Seb Reade, Kih Becke and Sam Vigneault. Photo by Memo Calderon Photography
Two Planks and a Passion’s production of Catherine Banks’ adaptation of Ernest Buckler’s 1952 novel The Mountain and the Valley closes today, August 11th, at Ross Creek Centre of the Arts. Banks has been working on this adaptation for fourteen years, and with director Guillermo Verdecchia since 2017. The enormity in scope of the project, adapting a sweeping familial epic that spans about twenty years and is not just the portrait of one family, The Canaans, but also a specific village in the Annapolis Valley, is quite apparent in this production.
We are introduced to the Caanan family in the early 20th Century: our protagonist David, played by Sam Vigneault, is a highly intelligent child who would prefer to be inside reading than engaging in any sort of manual labour. He is close to his twin sister, Anna (Ailsa Galbreath), and quite opposite to his older brother Chris (Alex Furber), the natural inheritor of the family farm. His father, Joseph (Ryan Rogerson) doesn’t understand him. His mother, Martha (Mary Fay Coady) fusses over him. His grandmother, Ellen, (Burgandy Code) shows him and his siblings unconditional love. We are introduced to the townsfolk: Rachel (Chris O’Neill) the uppity village killjoy, her daughter, Charlotte (Becca Guilderson), her prissy ingénue daughter, and African Nova Scotian characters, Bess, played by Kih Becke, who exists only in relation to how she is sexualized by the Caanan men in a way that feels very problematic, and her daughter, Effie (Seb Reade). Throughout the play David’s emotional immaturity causes him to make increasingly terrible decisions, and he continues to descend deeper into self pity, resentment, and isolation, while both his siblings are able to leave the village and face their futures with grit, practicality, and a vague shade of optimism. David can’t get out of his own way, and never does.
I had a difficult time with this play.
I think the biggest challenge with The Mountain and the Valley is how the episodic nature of the short scenes speeding headlong through time flattens a lot of the context and depth in the relationships between the characters that is possible to describe in rich detail in prose. Here especially, the relationship between David and Effie escalates to sex so abruptly and weirdly that it becomes predatory, and I didn’t know if that was intentional or accidental. The consequence, though, is that it makes David an unlikeable protagonist, but the audience doesn’t get enough time to know any of the other characters in any real depth, so it’s hard to find someone else in the story to care about. Not getting enough time to sit with all the characters as three dimensional individuals also leaves the audience weirdly cold to the steady barrage of death that David contends with. It’s oddly a play where nothing really happens, but also everyone dies.
Sam Vigneault does a beautiful job of bringing David to life, oscillating between moments of naive sweetness, and then devolving into temper tantrums of rage when he feels the smallest embarrassment or slight, he then descends into sullen lethargy as it becomes apparent that, despite his hubris about his academic achievement, his lack of ingenuity and determination has led to him failing to leave the village and making something ‘more’ of himself than a ‘simple farmer’s son.’ Mary Fay Coady plays David’s mother and Ryan Rogerson plays David’s father, and we see one beautiful glimpse of their love story, and a few hints that Joseph is seeing Bess on the side. I would have loved to see much more of the relationship between these two, and Joseph’s relationship with Bess, and the brutal reality of how the deep racism of the time would have affected all three of them in this scenario. Ailsa Galbreath plays Anna, David’s spunky sister, who is also, sometimes, clairvoyant, and Galbreath gives a lovely performance here, although, like Coady and Rogerson, there isn’t enough for her to do to really flesh out her story arc, especially concerning her alcoholic husband, Tobey, who seems to exist maybe for comedic relief (?), but I wondered what impact his drinking had on Anna in her unseen life in Halifax. By the time (spoiler alert) Tobey dies Anna is reduced to just being a vague letter update we get via David, so we have no real sense of how she fares in her future. Burgandy Code is mesmerizing as Ellen, the grandmother, a constant figure in the home, who offers her grandchildren a secret, but one that doesn’t end up really meaning anything significant to the story.
It was raining yesterday so I saw the production inside, so I can’t speak too much to the way Guillermo Verdecchia intended the staging to be. Inside, I felt like the play really captured a spirit of a concert inside a one room schoolhouse, which felt appropriate. There are minimal props, and the open space represents a wide array of places within the village, and the audience is encouraged to use our imaginations to fill in the rest. There were two elements that I was confused about. I was never sure both where exactly we were in time, and also the rate at which the children were growing throughout the First Act. When the War breaks out near the end of the play, I didn’t know whether it was the First World War or the Second.
In Banks’ Programme Notes she writes that she was interested in the recluse figure, Old Man Hennessey, who sort of haunts the story as a mystery, especially for the children, someone who hasn’t set foot in another person’s home in decades. Banks notes that she wanted to draw a parallel between how an idealistic boy like David could become so disenchanted by the world that he chooses to, at least partly, remove himself from society. I think this idea is really interesting, but it’s difficult, I think, for the audience to make the leap between David, played by the supremely and eternally boyish Sam Vigneault, and an unseen Old Man. David never feels anywhere near old, and his emotional immaturity makes him seem perpetually much younger than the thirty years he is supposed to be at the end of the play.
I feel badly because I can tell that Catherine Banks loves this novel and that because it was written so close to her hometown, it is important to her. I am curious to read the novel, because I am interested in knowing how much Buckler focuses on David, and how much he is able to delve into the lives of the others in a way that might be more difficult to do onstage. I am also not sure how much latitude Banks had from Buckler’s estate for this adaptation, but I would be really curious to know how this story might have been told from Bess’ point of view, or Martha’s point of view, or Anna’s point of view, or Ellen’s point of view, or with Banks herself acting as a sort of omniscient narrator who offers us a plurality of perspecties. All the women in the play seem wildly more interesting to me, and also much more fertile ground for comedy to be woven into the tragedy. So much has changed in the theatrical landscape since Banks first started this project fourteen years ago, and the stories that I find myself seeking out (and the ones I find myself struggling more and more to connect with) have changed quite a bit too. The Mountain and the Valley feels a little dated in the way it is so rooted in one quite whiney young white man’s grievance fest toward a community that he does very little to contribute to, especially willingly. Simultaneously, he goes around harming women he purports to care about, and is impervious to any consequences for that kind of behaviour, but still he sees himself as the victim in the story.
In Chased By the Bear we get to laugh at how ridiculous the man-child Leontes is, and that gives folks in the audience a power over him that is refreshing and satisfying. In The Mountain and the Valley we are being asked to feel deep empathy and understanding for the man-child David, usually at the expense of the other more likeable characters, and, while I concede that empathy is at the crux of both theatre and humanity, in this current dumpster fire world, this feels like a mountainous and exhausting ask.
The Mountain and the Valley has closed. Next up at Ross Creek Centre for the Arts is KOQM by shalan joudry, a presentation of the Nestuita’si Storytelling’s production, which runs at the Centre (555 Ross Creek Road, Canning) August 13-17th at 6pm and August 17th at 2:00pm. For more information or to buy your tickets please visit this website.
