Helen Shaw (Bernadette Horn), Patrick Burns (Colyn DeGraaff) and Samuel Shaw (Brent Podesky) in the Midnapore Cycle.

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The Midnapore Cycle presented by St. Mary's University College
St. Mary's University College
Thursday, June 10 - Sunday, June 13

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If you’re like the majority of Calgarians, chances are you’ve never heard of John Glenn or Samuel Shaw, and only have a vague notion as to the significance of Father Lacombe and Patrick Burns. These men, however, played an important role in the early development of Calgary. They’re also the central characters in Edmonton playwright Mieko Ouchi’s new play, The Midnapore Cycle, a site-specific production that looks at the people who touched the land around St. Mary’s University College.

Although Ouchi is the playwright, the inspiration for The Midnapore Cycle came from director Marilyn Potts, who teaches drama at St. Mary’s. And it was NiX — the play that took place in a dome of snow and ice at Olympic Plaza during Alberta Theatre Projects’ annual playRites Festival in 2009 — that inspired Potts.

“After seeing NiX, I realized St. Mary’s sits on a historical goldmine,” says Potts. “I had a vague idea of the history, but when I heard how many people were actually on this site, I got really excited.”

So, she approached Ouchi, with whom Potts has a long history. St. Mary’s produced another of Ouchi’s works — The Dada Play — a couple of years ago, and Potts was also Ouchi’s first dramaturge back when she was a student at Western Canada High School, where Potts was a drama teacher.

“She (Potts) convinced me to take a walk of the land with a historian and I thought, ‘This is really interesting.’ I’m a history buff, so I decided to do the play,” says Ouchi.

She constructed The Midnapore Cycle like a medieval mystery play in order to reflect the community spirit of the production, which involves students, St. Mary’s graduates and local actors. Medieval mystery plays are one of the earliest forms of community-based theatre. Local guilds (the bakers’ guild or the metalworkers’ guild, for example) would each perform a different biblical story and the audience would move from pageant cart to pageant cart watching the different scenes.

In keeping with the medieval mystery play motif, The Midnapore Cycle’s cast is organized into various guilds. Each of these “guilds” performs scenes at various staging areas around the campus, from the graveyard where Father Lacombe’s heart lies buried, to the 125-year-old St. Paul’s Anglican Church.

The audience will learn about Glenn, one of Alberta’s first settlers; Shaw, an early entrepreneur; and the First Nations who occupied the land.

Lacombe figures prominently in the story, as he built a home for orphans and the elderly on the land in 1910. The original Lacombe Home that served as an orphanage until 1963 — and that the province later designated a historic site — burned down in 1999, the same year St. Mary’s moved to the area.

While the play covers much of the area’s past, it doesn’t offer the complete story. “You pick and choose narratively to show the flavour of the history,” explains Potts.

Ouchi says writing a site-specific piece is not unlike writing any other play, where a playwright sifts through the available material to “find what is dramatic, telling and emotional,” adding that sometimes the desire to use a particular campus location came first, then the story, and vice versa.

“I tried to find those moments that intrigued me, those moments when I would say, ‘Oh, isn’t that amazing! I didn’t know that,’” she says.

For Potts, many of those moments came with knowing she’s treading, literally, in the footsteps of history. “If you’re going to do something that’s site-specific, the focus is on the site. Standing in the graveyard as the sun is setting with the birds singing, you can’t replicate that. Being there, where real people actually stood, you realize, ‘I really am a part of history,’” says Potts.

Both Ouchi and Potts agree the logistics of mounting a site-specific piece are more challenging than when presenting a show in a theatre. The logistics of how to move people from location to location, and how to make sure the audience ends up near a washroom come intermission. And, of course, there’s always the weather.

Ouchi says she hopes The Midnapore Cycle will have a lasting impact beyond its two-hour playing time. “I hope it will point people to other things, like Hugh Dempsey’s book on Crowfoot, like Fish Creek Park and Blackfoot Crossing. I hope it will get people interested in history,” she says.