McGregor's performance a gas
by Dave Mathieson, the RecordMoments become provoking and "strange"
PARRSBORO: A home filled with ice cream, accordions and train sets would usually be a recipe for joy and happiness but for the MacGregor's of Rosetown, Saskatchewan, it has brought a strange, fantastical kind of inertia whereby the family spins their tires upon the cold, prairie landscape.
MacGregor's Ice Cream & Gas opened to a packed house on Friday night at the Ship's Company Theatre in Parrsboro . Written by playwright Daniel Macdonald and directed by Pamela Halstead, the play follows the MacGregor's as they deal with the death of the family patriarch and break free from the grip he's had on the family.
The playwright says, "Minus 40 degrees on the prairie seems like a far cry from a summer's day in Nova Scotia. But no matter where we are, the land, the climate, and our own sense of place at times makes us do strange things."
In the case of the MacGregor's, doing strange things comes in many forms. Because the ground is in a solid state of permafrost Jake, the youngest son, played by Nathan Pilon, is keeping his fathers dead body cool by filling his casket with buckets of flavourful ice cream until somebody comes to haul the body off to the morgue for storage. Mother Marlene, played by Gay Hauser, paces the basement in bitter circles, angrily counting off the steps she should have taken to escape the family while she was still young. And the eldest son Fred, played by Charlie Rhindress, spends his time fixing the sign to the family store while trying to fix his family by maintaining some sense of sanity.
This is what director Halstead calls, "A frozen landscape and a frozen family." She asks, "How does one transcend the isolation and the despair and look up? How does one stop pacing in the basement and make those first steps forward out into the world?"
Relief comes in the form of daughter Missy, played by Natasha MacLellan, who refused to spin her tires and, therefore, escaped from the family when she was 17. It's been 20 years since she last stepped foot inside the MacGregor home and little has changed since she left. In a play infused with a kind of magic realism, she is 10 and a half months pregnant. Standing in as a metaphor for rebirth, regeneration and hope, Missy opens the family's eyes to the life of quiet, angry desperation they lived under a father who loved the accordion and his friends more than he loved his own family. After the family argues about how their lives have been wasted through mere chance and happenstance, the MacGregor's decide to dispose of the fathers body in dramatic fashion. It's here that sparks fly and green grass grows as Missy's baby is finally born and the McGregor's find catharsis and rebirth in the middle of winter.
MacGregor's Hard Ice Cream and Gas is thought provoking and thoroughly entertaining.
