The Cavan Blazers Written and directed by Robert Winslow Starring Erik Burns, Emily Glasspool and Tim Walker At the 4th Line Theatre in Millbrook, Ont. Rating: **
For 10 seasons, Robert Winslow has been harvesting local history and grinding it into theatre on his ancestors' farm up the road from Millbrook, in Ontario's Cavan Township. The scripts, which he mainly writes himself, are unvarnished things full of naked exposition and simplistic dialogue. The acting, provided by local artists from nearby Peterborough and volunteers from this rural community, is often flat and awkward. But as a cast of 50 spill out across the barnyard or a trio of riders gallop across the fields towards the audience, the vigour of Winslow's project is irresistible. At the 4th Line Theatre, history and theatre are the fruits of plentiful fields to be picked by anyone with a mind to it.
4th Line began in 1992 with The Cavan Blazers, a play about Protestant hoodlums who tried to drive Catholics from the area in the mid-19th century. That's the show Winslow is now reviving to celebrate the 10th season, and it proves typical of 4th Line's strengths and weaknesses.
Never naively celebratory, Winslow is unafraid of the ugliness and sorrow he finds in local stories. The Cavan Blazers recounts how, in 1854, a justice of the peace named Patrick Maguire (Erik Burns), long determined to establish a Catholic church in the Protestant township, finally brought out settlers from Peterborough to provide the numbers that might convince the bishop in Kingston to create a parish. The scheme was disastrous; the Catholic settlers were hounded, harassed and eventually driven out by a Protestant gang called the Blazers, who had been raised on stories of Catholic atrocities perpetrated against their grandparents back in Ireland.
This story is staged as a series of 21 scenes and is played out in the barnyard and the field beyond it. As always with 4th Line, the high points of the production are the crowd scenes, the comedy and the exuberant use of the setting. The show mercilessly exposes the Blazers as bigoted thugs and plays out most of their violent antics as black comedy: They steal chickens, con the local barman, tie the toll keeper to his own gate and infiltrate a Catholic wedding in drag, creating some effective grotesque along the way.
Tim Walker plays Blazer leader Dane Swane as a wild-eyed kook and gets strong support from Peter Ens as the simple and overexcited Little Dick. The show includes some equally lively yet unsettling work from the angry band of Irish settlers, lead by Nauni Parkinson as the angriest of the lot -- she takes an oversized mallet to one Blazer's hands -- and features an Orangemen's parade complete with King Billy on a real horse.
What's not compelling is the less physical side of the story that is played out in the Maguire home, where the drawing room was made to serve as a makeshift Catholic church. Winslow's script hints that Maguire's motivations in bringing Catholicism to Cavan might have had as much to do with his ego as his faith, and speculates about tensions there might have been in his relationship with his Methodist wife; but neither Emily Glasspool as Ann Maguire nor Burns as Maguire himself bring much emotional naturalism to their roles. The show particularly needs a stronger and more complex vision of Maguire than Burns's loud declaiming and repeating smiling can offer. To Sept. 2; 705-876-6323 or 1-800-814-0055.
Kate Taylor