THEATRE REVIEW: FARTHER WEST

Pictured:
William Webster,
Tara Nicodemo


JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun,
21 OCT 2013
R: 3.5/5


TORONTO - Think of it as the world’s second oldest profession — the career some men make of sweeping women up who are plying the world’s oldest profession to try to carry them away from it all, whether they want to be carried away or not. Playwright John Murrell, however, didn’t go back to the beginning of time when he wrote his story about a prostitute and the men determined to save her, back in the early ’80s. Instead, Murrell rewound only a century or so to recount the true story of the prostitute/madame May Buchanan and the two men determined to lift her from the way of life into which she had fallen.

Problem was, May didn’t fall into it as much as she jumped into it with her eyes wide open, embracing it for the freedom it could give her. She didn’t want lifting.

Murrell’s play is called FARTHER WEST, and it recently made a return to the Toronto stage after an absence of more than 25 years in a Soulpepper production currently playing the Young Centre.

We first meet Meg, played by Tara Nicodemo, as a young woman, naked and asleep in her father’s Ontario home in the equally naked arms of a man she has seduced. As Meg recalls her pragmatic father’s advice to keep moving west ’til she encounters a society that won’t judge her, we see her take her place in the frontier town of Calgary, where she catches the eye of Constable Seward (Dan Lett), a moralizing police constable obsessed with saving Meg’s soul, even while he aches to despoil her body. She also catches the eye of Thomas Shepherd (Matthew MacFadzean, too long absent from Toronto stages), a rancher who simply wants to look after Meg and build his life around her.

Surrounded by her stable of whores (Akosua Amo-Adem, Christine Horne and the ever-capable Kyra Harper) and her clients (Dan Chameroy, Jeff Lillico and Evan Buliung in a small but lovely turn), Meg struggles to maintain her own vision of herself in the face of the two men’s visions of what she should be, all the while moving ever further westward against the backdrop of designer Astrid Janson’s evocative mountainscape, beautifully lit by Graeme Thomson.

This is graphically adult and often compelling fare, almost operatic in its scope and staging, but despite the best efforts of director Diana Leblanc and a strong supporting cast that also includes Jesse Aaron Dwyer and William Webster, the triangle on which Murrell has built his story eventually buckles and collapses. MacFadzean’s and Nicodemo’s finely etched performances continuously wash up on the shoals of Lett’s shallow one-dimensional take on Seward, whose crazed religious zeal proves inadequate to even Nicodemo’s perhaps-too-understated commitment to freedom and is certainly no match for the powerful passion with which MacFadzean fills his performance as Shepherd.

So while everyone else seems determined to keep things moving FARTHER WEST at every turn, when the focus is on Lett, things just seem to go further and further south.