Innocence Lost: When Truth is More Interesting Than Fiction

Photo:Erik Berg

The tragic story of Steven Truscott which played out in 1959, in the tiny town of Clinton Ontario, created all sorts of great theatrical expectations, especially with the media hype that accompanied the arrival of the play. Yes, it is a horrific story of a travesty of injustice! Yes, it involved the destruction of two young lives: the twelve year old girl whose murder was the most heartbreaking event, and the accused fourteen year old boy sentenced to be hanged but who had his sentence commuted to life in prison, before he was released in 2007.  This is a true story that will haunt the annals of Canadian history forever.

However, a story of such horrific proportions does not guarantee a good play, and in fact with an unsolved murder such as this one, where the truth is more disturbing than fiction, it is difficult to create a play that elicits a response stronger than the one brought out by the facts. Where does that leave the playwright or the director, in this case Beverley Cooper and Roy Surette.   How is it possible to deal with such events when a play runs the risk of reducing the effects of the events, experienced by all those concerned?  That is one question we might ask ourselves while watching this rather bland show that tried to be everything and that finally succeeded at nothing: a docudrama, a taught court room drama based on true court records,  a drama of investigative  journalism, moments of a theatre of objects, a soppy image of  Thornton Wilder’s style of  small town with a sweet little narrator who transformed it all into a memory play, and a modern multimedia show with flashbacks, real photos, multiple forms of lighting to create emotional  effect that worked at times but that often appeared irrelevant. Add to that an enormous cast of ten actors playing thirty-eight roles, rushing in and out, it  was not at all clear what the playwright, or director Roy Surette were trying to do. In fact one could say that the play drowned in its own mixed ambitions that finally showed it did not have a clear theatrical line.
The play is organized in two parts. Part one takes us from the friendly community of Clinton where children from the town fraternize with children whose fathers are military personnel, assigned to the neighbouring Air Base. That is important. These outsiders are seen as nomads, “itinerants”, undesirables. It suggests the first sense of rejection that might lead to prejudice and such a travesty of justice that we experience during the evening. This social split was interesting and could have been highlighted by the director as element adding to the theatrical complexity of the show. But it all slid by as a passing remark. Little by little events take a turn for the worse, the search is on for Lynne Harper’s body and the rumours start flowing about Steven Truscott who was the last person to see her alive. The long detailed chronology of daily events in the town, along with the events leading to the drama became extremely monotonous especially since the multiplicity of characters and the rapid shifting of the dialogue, the rather thin characterizations (even Truscott himself) that resulted from the movement and the uneven performances were ultimately extremely tiresome. Add this to the fact that the mass of details and strict chronology of events, contradicted the dream-like logic of a memory play which would have emphasized certain moments of horror that should have been highlighted in Sarah’s narrative. The stylistic confusion due to the author and the director, cancelled out the effect of the play. Then there is the court room drama, where Steven is found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. This brings the first part to an end.
The trial showed us a parade of witnesses whose testimonies are  based on innuendo, rumour, suppositions, bad police work, questionable scientific examination  and  apparently true statements  of young school  friends  who  were manipulated by the Crown attorney to make their testimonies coincide with the prosecution’s desire to get a guilty verdict and put the case to rest.  This could have been the moment of revelation of the outrageous behaviour of the courts at that period, 1959, but none of this evoked any kind of anger, or even mild annoyance in relation to the audience. That should have been the focal point of the show but it all passed by too quickly, without any dramatic emphasis given to any portion of the trial. The staging, with a few judicious cuts, might have saved this but it didn’t.
The rhythm in the second movement of the evening picked up noticeably with the arrival of the investigative journalist, played with much energy by Fiona Reid who understood that the trial was a miscarriage of justice.  At this point the play’s focus shifted and it became an illustration of the sad phrase uttered by Sarah after the trial:  “Steven had to be guilty because the court found him guilty”, a statement that was the centre of the whole argument that guided that second portion of the evening. It pointed to the “loss of innocence” as the moment when one realizes that the justice system is not infallible, that it can make mistakes. It also reveals that in our society, nothing must be allowed to cast any doubt upon the judicial institutions of a country; otherwise it’s the end of everything. Wasn’t that the argument used by the extreme right wing government in France during the Dreyfus affair?  Thus all is sacrificed to maintain that fiction. This premise guides the rest of the play. No one wants to change his or her story. People are not at all anxious to discuss their testimony with the journalist. No one is even anxious to see Steven cleared of the crime. The system must be maintained at all costs and that should have provoked real anger on the part of the public, but I doubt it did. Something in the staging did not work.
Sarah, who has always defended Steven, changes her mind and tries to convince herself he is guilty. The problem is that this is Sarah’s memory show so her shift in attitude was central. Nevertheless, her change of attitude was not developed theatrically at all and she became an empty shell of a character spouting ideas that the writer put in her head with no human motivation at all. Perhaps this was also the actor’s fault. She evaporated as a character and lost control of her story.  And again, the play whizzed by at a phenomenal rate, always in a terrible hurry to get it over with, never allowing us to grasp the emotional impacts, the confusion and the extent of the guilt that, we can only assume, must have been gnawing at them all.
There were some interesting moments related to the  use of James Lavoie’s  set especially thanks to  Luc Prairie’s lighting  design but the multiple acting spaces were not exploited in any useful way and the overall impression was that the writer was both  operating in a form of esthetic confusion,  and completely  overwhelmed by the material. None of this was helped by a timid staging that did not dare to take the plunge into the social depths of these shameful events and reveal all that might have made us see this parody of justice in a completely new and perhaps even worse light.
Innocence Lost continues at the NAC until March 16.