Ursula Calder as Belle in Downed Hearts. Photo by Stoo Metz.
Catherine Banks’ new play Downed Hearts opened at Ship’s Company Theatre this weekend. The play is set in 1998 in a small Nova Scotian island community in Peggy’s Cove in the immediate aftermath of the SwissAir 111 disaster, which sadly killed 229 people. It is a play about making sense of the senseless, and hope; when we can’t necessarily find hope, we have to make the hope ourselves.
The play is an entirely fictional story about a fisher named Aaron who is going through a rocky patch in his marriage. His wife, Amanda, is away on the mainland going back to school. Aaron is living with his mother, Pearl, and his and Amanda’s son, Lucas, who is twelve years old and Autistic. In the midst of this transitionary time in their lives Aaron is also a first responder to the SwissAir crash site, and is deeply affected by the gruesome scene he finds out on the water. At first he cannot control his own rage, but two new friendships, one with the village artist, Percy, and one with an entirely mysterious young woman he found wandering alone and mute on the island during his recovery efforts, eventually help him find himself again. The girl he and Lucas call Belle raises a whole other series of questions and concerns from his mother and his wife, who want to focus on finding out who this girl is, and how to help her find her way back home. They don’t understand why Aaron seems to suddenly need her to be in their lives.
There’s a lot going on here, but I found that the layering of stress on this family and the various storylines enriched our sense of the island community, and was true to how things are in real life. Disasters like SwissAir that require folks to drop everything they are doing to rush to help don’t happen in perfect isolation. They happen when it’s inconvenient for people to do so, they happen when things are already hard for people. It makes Aaron even more heroic that even at a time that was already personally chaotic, he stepped up to try to make things in his community, and the world, a little bit better.
I was fully engrossed in this story and invested in these characters. I was utterly drawn into Aaron’s sweet relationship with Lucas, and their relationship with Belle, but I was also able to switch my perspective several times during the play to see things from Amanda’s very rational and logical point of view too. Banks doesn’t offer us easy solutions, or even solutions, necessarily, at all. How can there be a solution after a devastating plane crash and bearing witness to that many people’s bright lights suddenly being extinguished en masse? There is just how we sculpt our grief, either figuratively or literally. I’m in a bit of a unique situation now, in that I deeply know and understand that grief can be completely irrational. The part that Belle is willingly playing for Aaron doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else, except Aaron. We never really know what will help us in extreme grief until we are in it. Percy, the artist, is the beautiful metaphor for the idea that, over time, we make something new out of grief: we honour it, and if we can’t find the meaning, we make the meaning, even if that means forcing a square peg to fit in a round hole.
The actors are all excellent and they have created an ensemble that really feels like a family. Glenda Braganza plays Amanda, both very much anchored into this family, but also still a bit of an outsider. We can see the hurt in her that she has never been fully accepted by her mother in law, and perhaps the larger community of the island as well. This makes it easy to feel envious of Belle, who, for complex reasons, seems to have seamlessly made herself essential to the fabric of the home. Ursula Calder plays Belle, and I wondered whether we see her as she really is, or if we see her through Aaron’s eyes, because she is luminous in her quiet loving spirit, it’s impossible not to fall into platonic love with her. Martha Irving plays Percy, who balances her desire to really connect with her neighbours, with a respect for the boundaries that come from being a “Come From Away.” Elm Reyes is perfect as Lucas. It is a beautifully nuanced performance filled with so much specificity in physicality, pacing, and tone. Sherry Smith is also perfect as Pearl. Smith is so brilliant at creating characters whose arcs are basically, “I mean this with so much love and support for you, but what, the fuck, is going on?” Zach Faye gives a masterful performance as Aaron, he is excellent at establishing Aaron in relation to the other characters: the loving father, the emotionally rebellious son, the husband trying to make things work, but I found his deep presence as a fisher to be the most impressive. The entire play is a very respectful tribute to fishers and the difficult sacrifices they make, even in the best of times, but especially at the worst of times. Faye’s accent, also, so similar to his own, yet just a tiny turn of the dialect dial, is such a beautifully specific detail that just roots us exactly where we are supposed to be.
The play is directed by Samatha Wilson, and it unfolds on Sue LePage’s two tier set, which is interesting as the lower level is Aaron’s home, and the upstairs is mostly used as Percy’s art studio. It’s nice imagery to have the more pedestrian moments of every day downstairs, but the creative, more lofty moments, literally elevated. The lights by Alison Crosby often wash the entire set in blue, and the few projections of the ocean by MacKenzie Cornfield are just enough to remind us that the North Atlantic is all around us, in both its horror and its mercy always.
Like with Come from Away, Downed Hearts very respectfully doesn’t focus on the souls lost that terrible night, instead it brings the local community that the disaster touched so profoundly to beautiful and nuanced life. Like Percy, who turns to sculpture to try to make sense of what has happened, this play gives Banks, and in turn all of us, the opportunity to remember those who were lost, and another way through the communal sadness, the communal trauma, that we as a society have been experiencing, it seems, over and over and over again since September 2, 1998. If hope for the future is hard to find, we need to actively create it ourselves, using everything that we find around us: maybe even people.
It is worth noting that it has taken the Herculean effort of three different theatre companies, Ship’s Company Theatre, Eastern Front Theatre, and Matchstick Theatre, to bring this new play by two-time Governor General’s Award winning playwright Catherine Banks to fruition. We need to be able to foster new Nova Scotian plays, and we need to be able to bring them to a wide enough audience initially that they are seen by enough people so they can be remounted elsewhere in the future to find an even larger audience. It shouldn’t be this hard. We, obviously, still need more Arts Funding, and we still need to find ways to both explain and be heard and understood as theatre practitioners exactly what kinds of funding we need, and exactly for what and why. Otherwise we are going to keep getting community centre multi-use arts spaces and confused politicians who thought they gave us what we asked for.
Downed Hearts plays at Ship’s Company Theatre (18 Main Street, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia) until August 27th, 2023. The show runs Tuesday to Saturday at 7:30pm with a 2:00pm performance on Saturday and Sunday. There are PWYC tickets available for the show tonight (August 22nd), otherwise tickets are $15.00 for Youth, $30.00 for Seniors, and $35.00 for General Admission. Tickets are available HERE or by phoning the Box Office at 1.800.565.7469.
Ship’s Company Theatre is Wheelchair Accessible and has Gender-Neutral Washrooms. Assistive Listening Devices and Active Listeners will be available at all performances. They also have a café where you can get food and drinks before the show.
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