Spoon River at The Mack, Charlottetown

I had not seen Soulpepper’s Spoon River after it debuted here in Toronto in 2014. I knew it got rave reviews from Mooney on Theatre, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, but I never found my way down to the Distillery District.

How fortunate for me that it is playing at Charlottetown’s The Mack this summer. Again, my thanks to my sister for getting me the tickets.

Directed by Albert Schultz, Spoon River was adapted for the musical stage by Island-born Mike Ross, drawing from the American writer Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 Spoon River Anthology. I think I remember hearing of this book of free verse in one of my survey courses in school, though I never read it. Wikipedia’s description of it is as good a starting point as any: “Spoon River Anthology [. . .] is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ home town. The aim of the poems is to demystify the rural, small town American life. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses.”

In an interview with the CBC, Schultz suggested that Charlottetown was well-suited for this play.

“When [Ross] was here in Charlottetown working at the festival over a decade ago, he started working on taking poetry, the poetry of Dennis Lee actually, and turning it into songs,” explained Schultz.

“I had heard a lot of these songs, and so one day I was sitting in a meeting with him, and I went back to my office and I brought a Edgar Lee Masters, which is a book of poems, it’s not a script, it’s just a book of 250 poems, and I threw it in front of him and said, ‘Have you read this? I think you should.’ And the next day, he came in with two songs, and they’re still in the show.”

That connection alone makes it a good one for the Charlottetown Festival, but Brazier said there’s much more than that.

“Where it all began was me just going to see the play, and coming out and saying, okay, how do we get that?” he explained, saying he felt it was exactly right for Charlottetown audiences, both local and tourist.

“It’s community, in that the show speaks about a community, and I believe that the people in the community of Spoon River are recognizable in your own community today,” said Brazier. “And so it’s very easy to find yourself, and your neighbours and your families in this play.”

“I know that when Mike was writing it, he says it all the time, he was always thinking of home,” added Schultz. “He was thinking this piece is so perfect for home, this reminds me so much of home.”

I think Schultz is right. The town of Spoon River, located in the Illinois catchment basin of Chicago though we know it to be, did feel through the stories of its departed dead much like the small-town Canadian world I’m familiar with. Having the individual stories of the town come alive, through the performances of the spirits of the many dead in a town cemetery perhaps not unlike the ones I saw growing up, is genius. That my family happened to run into people we knew at this performance, and that this performance made inventive use of staging to guide us through a wake and into the audience, made ,

The rave review of The Guardian‘s Colm Magner is perfectly well-founded. The cast is more than capable of handling the demands of performance, as singers and actors and musicians performers who convincingly evoke dozens of personalities in a single sitting. I was particularly caught by the performances of Jonathan Ellul and Susan Henley–the latter’s evocation of a German servant girl who, after giving birth to her employer’s son, lost him first to his father’s family then to a brilliant political career, was heartbreaking–but I could not say there was a single weak or undeserving performer in the cast. This is a show hard on talented actors but more than capable of rewarding them if they can live up to the tasks put to them.

What of the story? There is no single story, excluding a frame that I refuse to spoil. If there is any message to take from Spoon River, it’s the universality of the themes of life. Any individual’s experiences or emotions can be experienced by any other individual, not only those who are alive now but those who are dead. The lives the actors evoked in a few lines of prose written a century ago, in a short song done now, are eminently recognizable to us. A deep and enduring community of experience unites us all, and Spoon River evokes that superbly.

Spoon River ends after an hour and a half, releasing its audience into the twilight of the Charlottetown evening. People who want to partake in this experience, audience-members who would like to grasp the things that unite us, should try to catch it before this touring performance heads next for New York City.