 7:30pm, Saturday and Sunday at 2:00pm and 7:30pm. Tickets are $30.00- $78.00 and are available at the Box Office at 1593 Argyle Street, by calling 902.429.7070, or ONLINE HERE.
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