Paul Cowling and Braden Griffiths in Catherine Banks’s Bone Cage.

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Bone Cage presented by Downstage Theatre
Engineered Air Theatre
Thursday, February 4 - Saturday, February 13

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Licence plates may bill Nova Scotia as “Canada’s Ocean Playground,” but behind its picturesque beaches lurks a darker side. A lifelong resident of the province, Catherine Banks has come to know both the natural beauty and the human tragedy found in many of its rural areas. And it was the tension between the two that inspired her play Bone Cage.

Although the play didn’t debut onstage until 2007, the idea for it came to Banks many years before. It was sparked by a prison brawl on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore that left two young men dead and people stunned. But not her.

“People said ‘Oh, how could such a terrible thing happen in a rural community that’s so beautiful,’” she says. “I felt I could respond to that question with some knowledge of the situation of young men in rural Nova Scotia.”

Banks had always enjoyed writing, but her seemingly mundane surroundings didn’t appear an interesting setting for anything, until she saw a production of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs in the mid-80s. The play had revolutionized Quebec theatre when it premièred in 1968, and it greatly affected her as well.

“Up until that point, I’d always thought to be a writer you had to live somewhere exotic,” she says. “I came out of that play and I just felt suddenly that I did have people to write about, I did have stories to write about.”

Bone Cage’s main character, Jamie, was a product of Banks’s imagination, but she drew upon personal experience in crafting him. Like many young men she’d known while living in Stewiacke in Nova Scotia’s interior¸ Jamie is a logger, an occupation that pays the bills but costs him his soul.

“In our community, a lot of the young men were involved in clear-cutting,” she says. “They ended up destroying something that they really loved, and that seemed very tragic to me.”

The play’s relatively large cast and sometimes coarse language turned off a lot of theatre companies in Nova Scotia, and Banks ultimately co-produced its première when no one else would take it on. Simon Mallett, whose company Downstage presents the play in Calgary, was instantly drawn in after reading the script in 2008, though he wondered if audiences would be similarly enticed. In a fortunate turn of events, Bone Cage claimed the Governor General’s Award for drama later that year.

The win offered a handy marketing tool to Mallett, who saw a parallel between the clear-cutting and the no-holds-barred development of Alberta’s tarsands. Although there was initially talk of shifting the play’s setting to Wild Rose Country, Mallett and company decided audiences could make the links themselves.

“The idea of environmental destruction and how that affects people’s lives is something that’s very present in Alberta with the tarsands and the amount of oil mining that’s going on in the province,” he says. “So I think it will resonate quite strongly with people here and with people who know people who work in those industries especially.”

But if that makes Calgary a logical setting for Bone Cage, Mallett and Banks share a belief that whether eastern or western, rural or urban, audiences everywhere will relate to its characters. It’s a view echoed by Braden Griffiths, a longtime member of Downstage’s ensemble who plays Jamie. In contrast to the play’s six other parts, Mallett offered Griffiths the leading role without an audition. While he felt well-suited to the role in terms of age, the character’s personality proved more of a struggle.

“I think of myself as a generally nice guy,” he says, “and not to be too harsh on this character, but he’s been embittered by his life in this town. You have to be a bit of an asshole to live there, and he’s been doing that for some time.”

Although Griffiths is from Calgary, Jamie’s desire for more than what a small town can offer him resonated. He likens it to the career choice he made despite coming from a family of engineers.

“I felt like I was going against the family tradition a bit when I decided to go into the arts,” he says, adding that “to find yourself is a lifelong struggle that everybody faces.”

But if the struggle is universal, Banks feels there’s a lack of empathy for young rural men caught up in it. Many people hold a stereotypical view of them as drunken louts and an idyllic view of environments that are less playgrounds than battlegrounds for those who live in them.

“If you destroy something you love, I don’t think it can just be that part of your day and then you come home and be something different,” says Banks. “To me, that has to have an impact on your psyche. I want people to come away maybe not liking Jamie, but to have some compassion for his journey in life.”