Review
PICNIC
Ghost River Theatre
Starring Elinor Holt, David van Belle and David Rhymer
Written by Doug Curtis, David van Belle and Elinor Holt
Music by David Rhymer
Directed by Andy Curtis
Runs until May 9
Pumphouse Theatres
Convicted oil well bomber Wiebo Ludwig may be keeping a low profile these days, but his actions live on in theatre and film. While CTV prepares to air a new made-for-TV movie later this month about Robert Wraight, the man who turned RCMP informant on the eco-terrorist, Ghost River Theatre is currently revisiting – and dissecting – its controversial Ludwig musical, An Eye for an Eye.
Picnic is a 70-minute documentary play recounting the brief whirl of media and public attention that accompanied Ghost River’s presentation of An Eye for an Eye at Edmonton’s 2002 fringe festival, when Ludwig and his clan came down to see the show. Later, the company risked its stance of ostensible objectivity by joining the preacher and his family for a picnic supper at a farm north of the city.
Not much of a premise for a sequel, you say? So did Ludwig, who is quoted in a friendly letter to Ghost River artistic director Doug Curtis, advising him against it (and in the process revealing himself to be a man whose opinions about art are as strong as those about the oil industry and the environment). But Picnic doesn’t pretend to be An Eye for an Eye, Part II. Instead, it is an interesting experiment – a bit like a stage version of the kind of behind-the-scenes and commentary material you get on DVDs, as well as a serious attempt to grapple with the issues raised in creating a play about real people and an unsolved crime.
Elinor Holt and David van Belle, who had no part in An Eye for an Eye, act as witty, probing hosts, sifting through the musical’s reviews, reading e-mails received from the public, and re-enacting the jittery day of the Fringe performance followed by the amiable but awkward picnic – the latter seen primarily through Curtis’s eyes. Meanwhile, musician David Rhymer, An Eye for an Eye’s composer, contributes his own reflections in the form of song.
The show becomes the occasion for some soul searching. Did Ghost River compromise itself by meeting with the Ludwigs? Was Ludwig (and a certain critic in the Globe and Mail) right in asserting that the musical should have taken a stand instead of trying to present all points of view?
And, most significantly, was the company right in deciding to dramatize the shooting death of teenager Karman Willis on the Ludwig property without getting the consent of Willis’s family? In a powerful scene, Holt reads passionately an angry e-mail from an audience member, castigating Ghost River for not considering the feelings of Willis’s mother.
In the style of the original musical – and in the style of such recent documentaries as The Corporation – Picnic couches its serious thoughts in satire and amusement. The hand of the director, comedian Andy Curtis, is evident here. Holt provides funny caricatures of the original cast (a bit of an in-joke if you don’t know the actors she’s parodying), van Belle does a wicked vocal impersonation of Doug Curtis, and the two have fun lampooning the fatuous print and TV reporters who covered the show in Edmonton.
One of the more revelatory moments in the company’s meeting with Ludwig comes after the picnic, when he and his family graciously entertain their guests with performances of their own. The Ludwig daughters do their own brand of interpretive dancing and Ludwig himself recites Shelley’s "Ozymandias." His choice of that great ironic poem about hubris tells you much about Ludwig. I wonder, does he see in Shelley’s haughty pharaoh some of the arrogance of the oil company whose sour gas wells goaded him into action? And in the pharaoh’s vanished kingdom, the eventual fate of a province whose wealth is founded on a non-renewable resource?
Although the dandelion wine flowed freely at the picnic, Doug Curtis was never able to confront Ludwig. Instead, played by van Belle, he expresses his feelings here in an imagined conversation with the bomber, explaining how the unresolved Willis case has tainted his sympathies. But one doesn’t have to like Ludwig, let alone agree with his terrorist tactics and religious fundamentalism, to appreciate the just cause that led to his notoriety – a battle against the impunity of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, which has allowed rural Albertans to suffer from the harmful effects of sour gas emissions for decades. |
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