COURTING JOHANNA
By Marcia Johnson; Based on a short story by Alice Munro
Directed by Kate Lynch; Starring Catherine Fitch, Tova Smith
at the Blyth Festival in Blyth, Ont.
Catherine Fitch & Gil Garratt star in Courting Johanna at the Blyth Festival (Terry Manzo)
Internet Links
**
Alice Munro's acclaimed short-story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, has proved quite the inspiration for other artists.
Sarah Polley adapted the 2001 book's final story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, into her fine directorial debut, Away From Her. And now, the title tale has been turned into Courting Johanna, a play by Marcia Johnson premiering at the Blyth Festival (located in Munro's native Huron County, Ont.). It's a less-successful transformation of the source material than Polley's film, however.
Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of small-town Ontario in the 1950s - though the era is difficult to pinpoint in Kate Lynch's ambiguous staging - Johanna is a dignified, Scottish immigrant housekeeper played with unsentimental restraint by the perfectly cast Catherine Fitch.
Johanna works for the well-off Mr. McCauley, looking after his granddaughter, Sabitha (Lisa Norton), whose mother is dead and whose father, Ken, is a deadbeat looking for work out West.
When silly, spoiled Sabitha and her younger, but more mature friend Edith (Tova Smith) - the sensible daughter of an immigrant shoemaker - discover a personal letter Johanna has written to Ken, they decide to play a trick on her. More out of boredom than cruelty, they begin forging letters from "Ken" to the lonely Johanna, who opens her heart and confesses that before she became his pen pal, she had "only had one friend in my life."
When the semi-fictional correspondence becomes more explicitly romantic, events spiral out of control: Johanna takes off for Gdynia, Sask., with a load of furniture that belongs to Ken - an accusation of theft following in her wake.
While she captures Munro's Chekovian tone fairly well, Johnson struggles to find a consistent way to theatricalize the story. She follows Munro's structure too reverently, the shifting perspectives and short scenes seeming jerky and unfocused on stage. Peripheral shopkeepers and station agents get long, unnecessary monologues, while more central characters like Mr. McCauley (John Dolan) are left mysterious. The swaths of narration turned into soliloquy combined with Kelly Wolf's set, a series of backdrops covered in script, only emphasize this play's origins as a piece of prose.
Courting Johanna finds a bit more focus when we meet the teenage girls. Smith is very sympathetic as Edith, the evil genius behind the letter-writing scheme, slyly opening envelopes with steam, but Norton is overly shrill in her portrayal of Sabitha. Her cackling performance as the crude girl becomes very annoying very quickly.
For the first few scenes in the second act, however, the play does come together brilliantly when Johanna arrives in Gdynia and surprises Ken (a funny Gil Garratt), who is sick and holed up in a dilapidated hotel. (Their tenuous, silent pas de deux is reminiscent of Morris Panych's Vigil.)
Ultimately, Courting Johanna is a tribute to survivors like the title character: those resilient, often invisible immigrants who adapt to new circumstances without complaint.
In the field of adaptation, Johnson could learn a thing or two from Johanna. Edith is too accurate when she describes her adventure as "fantastical, but dull" - though one suspects that there is a good play buried in here waiting to be revealed after a couple, less reverent rewrites.
Courting Johanna continues at the Blyth Festival until Sept. 6. (http://www.blythfestival.com; 1-877-862-5984).
