Mouthing off

The prospect of Maureen Hunter’s latest, Wild Mouth, had me gritting my teeth before the curtain even went up: another Canadian farm drama featuring prairie winds and thick skins. It proved to be more than that, although it took its time.

Wild Mouth is set in Saskatchewan, 1917, bringing together hardworking British ex-pats the Reids and the visiting Anna McGrath (Sarah Orenstein)— sister of Reid paterfamilias, Logan (Ian D. Clark). The plot follows Anna as she tries to cope with the loss of her teenage son to the killing fields abroad—coping being a relative term. Anna’s presence stirs up much more than she intended as she tries to provoke the inert Reids (who have also recently lost a son in France) to some level of emotional awareness. There’s also swarthy Ukrainian farmhand Bohdan (Oliver Becker), whose presence creates so much sexual and emotional tension in the household that he and Anna’s mutual contempt that scars them irrevocably.

Although the setup is promising, Anna’s “wild mouth” isn’t all that wild, and the conflict surrounding the idea of repression versus expression travels in frustrating circles—the only marked difference is whatever farm chore happens to be completed at the time. Speaking of the farm, much of the action surrounds everyday activities like the eating of dinner, chicken-plucking, and pig-slaughtering. Why? Perhaps it’s to show how repetitive things are on the prairie, how predictable and inescapable the daily banalities are that lead to conflict and violence on any scale.

A scene at the conclusion of act one veers dangerously toward Carrie territory, and a climactic scene near the end of the second fares much worse thanks to R.H. Thomson’s confusing and ineffective staging. Thomson, perhaps unsure of how to make use of Yannik Larivée’s beautiful, if not unusual set, stages much of the play crammed into corners, failing to use the dynamic space afforded to him. Constructed out of precisely cut wood planks, the design consists of a box within a box, creating a forced perspective that focused eyes on two converging spots. As my companion pointed out post-show, the whole thing resembled the inside of an antique camera—much like the one that Anna uses throughout the action to capture the bleak landscape around her.

Despite the elegance of Hunter’s writing, Wild Mouth could have benefited from a good nip/tuck. Certain characters border on redundant—like the two Reid children, Claire and Jamie, who fail to do much more than watch the action happening around them as if they were at a ping-pong match. David Fox was made to play Aloysius, and he does it with great sensitivity, but both his character as well as Brenda Robins’ Roberta Reid needs more attention to detail written into their characters. As they stand, they’re not much more than devices to the plot—and what Wild Mouth requires is sharper characterization to make that wildness hit the prairie air.

Wild Mouth has powerful moments, posing interesting questions about war, family, desire, and inequality between immigrants, but it falls into the trap that many distinctly Canadian plays suffer from: a dull sobriety that squeezes any vigour from a subject (farm livin’ and war-hatin’), tending towards talking head syndrome straight from the get-go. And it should be added; the utterly cheesy final image of Aloysius playing a mournful tune on the violin would have had a lot more kick had Fox actually moved the bow across the strings. Or better yet, kept him offstage, leaving something to the imagination.