Catherine Banks’ Governor General’s Award-winning 2008 play Bone Cage is currently being staged by the intrepid One Four One Theatre at The Assembly Theatre in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. We are in a small logging town in Nova Scotia – and the theatre’s small space feels like being in a cage.
In a soulful depiction of bleak, dead-end lives, the play centres on a group of young men and women. Jamie (Daniel Reale) is a clearcutter who will marry the idealistic 17-year old Krista (Jessi Elgood) at the end of the week. His roving eyes are set on other jobs far away, as a means of escaping this town, where options are meager and attitudes are narrow. From the start, Jamie is in distress: his livelihood depends on clear-cutting the forest, but clear-cutting destroys the wildlife – which he works belatedly, and with limited success, to save after each shift. As he blows through an endless succession of six-packs of beer, Jamie struggles with his despair and rails against his loveless family life and the father who can’t bear to talk to him.
His equally restless and unhappy half-sister Chicky (Kaitlin Race) strips sod for her more renewable living. She’s deeply unhappy, but feels compelled to stick around to take care of Jamie and his father Clarence (Jimi Shlag). The emotionally distraught Clarence is also stuck. Shattered by the death of his son Travis, he fixates on pseudoscientific schemes to bring Travis back, while ignoring Jamie, the son who is still alive.
Where the naive Krista seeks to evade her dead-end small-town life through the short-term goals of passing high-school English and planning the perfect wedding, Chicky shows a more clear-eyed awareness of the confines of their environment. Race, who gave an especially memorable performance as the titular Glory in Love 2 Theatre Company’s outstanding Watching Glory Die, delivers another gripping portrayal full of intensity and depth. Her Chicky is bitter and tough but humane – and unlike many of the other characters, she is also clear-eyed. She sees her life as it is, rather than what it might be. Race is magnetic in realizing this character who is compelled by desperation and despair into making a make-or-break choice. Chicky’s emotional counterpoint is Clarence, the father so grief-stricken that he neglects his live son for delusion about his dead son. In a life without hope and choice, Clarence manufactures both. Shlag realizes Clarence vividly as deeply damaged, propelled by inconsolable grief and his own limitations.
Rounding out the cast are an excellent Cooper Bilton as Jamie’s best friend and Krista’s brother Kevin. Roughed up by the town locals, he is preoccupied by revenge. Atlin Hofer is also compelling as Robby, a young man mocked and othered simply because he is different. Different has no place in this town built on clear-cutting biodiversity and stripping surface grass. Finally, Karen Scora plays his naive younger sister Lissa, whose idolizing of Chicky and Krista predicts a future that is as blighted as theirs.
The experience of watching Bone Cage is hard to describe. Intellectually, it’s a hard and dispiriting slog – but you can’t take your eyes off it because it’s so loudly, arrestingly and energetically acted, and because it strains relentlessly against the confines of the theatre’s cage-like space. In addition to the uniformly strong cast, the production’s ultimate success lies in JB Nelles’ inspired set design. So close is the audience to the actors that it feels like sitting almost on top of them and being drawn into the action in a near-palpable way. The walls are stenciled in a pattern of stumps, and the sod-covered forest floor is strewn with wood chips. A wooden boardwalk surrounds strategically placed tree stumps that ingeniously serve outdoor and indoor purposes at different times. The vast outdoor spaces by and above the river where the characters hang out for large parts of the play are foreshortened in a way that requires a suspension of disbelief but also hammers home the small size of the boxes they are trapped in. Thanks to the elastic claustrophobia of the small set, used to full advantage by Nelles, the audience is trapped right there with the characters, whether they are working in the forest, talking with their friends, or alone inside with their thoughts.
The landscape of Bone Cage is one of miserable, almost inconsolable discontent. The material is rich and complex, with each character’s emotional arc demanding focus. Cass Van Wyck’s strong direction elicits powerful performances from each ensemble member, and they deliver – viserally and memorably. The play’s ending – which veers further from the realism of the character drama – or more accurately peers beneath the realism to see what lies there – is shocking, disturbing . . . and ambiguous.
In lesser hands, it might prompt a sigh of relief, rather than a compulsion to wonder, ponder and question. But these are not lesser hands – so don’t expect to escape the Bone Cage when you exit the theatre.
Bone Cage runs until May 20 at The Assembly Theatre. Reserve tickets on theassemblytheatre.com.
Content Advisory: Strong language, homophobia, violence, sexual assault, death
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2023
