By Brian Taylor
Morning Star contributor
Although I lived in many different towns growing up, I spent the bulk of my childhood in Armstrong and refer to it as my hometown.
Living in a smaller town, especially a farming community, allows citizens a quieter, more relaxed pace of life. When you move away from that pace and then return, it becomes more noticeable.
Someone else who grew up in Armstrong, moved away and came back, is playwright and director Mark Trussell. The Asparagus Community Theatre is currently presenting his play Fertile Ground at the Centennial Theatre in Armstrong.
The play is a comedy about a misunderstanding that centres around a young couple, David and Deanna (Phelan Gotto and Kaila Sinclair), who are visiting his parents, laid-back, hippy-type Armstrongians Adam and Leona (Buck Crich and Mary Ann Domarchuk). When Deanna’s notoriously uptight, conservative Calgarian parents, Jim and Pam (Paul Kirkwood-Hackett and Lois Archer-Duell), show up, the tension escalates as do the misunderstandings.
David’s confusion concerning his mom having to kill a mouse leads to his thinking she has murdered a homeless person named Daisy (Aileen Brand), whom Leona allows into her home to eat, with the door always unlocked.
“She just kept coming around and coming around, getting into my brownies,” says Leona.
David goes from disbelief, to horror, into shock as the story progresses, which provides a great deal of the comedy, but there is just as much happening in the background. The extremity of the two sets of parents, on either side of the political, social, cultural scale, is also joke inducing. Where Adam and Leona are in your face about yoga, home birthing and maybe not going into the greenhouse, Jim and Pam are quietly drunk, unhappy and mean, but in a funny way.
Taking place entirely in the kitchen of Adam and Leona’s home, both the set and the action are particularly rich. Colourful and adorned with many accoutrements one would expect, the set made a very convincing home, providing the eye much to examine.
During the entire play, the characters prepared and ate real food and drink, in a fully functional kitchen. Not only providing a free plug for delicious Armstrong asparagus but pulling the audience into a normal, comfortable familiarity via methods difficult to achieve on stage.
During all this, many subtle jokes are also cleverly interwoven, such as drunk Pam tapping her glass when it is once again empty.
Ultimately, I think Fertile Ground is about a little more than what sits on the surface, a funny misunderstanding and dichotomous personal preferences. While showing us where these characters currently are in their lives, the story springs forth from where they came. They are all the products of the fertile ground of their own hometowns.
Perhaps people can’t help but come together in groups that differ in small but noticeable ways, a particular foible, leaning or manner, such is culture. Distance makes those cultures differ further, such as in the case of Deanna’s parents, the Calgarians. Admittedly, this is not particularly scientific, but it does make for a very funny play and it is well executed.
Produced by Lara Sheridan and Mandy Penner, Fertile Ground continues today through Saturday. Curtain is at 8 p.m. Tickets are available at The Guy Next Door, 3450A Okanagan St., Armstrong, call 250-546-0950 or get them at the door. The play features some coarse language.
Ed note: Reel Reviews columnist BrianTaylor is normally The Morning Star’s film reviewer. We thought it was time he checked out some live theatre in his hometown.
