What happens when a group of Indigenous youth in a residential school are forced to perform Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well for the visiting King of England?
You can find the answers in Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan’s 1939. In this challenging and inspiring joint-production of Canadian Stage and Belfry Theatre (in association with the Stratford Festival, where the play was initially produced in 2022), the audience is asked to sit in the simultaneous absurdity, tragedy and comedy of this premise.
For many, the play’s title conjures the pivotal year in world history when World War II breaks out, and Canada, in lockstep with our British colonial masters, declares war on Germany. It is also the year that King George VI (with a young Queen Elizabeth in tow) conducts the first coast-to-coast royal visit to Canada — reaffirming and bolstering Canada’s status as a colonialist project of the British Commonwealth.
1939 also marks roughly the midpoint in the 120-year operation of the residential school system initiated by and advocated for by Canada’s first Prime Minister. So in the context of this play, the historical year is a grim reminder of the consequences of colonialism. While Canada and the world grapple with fascism and imperialism abroad, the systemic, slow-drip genocide of Indigenous peoples at home continues unabated and unremarked– in settings just like the one depicted on stage.
By this point, generations of Indigenous children have already been stolen, imprisoned, abused and murdered by this educational system intent on erasing their languages, cultures, and connections to their communities. And this machine will continue its predations for more than 50 years until the final residential school closes in 1996. Set against the backdrop of this dark chapter in Canada’s history, 1939 explores the impact of cultural erasure, trauma, and resilience. Through its play-within-a-play structure, it illuminates how Indigenous children and youth were subjected to genocidal policies with a smile and a stick . . . and how – with resourcefulness and resilience — they found ways to resist, and to reassert and recover their own identities.
Watching 1939 is a powerful experience: the artistry of the actors’ performances, the sheer weight and scale of the context, and the complexities of this multi-layered production simply refuse to let go when the lights come up.
The woefully incomplete status of the 94 calls to action of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada – whose express purpose was to tell the truth about residential schools like the one in 1939, and to initiate a painful process of reconciliation—are reported on by the Government of Canada in six categories. I will use those categories to comment on the play.
Children and Youth
The play’s central characters are five Indigenous youth plucked from within the unnamed fictional northern Ontario residential school. They are Ojibwe Beth Summers (Grace Lamarche) and her older brother Joseph Summers (Richard Comeau), Cree orphan Susan Blackbird (Brefney Caribou), Mohawk Evelyne Rice (Merewyn Comeau), and Algonquin Métis Jean Delorme (John Walmsley). The actors, garbed in worn, drab working clothes, deliver a multi-faceted performance – conjuring with energy, sly humour and introspection both the innocence and the strength of their characters.
We first see them being conscripted into the play’s absurd project by the dimwitted, hockey-loving, and glory-seeking school administrator Father Callum Williams (Nathan Howe) and teacher Sian Ap Dafydd (Catherine Fitch). Of course, All’s Well That Ends Well is a play about noble privilege, familial connection and romantic resolution. These realities are worlds away from these children’s reality – where the school exists to disrupt the connection of children to their families, so siblings Beth and Joseph are at the same school because of an error.
Language and Culture
In the students, we see the nourishing and essential attachment to their cultural identity that Canada’s residential school system sought to sever. In moments before and between their forced performances in the King’s English, the children maintain and use their own languages, and work together to recover, reconnect with, or learn anew about their culture.
Though suppressed, Indigenous language pulses through this play like a heartbeat, keeping the characters connected to their ancestry and to a future outside of the residential school. Joanna Yu’s simple set design prominently features blackboards. In moments between scenes, these are continually being written on by teachers and by students – and then erased. The blackboards serve at once as a potent symbol of the ongoing erasure of Indigenous language and culture – and a wonderfully resonant proof of the impossibility of such erasure.
Health
The physical and psychological toll of the residential school system is on display in 1939. The trauma inflicted on Indigenous children begins with the physical. We see this in their forced labour, and in the evidence of physical abuse, such as a back wound inflicted on Susan off-stage, by a lash administered for some unseen transgression, and treated by Evelyne through covert and forbidden use of her ancestors’ medicinal and spiritual knowledge. It’s both a stark reminder of the enduring effects of residential schools on Indigenous mental and spiritual well-being and a depiction of spiritual health and survival.
Justice in the Legal System
In 1939, the residential school system IS the legal system — a form of sanctioned violence against these Indigenous students and their families and people. So while the legal system is not explicitly addressed through courtroom scenes or legal dialogue, it hangs over the narrative like a spectre, reminding us that these atrocities and absurdities were legally enforced by the Canadian government. And we are shown exactly how this legal system has been rigged to curtail these students’ possible futures and deny them justice. For instance, boys who age out of the school are forced to continue working the school farm as indentured labour. Girls who marry a non-indigenous man are stripped of their legal Indian status. Every path to leave the school exacts a heavy price . . . while staying exacts a different and even heavier price.
So on one level, this is a play about how each student negotiates with a legal system that is designed to defraud them of their culture, status and identity. Thanks to their resourcefulness, resilience and community, all ends as well as it could . . . within a system built to ensure no equitable justice. But it certainly doesn’t end well.
History and Commemoration
1939 is itself an important act of historical commemoration. It reminds audiences that the events depicted onstage are not isolated incidents but part of a long and brutal history. The reflection circle offered after the performance invites audiences to engage with this history directly, fostering dialogue and understanding. It is a critical space for acknowledging the harms of the past, while reflecting on the ways they persist into the present – and what we can do to address them.
And the play also takes aim at white Eurocentric history, which centers Shakespeare (who, along with the rest of the mandatory Grade 11 English curriculum, is in the process of being replaced with a course centering Indigenous writers by the reconciliation-minded Toronto District School Board). Sian Ap Dafydd (Catherine Fitch), the well-meaning but ultimately complicit Shakespeare-boosting teacher, embodies the cultural and historical egocentricity that are the root of the problem. She genuinely believes that she is helping the children by teaching them Shakespeare with “proper” British accents – even though we learn that her own Welsh past is coloured by generational trauma wrought by the conquering British. Fitch’s disorienting performance is at once empathetic, funny and deeply unsettling, leaving the audience questioning the willful blindness of those who could perpetuate such violence.
Reconciliation
In sum, 1939 is a profound argument for empathy and understanding, only after which can reconciliation even be attempted. The play’s white characters are not caricatures, yet they are hopelessly benighted. And none – not Ms Ap Dafydd, not the liberated-seeming female reporter Madge Macbeth (Amanda Lisman) and not the comically nervous Father Williams — can see past the limitations of their cultural blinkers.
Meanwhile the Indigenous youth – in their own deep act of empathy and understanding – do the near-impossible: they locate themselves and their cultural realities within the complex plot and byzantine characterizations of Shakespeare’s play, and in the process transform and redeem the absurd racism in the idea of “Indian Shakespeare”.
It’s profoundly inspiring, but unlike its Shakespearean touchstone, the play does not offer easy answers or a neatly tied-up resolution. Instead, 1939 is a multi-layered, complex and profound theatrical experience. The play is educational, uplifting, funny and deeply disturbing — all at the same time. It merits repeated viewing to unpack its many layers, appreciate its craft, and ponder its implications.
And it demands that we grapple with the complex legacy of Canada’s residential schools and the ongoing work of reconciliation. Because off the stage, nothing’s well . . . and nothing’s ended well. As we continue to heed – and to prod ourselves and our leaders on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action — 1939 is both a reminder of the work yet to be done . . . and a call to ensure that the past is never forgotten.
1939 has been extended until October 12, 2024. Reserve tickets at canadianstage.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2024
