THEATRE REVIEW: WAITING FOR THE PARADE
6 May'10

‘Parade’ slightly off-key

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Legends of Amazon warriors notwithstanding, the whole notion of women going off to war is one that belongs to our modern age.

Which is not to say that women have not been fighting wars for centuries. They’ve just been staying home while doing so — a fact beautifully rendered and underscored in playwright John Murrell’s seminal Canadian drama, WAITING FOR THE PARADE — a play that has never been long out of circulation nor off the stage since it was penned back in 1977.

On the heels of a couple of Tarragon productions, a Shaw Festival production and no doubt one or two others we’ve probably missed, Toronto audiences are once again presented with yet another opportunity to see the play, courtesy of a Soulpepper production that opened Wednesday at the Young Centre.

For the uninitiated, the play is set in Calgary during World War II and tells the story of how five women fight the war that is raging inside them, struggling to keep home-fires burning while the fires of rage, loneliness and abandonment threaten to consume their very souls.

Loosely joined through volunteer war efforts, most of them are shepherded by the overbearing Janet (played by Deborah Drakeford), a woman whose unbending officiousness and zeal mask a deep sense of inadequacy that is not completely her own.

While Janet’s husband is employed on the homefront, Catherine (Michelle Monteith) has been left alone with a small child when her husband volunteered and was promptly shipped off to Europe, where he has been at the heart of the fighting ever since — leaving his wife to wait and to worry.

It’s the kind of worry the widowed Margaret (played by Nancy Palk) understands, for her eldest son has enlisted too. Meanwhile, her younger son has run afoul of the law by becoming involved with the communist anti-war effort, only adding to Margaret’s worry — and her sense of abandonment.

Eve (played by Krystin Pellerin), for her part, naively watches the young men she teaches in high school eagerly slip away to become cannon-fodder while she cares for a domineering husband who’s too old — but certainly not too unimaginative — to fight. All the while, she juggles her patriotism with a growing realization that war is not only hell but hellishly wasteful.

Meanwhile, the tragic Marta (Fiona Byrne) prowls the periphery of the group, excluded from its camaraderie by her German birth and her aged father’s loyalties.

These are five strong actresses telling a deeply moving story, but there is nonetheless something slightly off-key in the production directed by Joe Ziegler. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Second World War melodies scattered throughout its length; it’s more to do with the rhythms of the characters and the wars they are fighting.

Under Ziegler’s direction, Palk fails to mine Margaret’s unbending Calvinism for the terror and loneliness it has bred, while Drakeford’s Janet is played as such an utter martinet, we can never fully sympathize with her plight, once the tide of her war turns. Pellerin, for her part, relies too heavily on comedy to show us Eve’s timidity and thereby diminishing her character’s voyage into strength, if not into wisdom.

So, even though Monteith finds a nice blend of pluck and despair in Catherine’s suffering and Byrne hits all the right notes in Marta’s symphony of Germanic pragmatism, these are merely dramatic battles won and not the war itself.

In the end, it’s the kind of production that gives one an appreciation of the play while only hinting at the kind of emotional depths revealed in other, and sadly, better productions.