✭✭✭✩✩

by Dan Needles, directed by Liz Gilroy

Port Stanley Festival Theatre, Grace Auditorium, Port Stanley

August 29-September 14, 2024

“This is Ontario. Nobody sues a farm”

The Port Stanley Theatre Festival had planned to present The Perils of Persephone by Dan Needles in 2020. The pandemic prevented that from happening and the play was rescheduled for 2024. The timing is fortuitous since 2024 happens to be the 35th anniversary of the play’s premiere at the Blyth Festival. Needles is, of course, best known for the seven one-man plays of his Wingfield series wherein Walt Wingfield, Toronto stockbroker-turned-farmer, sends in letters describing events in his new surroundings to the Editor of local newspaper.

Wingfield lives in the village of Larkspur in Persephone Township, the same township where the characters of Perils live. Needles had written two of the Wingfield plays – Letter from Wingfield Farm (1985) and Wingfield’s Progress (1987) – before writing Perils, his first multi-actor play set in the same fictional location. There is no overlap between the Wingfield characters and those of Perils, but Perils, like Needles’s previous plays, fully displays Needles’s talent for intricate storytelling.

The scene is the combined living room and kitchen of Reeve Eldin Currie. Currie is frustrated with other members of the township council who all agree the township should have a place to dispose of the province’s toxic waste but can’t agree where it should be. All of them are guilty of nimbyism. Virtually as that topic has been raised, Eldin and his family hear an enormous crash not in their backyard but not far from the farmhouse. A tanker truck from Atomic Breeders has crashed and there is leakage. The recent debate is on his mind and the company that owns the truck reminds Currie too much of breeder reactors, so Currie naturally assumes the tanker is filled with nuclear waste.

With the truck driver knocked out and unable to answer questions, Eldin calls he authorities in the surrounding area and finally his friend, Henry Burford, the Provincial Minister of the Environment, who is from Persephone Township and immediately takes control of the situation.

All this frantic activity takes up Act 1, but there is a twist that must be disclosed since it is the impetus for all the action in Act 2. When the truck driver finally comes round, he reveals that the truck belongs to an artificial insemination company. It not filled with nuclear waste but bull semen. The question for Act 2 is how can Eldin and Henry possibly save face, and their jobs, after frightening the entire community and mobilizing manpower from around the province?

We find the answer in Act 2 when Henry calls Premier’s assistant Skip Fuller, an expert fixer and spin doctor. Now we see the real aim of Needles’s satire – not the panicky common folk of the countryside but the politicians who know how to massage a PR disaster into a PR success. The wily means Skip uses to turn the bad situation in Larkspur around are audaciously clever and provide the greatest concentration of humour in the play. Even when we think the issue has been resolved, Needles still has a few twists up his sleeve to put the politicos in their place.

If there is a problem with Perils it is that Act 1 serves entirely as a set-up for the arrival of Skip in Act 2 and her continually surprising machinations. Needles manages to keep the nature of the “toxic” spill hidden in Act 1 by having the truck driver remain rather too conveniently knocked out until the end of the act. Another problem is that Needles is far more interested in plot than characters. One can easily imagine the play as a Wingfield play with Eldin as Walt telling the tale and imitating all the voices of the characters. However, this is not a Wingfield play and in its multi-actor format it’s noticeable how the various characters are simply sketched in with a few strokes and do not change. In this way the play is rather like a verbal farce where characters development is unimportant compared with the who’s where when of the plot.

Under Liz Gilroy’s direction the cast do what they can to make their characters stand out. For the entire first act, we assume that Eldin is the lead character. As played by Tim Machin, Eldin is a kind of Everyman who is meek and unassertive, so much so that we realize that his wife really runs the family side of the farm and his brother the business side. Elin makes out that being reeve is an honour, but, as Machin demonstrates, Eldin’s first impulse when confronted with an emergency is to panic.

The real main character of the show is Skip Fuller in a terrific performance by Debbie Collins. Collins mines humour of all kinds. In her heels and power suits, Skip is totally a fish out of water. She acts as if anything outside the 416 area code is a Third World country. At the same time Collins has Skip, a quick, ingenious schemer, speak in such rapid fire fashion the other characters can hardly keep up with her. As keeping the press at bay becomes increasing difficult, Skip’s plans involve ever more deception. Collins is great at showing how a politician like Skip is willing to throw ethics and truth to the winds in the service of her goal – a stance that gives Needles’s play continued relevance. Skip is Needles’s most fully drawn character and Collins gives Skip the play’s most memorable performance.

Geoff Whynot reveals Henry Buford, a local boy who’s hit the big time (as if the provincial government were the big time), as a man almost as meek, unassertive and panicky as Eldin, but one who simply has more connections to help him out. Danielle Nicole is a calming presence as Eldin’s wife Marj. Marj is a woman who is happy as a housewife and is most concern with food and daily chores. One of the funniest scenes in the plays is when Marj meets Skip and assumes she is just another homemaker, not a high-powered fixer.

Scott Maudsley can’t help the fact that Needles has given Orval Currie, Eldin’s brother, so little to do. Orval argues with Eldin about his lack of help around the farm but otherwise has nothing to say except what’s going on with the livestock. In contrast, Needles gives more life to Francis Hinkley, the truck driver, and Wendy, the Curries’ daughter. Through his level of speech and demeanour, Chris Bancroft well conveys Needles’s notion that Hinkley is over-educated for his job. Kira Shuit ably demonstrates Needles’s conception of Wendy as far more perceptive than the average teenager. The thoughtful conversation between Hinkley and Wendy about prehistoric animals comes as a welcome interlude from all the chaos that envelops the other characters and evokes a time scale that place the crisis of the day in a cosmic perspective.

Eric Bunnell’s set fills the entire stage and displays a full, highly detailed slice of the Currie home plus a glimpse of the outdoors outside the back door. Alex Amini’s costumes well suit the characters’ status and personality, but she seems to have had the most fun designing Skip’s dress-to-intimidate outfits.

While the artifice in Needles’s story is too obvious and the structure of Act 1 not fully dramatic, The Perils of Persephone is still an enjoyable entertainment. For a long time it seems as if the urbanites will triumph over the countryfolk, but Needles has his plot so arranged that, just in time, the opposite occurs, just as it does in the Wingfield series. Even though it feels in Perils as if Needles is still adjusting to the multi-character format, the play shows Needles as ever the master storyteller.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Debbie Collins as Skip Fuller, Geoff Whynot as Henry Buford, Tim Machin as Eldin Currie and Chris Bancroft as Francis Hinkley; Kira Shuit as Wendy, Scott Maudsley as Orval, Tim Machin as Eldin Currie and Danielle Nicole as Marj; Scott Maudsley as Orval, Tim Machin as Eldin Currie, Debbie Collins as Skip Fuller, Kira Shuit as Wendy and Danielle Nicole as Marj. © 2024 Port Stanley Festival Theatre.

For tickets visit: psft.ca.