Worth getting to know the MacGregor family
by Andrea Nemetz, Entertainment Reporter, HeraldShip’s Company captures you, body and soul
The MacGregor family is decidedly odd.
But the fictional Prairie clan is oddly charming.
As is the dysfunctional family dramedy MacGregor’s Hard Ice Cream and Gas, on stage at Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro until Sept. 2.
The work, by Saskatchewan playwright Daniel Macdonald, builds slowly, gathering steam as it moves along, racing to a conclusion that is utterly absorbing.
The setting of the play a dying town where most of the residents have moved away leaving streets full of boarded-up windows and a sense of hopelessness, accentuated by the bitter cold of February on the Prairies — is as much a character as the MacGregors and their dead accordion-playing neighbour (who is never seen).
And set designer Michael Fuller expertly captures the desolation and loneliness of life in the town.
Looking at the brilliant set, with its glistening spiked icicles, surrounded on all sides by a train track gradually retreating to nothingness, you feel the cold despite the summer heat.
The play isn’t so much about what happens as about the people and why they did what they did and the unknown reasons for their past actions.
The family patriarch is dead, but can’t be buried until spring because the ground is frozen.
Youngest son Jack, who ran a family ice cream store with his father, takes the body hostage, packing it with tubs of homemade ice cream that nobody buys because it’s the Prairies in the middle of winter.
Sensible middle child Fred, who hosts a two-day wake, tries to get the body back down to the parlour, while running around town boarding up windows and attempting to fix the sign for the family store.
Mum Marlene is in the basement pacing, counting off steps. It’s a behaviour that surprisingly makes a lot of sense when she explains it.
Daughter Missy, who left home 19 years ago and hasn’t been heard from since, returns 10 months pregnant, fearful her child will never be born.
But the play isn’t about plot, it’s about family, about sibling rivalries, relationships with parents, the bonds borne of blood.
And it’s a play about roads.
It’s about the roads where the train that runs through the town but never stops will take you, filling residents’ heads with dreams of what lies outside their small patch of earth.
It’s also about roads not taken, the consequences of choices made.
The oddly childlike Jack could be an annoying or pitiful character, but, as played by Ship’s newcomer Nathan Pilon, he’s intriguing, compelling and caring.
Live Bait Theatre artistic director Charlie Rhindress shines as Fred.
As Missy, at various ages from shivering newborn to train-obsessed tween, to partying teen, Natasha MacLellan displays the perfect amount of anger, rebelliousness and unspoken longing for a mother’s love.
And Gay Hauser is a tour-de-force as Maureen, as frozen in her feelings as the Prairie ground until the confluence of circumstances and confessions leads to an almost frightening eruption of long bottled-up emotion.
Director and Ship’s Company artistic producer Pamela Halstead expertly ensures the actors move at the right pace for the audience to keep up with the shifting revelations and emotions.
