With a splendid lead performance and believable, yet simple staging, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland and Factory Theatre’s co-production of Between Breaths nonetheless has its issues while telling a worthwhile story.
Factory Theatre & Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland/Between Breaths, written by Robert Chafe, directed by Jillian Keiley, Factory Mainspace, Nov. 20 to Dec. 8. Tickets available at factorytheatre.ca.
While there is much to admire in Between Breaths (2018), things are not perfect. Nonetheless, an imperfect production from Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland is still a heady experience.
Artistic Fraud is one of Canada’s most esteemed theatre companies. Its leadership is Canadian theatre royalty. Playwright Robert Chafe is a Governor General’s award winner, while director Jillian Keiley received the Siminovitch Prize. Keiley is also the current head of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre English Theatre. Artistic Fraud is known for its original plays and compelling subject matter, and Between Breaths was inspired by a genuine Newfoundland hero.
American-born Dr. Jon Lien, who passed away in 2010, was an animal behaviourist who was known as “the whale man”. A professor at St. John’s Memorial University, his main field of study was small marine birds, but he got side-tracked into whales in 1978 when he was called upon to rescue one of the giant mammals caught in a fishing net. Over time, Lien pioneered methods to free whales while doing the least amount of damage to the nets. To a fisher, a tangled net meant the loss of $8,000 worth of equipment, as well as the end of the fishing season and his livelihood.
Chafe’s play moves backwards in time. We first see Lien (Steve O’Connell) confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home, unable to express himself and imprisoned in his own body. As the play progresses, the larger than life Lien emerges as a force of nature who bulldozes his way through all manner of obstacles in pursuit of trapped whales.
Apparently, over five hundred whales found freedom due to Lien’s passionate endeavours, and he was revered by both fishers and environmentalists alike.
The play’s title comes from an observation that Lien documented in his research. Trapped whales dive deeper into the sea between breaths in an attempt to free themselves. As Chafe said in an interview, Lien keeps diving deeper into his past, between breaths, throughout the play. We also meet Lien’s loving wife Judy (Berni Stapleton) and his chief assistant and former whaler Wayne Ledwell (Darryl Hopkins).
In a Keiley-directed play, we expect clever visual images, and we do get them in Between Breaths. For example, we know we are going backwards in time as actor O’Connell walks in a circle travelling from a wheelchair, to a walker, to a cane. The whale rescue is done with two chairs to represent a boat. A tiller is placed on one seat, manned by Wayne, while Lien bends his body over the other chair, and in this upside down position, he gives the illusion that he is reaching into the water to cut the net, shouting instructions to Wayne to move closer, or move sideways etc. The net is depicted by a rope that Lien manoeuvres. It is an astonishing image because it is so believable, yet so simple.
Between Breaths boasts an original live score composed by the award-winning Newfoundland roots/folk band The Once, and despite the beautiful, haunting music, it is a problem. The excellent musicians (Brianna Gosse, Steve Maloney and Kevin Woolridge), using a guitar, harmonica and their voices, vocalise their way through the wordless cinematic score that mimics, in part, the ups and downs of whale music itself.
Because the musicians have microphones, the actors also have mics, presumably to be heard over the music, which makes Between Breaths a very noisy production. Given Lien’s nature as a short-tempered, impassioned, shouting man, many scenes of high dudgeon are simply deafening. Also, at several times in the play, the characters are speaking over one another, while the live music swells to a crescendo, inundating the audience with a wall of sound. What would it be like if neither the musicians nor the actors were miked?
There are also irritations in the script. Chafe may have tried to mimic Judy Lien’s speech pattern, but her constant use of “my darling” started to sound like a broken record. As well, there are a lot of tells, not shows, as Chafe tries to get out as much information about the Liens and Wayne as he can. As a result, a lot of the text sounds contrived. The best scenes are those of action, like the actual whale rescue, or arguments between husband and wife as Judy tries to be the voice of reason. The vignettes where Lien is in his memory also have strong resonance.
O’Connell, who seems to be suffering from a cough, nonetheless, gives a splendid performance as the over-the-top Lien, capturing the man’s obsession about whales. It is a performance that wears his heart on his sleeve. Stapleton makes Judy as feisty as she can, given the limits of being in her husband’s wake. I had trouble with Hopkins’ accent for Wayne, which obscures his words, but he does convey his character’s wry sense of humour.
Shawn Kerwin’s clever set of a blue-green curved ramp surrounding a plateau evokes a sea wave, while a large overhead, florescent disc symbolizes the whales. Brian Kenny’s sound design is a marvellous mix of seascape, bird calls, and whale music, and is perfectly grafted to the script for effect. Leigh Ann Vardy has provided the atmospheric lighting.
In the final analysis, Between Breaths does bring the marvellous life of Dr. Jon Lien to new audiences, and it is important that we know about him. Perhaps, however, the Newfoundlanders who developed the script are a little too close to the material and so tried to cram in too much detail, rendering Between Breaths ambitious but flawed.
There is a wonderful Lien idea in Between Breaths that should be noted. We have all seen pictures of whales hurling their gigantic bodies vertically into the air, which Lien noticed they did once they were finally freed. He pronounced that the whales’ behaviour denoted joy. The thought of a joyful whale, in a time when the species is headed for extinction, is a joyful thought indeed.
#LUDWIGVAN
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