We know these Neighbours
Ship’s Company hits home, again, with dream cast delivering engaging show about stuff of life
by Elissa Barnard, Arts Reporter, Herald
Bill Forbes, Frank MacKay, Stephanie Folkins - Ivor Johnson's Neighbours
Photo credit: Rena Kossatz
Ship’s Company Theatre, Parrsboro, opens its 25th anniversary season with a fast-paced, comedic drama about a small community.
The community is Parrsboro’s Whitehall Road in the 1950s and the bridge on stage is only a stone’s throw away from the real one.
However, the characters’ journeys are universal as they learn about the value of acceptance, how to be good neighbours and how to change their own lives.
Watching these familiar characters stumble along is highly entertaining and engaging. Watching a dream cast play them is a delight.
Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours, adapted by Charlie Rhindress from the novel by Parrsboro’s Bruce Graham, has a cast of East Coast all-stars including former Ship’s Company co-founder Mary Vingoe, back on stage for her first time since 1991, Gay Hauser, Deb Allen, Frank MacKay and Bill Forbes. Younger actors Gordon White, Stephanie Folkins, making her professional debut, and Amy Reitsma are equally strong.
The characters are quirky, working class people living hard lives on "the snake" and sharing beers on hairdresser Tess’s front porch. In the wrong hands they could descend into stereotypes, but this cast embraces them and lifts them off the page into sympathetic, whole human beings, even the red neck, hothead Duddy.
While humour ripples throughout the two-hour drama, the problems these characters have are real and the stuff of small town secrets.
The play starts with Duddy in a state because his wife, Minnie, won’t let his daughter, Pearl, back in the house. Pearl has had a baby out of wedlock and won’t tell her mother who the father is. (Unwanted, teen pregnancy and how it affects a girl and her community is a theme in this play.)
Ivor Johnson (Frank MacKay) sagely advises his unhappy neighbours how to fix their problems, apparently existing beyond the messy stuff of life.
The miserable Minnie is the first person Ivor changes by urging her to change herself. Vingoe lifts Minnie out of her house-dress wretchedness into a woman who goes after what she wants — even if it’s just bingo and not cooking dinner for her family.
Vingoe never lets go of Minnie’s wry sense of humour and amusingly practical approach to life and marriage as she advises her sometimes distraught but strong-willed daughter.
Living close by is Tess (Deb Allen) and her fatherless, twin sons, the shy Edger and the overly confident lothario Ledger, both amazingly played by Gordon White in lightning physical transitions and with thoroughly convincing, heartfelt characterizations.
Edger is in love with Pearl, whom Reitsma plays with the right mix of vulnerability and strength as a very believable young woman. Ledger decides to skip a career in plumbing to become a paratrooper to impress the stunning blond Melissa, played by Stephanie Folkins with a glowing, innocent passion for spiritual over sexual life, even as she is tempted to stray.
Forbes’s Duddy is a character you shouldn’t like but kind of do, and that’s because Forbes gives him a breathtaking energy and verbal power as well as comfortably inhabiting a silly man who can, when forced, see beyond himself.
Hauser’s hoity-toity school teacher Claudia, a newcomer to Whitehall Road buying land next to Duddy’s, is a match in spirit as the two war over Duddy’s "collection" of old car parts. While her snooty horror over Duddy’s hub cap fence is a delight to witness, her desperation about her own and her daughter’s lives is tangible.
MacKay gives Ivor his calm, warm, all-knowing presence. Allen’s Tess also exudes an accepting warmth on top of the fierce practicality she shares with Minnie and Claudia.
Set designer and Ship’s Company veteran Stephen Osler, aided by lighting designer Michael Fuller, is back with a winning set that sprawls across the stage to depict multiple, simply defined, domestic locations as well as an ingenious store interior and a sea shore. The bridge towering over the other locations has one broken off girder suggesting a bigger unseen structure — an Osler trademark.
This bridge also acts as a symbol for the characters’ need to build bridges in dealing with one another and to walk forward in their own lives. There is a lot of period and character accuracy in Krista Levy’s costumes including cotton candy pink for Melissa and practical dresses for Pearl.
Director Pamela Halstead has kept the pace swiftly moving, and there’s hardly time to smile or laugh before the mood gets pulled down deeper.
These people are rough and ready in sexual and gender castigations and very 1950s in some ways, but a teen pregnancy can still ricochet through more than one life, and the biblical idea of a neighbour being someone who needs your help is still applicable to today.
Ship’s Company celebrates its anniversary with the type of show that has made the company a success, a story that connects wonderfully to the area but also to the stuff of human life. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours runs to July 26 Tuesdays to Sundays at 7:30 p.m. with a 2 p.m. Sunday matinee. Herbal cigarettes are smoked.
