>>PREVIEW
TEMPTING PROVIDENCE
Runs until April 1
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Though every Newfoundland elementary school student learning their ABCs may know her, Myra Bennett was unknown to native Newfoundlander Robert Chafe before 2000. A British nurse who provided medical services for the remote coastline of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula, Bennett became a hero to the local population surrounding her station in Daniel’s Harbour, even if that celebrity didn’t extend to the curricula of Chafe’s generation.
"We tend to lump them all together. We hear ‘British missionary nurse’ and think one thing," he says, alluding to Florence Nightingale, a figure Bennett is often explicitly compared to.
Despite missing this particular chapter of Newfoundland’s history in his own education, Chafe quickly learned about the woman who insisted on being called simply "Nurse" when Theatre Newfoundland Labrador’s new artistic director, Jeff Pitcher, commissioned him to write a biographic play for the Gros Morne Theatre Festival, an annual festival produced just 30 kilometers from Daniel’s Harbour in a town called Cow Head. From there, what began as a compact production designed to play to an 80-seat theatre with trips to local senior centres called Tempting Providence has become a touring machine, remounted continuously with the same cast for the last five years and now being produced by Alberta Theatre Projects.
When she was 31-years-old, Bennett was given a two-year contract to administer to the population of 300 kilometers of Newfoundland coastline without roads and other basic infrastructure. Within a year, she had married her local assistant, Angus Bennett, cementing her place in the isolated and tightly knit community. For Chafe, whose play focuses roughly on Bennett’s first three years in Daniel’s Harbour, it was that transition from outsider to ingrained community member that resonated most about Bennett’s story.
"It wasn’t like she had been there for two years and then decided to marry (Angus) and stay," he says. "She married him halfway through her term. I really wanted to explore what he meant to her and not just what he represented."
Limited by the constraints of the still-growing festival’s budget – Chafe was told his play could include no more than five actors – and the play’s focus on Bennett set against the larger community she helped maintain, Chafe opted to make Myra and Angus the only constant characters, currently played respectively by Deirdre Gillard-Rowlings and Darryl Hopkins. To populate the rest of the community, Chafe created two characters listed in the script only as Man (Robert Wyatt Thorne) and Woman (Melanie Caines).
"I realized very quickly that I did want this play to be about costumes, different bonnets or hats to indicate other people," he says. "So I developed this notion that all of the actors would be on stage at all times."
Visually, the play is striking in its minimalism, with only a few multifunctional props and a portable playing area. All the same colour, one table, its tablecloth and four chairs serve as every element of Bennett’s adopted home. In what director Jillian Keiley accurately calls a series of sleight of hand, the set pieces do multiple duty as, among other things, a dog sleigh, the Atlantic Ocean and backpacks.
The idea of creating such a minimal production was partially written into the script, with Chafe originally suggesting that Tempting Providence’s only scene changes be executed with lighting and sound cues to reflect Bennett’s own practical style. Keiley, however, took the process a step further, eliminating all but the play’s opening and closing lighting cues, and tightly choreographing her actors’ movements across the playing area, a mat that has toured in productions across Canada and even made an appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
"When you put that square on the floor, the focus just goes there and the rest of the stage disappears. It doesn’t matter how big the space is," says Keiley.
The result is a portrait drawn strongly by its four actors, driven by the conviction of a character whose personal stoicism could not hide her larger impact on her community. Through Bennett’s diary, which was characteristically more concentrated on her patients’ lives than her own and interviews with locals, Chafe compiled a portrait of the woman whose impact on an entire generation of Newfoundlanders was indelible.
"An entire generation of people along that coastline were babies that were born by her, so there’s an incredible oral history of her," says Chafe.
Ironically, one of the sources that Chafe did not originally consult in his writing was Myra Bennet’s son, Trevor Bennett. When the play had its first reading, however, Trevor attended and was approached by Chafe, who asked whether the portrait of the man’s mother had been too stern. Her son’s answer demonstrates the same sensibility that Bennet held in life, and a mark of the paradoxical roughness that makes Bennett such an endearing personality.
"He laughed under his breath," recalls Chafe, "and said, ‘no, were you quite light.’" |
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