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review

Layne Coleman and Sarah Sherman in Peace River Country.Cylla von Tiedemann

Wiebo Ludwig died in 2012 but his cantankerous ghost continues to haunt northwestern Alberta, where just last month a pipeline was vandalized not far from his Trickle Creek farm.

His name may not be familiar today, but 15 or 20 years ago, Ludwig was almost a household name, at least in Western Canada. Part Bible-thumping patriarch of a traditional Christian community, part ecoterrorist who sabotaged oil wells, he provoked complicated feelings in many of us. You admired his defiant stance against big oil – if not exactly his means of expressing it – even as you felt distaste for his Old Testament way of life.

In his time, Ludwig inspired a book (Andrew Nikiforuk's Saboteurs), a National Film Board documentary (Wiebo's War), a TV movie and even a musical – An Eye for an Eye, by Calgary's Ghost River Theatre. Now his story is being told again, by Toronto-based German playwright Maria Milisavljevic, who has turned it into an intimate little drama called Peace River Country for Tarragon Theatre.

It would seem an opportune time to revisit the Ludwig saga. As that recent pipeline incident reminds us – not to mention the controversy over the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway projects – Wiebo's war is still being waged. Besides, it also offers an intriguing variation on the mix of terrorism and religious fundamentalism. There's a frisson of what Milisavljevic's play might be in its sharp opening scene, where Mom (Janet Laine Green) piously sings a hymn at one end of a dinner table while Dad (Layne Coleman), at the other end, talks about building a bomb.

Alas, Peace River Country never lives up to that potential. Much of the time it's nothing more than a fictionalized retracing of the key events at Trickle Creek, told entirely from the Ludwig family's perspective, with little in the way of context or complexity.

Wiebo, known here simply as Dad, has strong religious ties to nature and has established a peaceful little Eden for his clan in the Alberta backwoods. But then nearby sour gas wells start poisoning the water and air, making his livestock sick. Complaints to the authorities fall on deaf ears. When daughter Jemima (Sarah Sherman) gives birth to a stillborn child, the family escalates its protests from pouring crude oil on the carpet of a government office to blowing up wells.

Dad is caught and sent to prison for three years. After he returns, the accidental shooting of a teenage trespasser on the farm turns the clan into pariahs in the local community. By then, the stressed family members are at each other's throats and their Eden, as the son Joe (Benjamin Sutherland) bitterly observes, has turned into Hell.

I was expecting more from Milisavljevic, whose previous play at Tarragon, the immigrant thriller Abyss, was a rich and artful piece of writing. (She also translated Tarragon's hit production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the original ecowarrior play.) True, there are poetic moments here and some attempt at giving Wiebo/Dad's struggles a biblical parallel – or not. At one point, he rejects a reading from the Book of Job and chooses defiance over patience. But the playwright's insular approach to the Ludwig story provides no historical or political framework for those unfamiliar with it, while her four characters are barely developed.

Instead, the show's fine cast settles into types. A silver-bearded Coleman, looking very much like Ludwig, varies a gently pedantic preacher's tone with moments of trembling rage. Laine Green wears the expression of a quietly sorrowful Madonna (and I don't mean the pop star, although her character does do a lot of singing). Sherman is by turns coltish and fiery as the daughter, while Sutherland as Wiebo's son is a stubborn, bewhiskered chip off the old block.

Director Richard Rose, who gave Abyss a stunning staging, brings some of the same elements to this production, including a superb lighting design by Jason Hand that at times evokes pastoral religious paintings. But the show could have used the nimble choreography of Abyss's Nova Bhattacharya; instead, the movement is hampered by the conceit of having much of the action take place around that dinner table. Curtis Wehrfritz's set, wedged into Tarragon's tiny Extraspace, also features a forest of naked, spindly hemlock trees with gnarled roots, suspended a few feet from the stage – a striking visual effect, but an impediment in the scenes where the actors are required to run through the woods.

Ludwig spoke of how the oil and gas industry needed to ditch fossil fuels and find alternative energy sources. Today, in light of climate change, few – apart from the Trump administration – would disagree. Whatever we may think of his religious practices or terrorist tactics, the man really was a prophet crying in the wilderness. He deserves a stronger play.

Peace River Country runs until March 19 (tarragontheatre.com).

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