THEATRE REVIEW: THE MILL Part III: THE WOODS
23 Mar'10

Lost in the woods

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5

Years ago, a joke made the rounds, the punchline of which featured a relentlessly optimistic boy digging happily through a room filled with horse manure, convinced that somewhere in the midst of all the — ahem — organic fertilizer, there simply had to be a pony.

But frankly, after three episodes of Theatrefront's planned four-part opus, THE MILL, it's getting harder and harder for all but the most optimistic to believe there is even a hobby horse buried under all this horse hooey.

THE MILL, Part III: THE WOODS opened at the Young Centre Saturday, written by Tara Beagan and directed by Sarah Garton Stanley on the rough-hewn set created by Gillian Gallow for the entire series.

Right off the top, that's problematic, for Beagan has been charged with picking up the sordid tale of a haunted, woman-eating mill, right at the very beginning, circa 1640, in the days before the titular mill was built.

So as Michelle Latimer and Holly Lewis struggle to tell their portion of this most recent installment of the tale, they do so in the shadow of the two massive saw-wheels that play such a gory role in subsequent episodes. Talk about foreshadowing.

Mind you, that's not the only shadow hanging over Marie (Latimer) and her daughter Lyca (Lewis), for in asking them to create characters drawn from an ancient native culture, using contemporary language, Beagan throws down quite a challenge.

A descendant of the indigenous people of the area, Marie was conceived in violence with the arrival of the first white explorers, and then, having herself given birth to a white, fair-haired child, she has apparently been cast out by her people, themselves decimated by the diseases the white people trail in their wake.

Left to their own devices, Marie and Lyca have carved out a bucolic existence apparently in utter harmony with nature, but with the arrival of Charles (played by Ryan Hollyman) , a French ethnographer separated from his party and desperate for company, that all changes. He speaks only French, they speak only the Huron tongue, and before the language barrier of all of them speaking modern, colloquial (and in his case, colourfully profane) English has been worked out, he has been grievously injured.

Of course, he soon falls under Marie's spell as she grudgingly nurses him back to health and she falls under his, leaving young Lyca, who has already established in earlier installments that she does not play well with others, feeling more than a trifle abandoned. Her solution not only ends the nascent romance but also sets up the Terribly Spooky Premise that will apparently stretch through the other three episodes.

With a cast rounded out by Frank Cox-O'Connell, Eric Goulen, Richard Greenblatt and Michelle Monteith (all of whom spend the majority of their time playing shrubbery), Stanley gives The Woods her best shot, but in the end, only succeeds in creating a more artful version of the kind of tedium that marked the first two installments of this ill-fated theatrical adventure.

As Daryl Cloran, Theatrefront's artistic director recalls it, this project was conceived, at least in part, as "a way to make Canadian history less boring" — a concept clearly framed by individuals who have spent very little time studying the very history of which they are so dismissive. For, as anyone who has even casually studied the subject can tell you, there are thousands of yarns just waiting to be spun that have nothing to do with derivative B-movie Hollywood schlock like this.

Which is not to say that playwright Damien Atkins won't unearth a pony in Part IV: ASH, due next season — Lord knows, we've earned it.