In my travels through this great nation of ours, there is just one province I have never visited.
It’s the one I’ve always wanted to see ever since I read The Shipping News, which ironically was written by an American, or heard Stompin’ Tom Connors’ The Man on the Moon is a Newfie.
How I’ve longed to kiss the cod on that jagged mass of rock and coastline on the Atlantic known as Newfoundland and Labrador.
On Wednesday, I experienced the next best thing, when a taste of the Rock played itself on the stage at Powerhouse Theatre.
David French’s play Salt-Water Moon, directed by Arlene Spearman, with its true-blue Newfoundland story, is what Anne of Green Gables is to P.E.I.; what Hagar Shipley is to rural Manitoba; what Duddy Kravitz is to Montreal… you get the picture.
Set 10 years after the First World War and two decades before Newfoundland joined Confederation, the story is told by only two characters, Jacob Mercer and Mary Snow, former loves who have been separated by circumstance.
You see, Jacob took off a year before, without word, to Toronto (that’s “Tronna” to most Newfoundlanders). The play starts as he returns to his home of Coley’s Point on Conception Bay on the night of the new moon. There, he seeks out Mary staring up to the stars in front of the house where she works as a maid.
That house’s facade, authentically built by set designer Gord Bannerman, with stars as a backdrop, thanks to lighting designer Kelly Ingersoll, adds to the Maritime mystique and does not take the focus away from the story. And it’s a wholly engaging and wordy story, told by actors Gavin Opp and Andrea Pittman, who at 19 and 20 give Jacob and Mary fully lived dimension.
Both deserve a “golden dory”, my own made up award for a Dora, for their efforts.
It’s just the two of them on stage for one-and-a-half hours, no intermission, living and breathing a past so distant from what most Canadians know about Newfoundland.
And they do it justice.
Jacob is the “b’y” (that’s Newfoundland speak for boy) when it comes to telling a fascinating story, whether its describing the atrocious conditions of the trenches during the First World War and how most of the Newfoundland Regiment was lost at the first Battle of the Somme at Beaumont-Hamel in France on July 1, 1916 (remember that date, kids.) Then there’s the story on how his father came back from the war and had to go in collar (join a fishing fleet) on the Labrador.
Mary’s circumstances at home are just as hard. She lost her father to the war and her mom, unable to cope, has placed her sister in a home in St. John’s.
Mary works in the house of the Right Honourable Henry Dawe to make ends meet and is marrying local school teacher Jerome McKenzie, whose father used to be Jacob’s dad’s boss (a bone of contention for Jacob), to escape her situation and rescue her sister.
Jacob’s return upends all that, and well, this is a love story so you can imagine how it all turns out.
However, nothing is treacly, thanks to all the historical backstory of what brought these two together and what separated them.
Hats off also to Opp and Pittman for the rather fine job on those Irish-tinged, Newfoundland accents.
Salt-Water Moon continues at Powerhouse Theatre until March 7, with shows nightly (except Sunday and Monday) at 7:30 p.m. Matinées take place Sunday and March 7 at 2 p.m. Contact the Ticket Seller at 250-549-7469 or www.ticketseller.ca for tickets.
– Kristin Froneman is the arts and entertainment editor at the Vernon Morning Star.
