Competing Visions of How to Play a Tree; Two Plays Set in the Woods Feature Actors in Arboreal Roles

Riffs on SHakespeare: Birnam Wood, The Woods
Theatre passe muraille, The young centre
the national post

As the late Spike Milligan used to sing: "I talk to the trees, that's why they put me away." The Tank House, one of the smaller performance spaces in the Young Centre, has The Woods, the third part of the planned tetralogy known as The Mill. The main stage at Theatre Passe Muraille has Birnam Wood, a movement-based piece (which doesn't mean it's mimed or danced) with Shakespearean antecedents. Both feature actors pretending to be trees, but neither to the extent that you might expect. In fact, for large stretches of both, you can't see the wood for the plays. Which may be as it should be.

J.R.R. Tolkien got very angry at Shakespeare for cheapening the potent idea of a mobile forest attacking a castle by making the trees a front for a gang of mere humans. His militant Ents in The Lord of the Rings were his demonstration of how the thing should have been done. Birnam Wood, conceived and directed by Allyson McMackon for her Theatre Rusticle company, has at least one moment whose sentiments seem to echo Tolkien's: One of the six actors, Hume Baugh, asked if the camouflaged soldiers advancing on Dunsinane really looked like a wood, says that, no, they just looked like people holding broken branches in front of them. His character is announced in the program as "Tree of Dreams -A King," and he does indeed have an arboreal circlet on his head. He's mostly a gentle presence, though there's one sequence in which he plays the warrior, and, having despatched his opponents, returns to a victory party singing "when Johnny comes marching home." His fellow celebrants aren't impressed. The sequence seems to be the show's pacifist response to the account in Macbeth of the hero's meeting the Norwegian invader and unseaming him from the nave to the chaps: Not, it is hinted here, a very nice way to behave. Similarly, we have a scene that seems to be recreating the murder of Duncan, from Duncan's point of view; we are made to feel what it must have been like to have been on the receiving end of that bloody dagger.

Few of these Macbeth motifs have much to do with Birnam Wood itself, though there's an arboreal setting with an especially impressive black-and-white floor-cloth that extends, in Lindsay Anne Black's design, to the very verge of a foreshortened auditorium. Perhaps the idea is that Shakespeare's whole play is a forest, and they have extracted a few limbs from it. There were plenty of times when I couldn't make root or branch of what was going on, but a dominant theme seems to be relations between the sexes, as extrapolated from the dysfunctional relationship of the Macbeths themselves. The problem is that, though the various sequences are fluently staged and executed, they don't cohere very well, while the underlying view of love and war comes across as finger-wagging. Also, some of the more flirtatious episodes seem more suited to another Shakespearean wood, the one near Athens.

Maev Beaty, playing "Tree of Dreams -Critters" (I don't know what that means, either) has a piercing scene in which she oscillates between pleading for a man's attention and enumerating all the domestic things she has done for him. One of our best younger actresses, she has sometimes come on too comically strong; here, she's both disciplined and delicate. She's also been through both earlier instalments of The Mill, though she is, of course, absent from the new one. The Woods does involve a chorus of actors playing oracular trees, whom neither Tara Beagan's writing nor Sarah Garton Stanley's direction can prevent from seeming as absurd as the king's comment in Birnam Wood might suggest. They are, however, peripheral. The central action is absorbing. In this play, set centuries before Parts One and Two, we learn the origin of the buried bones (buried even before the play begins) that were to exert such a baleful influence. In 1640, before the Mill was even a mill, its future site is occupied by a First Nations woman and her daughter whom she has taught, with good reason, to hate and fear the white man. Their equilibrium is disturbed when an actual white man, an ethnographer who's got lost, almost literally stumbles upon them. Gradually -- very gradually -- an attraction develops between mother and intruder, one that Ryan Hollyman and Michelle Latimer present with a delicate tragicomic awareness; Hollyman is especially delightful as a man half- fearful for his life, half-afraid to believe his luck. He describes the daughter as "a weird child"; Holly Lewis, who has specialized in this cycle at presenting weird children, does her fullest work yet as a girl in whom tribal and filial resentments come combustibly together. The four remaining members of a strong ensemble double as talking trees and French colonizers on stilts; neither gives them much chance at subtlety, though Michelle Monteith gets an amazing amount of graciousness from the ethnographer's wife. At three-quarters done, The Mill still doesn't add up to the statement about Canada that seems to have been intended, and this segment is shorter than its predecessors on Gothic thrills. But it's the best, so far, on concentrated human content.