Edward Curtis Project: A superb staging of a problematic script

Photo: Andrew Alexandre. Todd Duckworth (Edmund Curtis) and Quelemia Sparrow (Angeline)

The first point to be made about The Edward Curtis Project is that the production itself is exquisite.

Playwright Marie Clements’s direction is assured and imaginative — in the seamlessness of its ever-changing visual imagery, in its crucial attentiveness to mood shifts, in its balancing of naturalism with a more elusive expressionism, in the ethereal beauty of its soundscape.

Furthermore, it’s rare for back projections to be used so well. And their presence is an essential component of Clements’s attempt to revisit the influential but unreliable world of Edward Curtis who once enjoyed international fame for his allegedly “authentic” photographs of First Nations people throughout North America. These blown-up relics from nearly a century ago often dominate the Greenberg Centre stage, providing an eerie visual counterpoint to the more unsettling truths about an obsessive white man who saw it as his mission to document ‘the vanishing Indian” through the medium of the photograph but whose manipulative, orchestrated images constituted an ongoing lie.

Clements’s production, of course, is a shared triumph which also embraces the talents of set designer Ivo Valentik, projection designers Jamie Griffiths and Tim Matheson, lighting designer John Webber (superb), soundscape creator Bruce Ruddell and singer and songwriter Leela Gilday. The result, in terms of production values, is undeniably impressive. More the pity then that all these creative forces should be harnessed in aid of an ultimately disappointing play.

This is the second time in a month, we’ve been exposed to the type of dramatic material that urges us to acknowledge its Importance. Given today’s heightened awareness of First Nations initiatives, you’re probably already wanting to root for it even as you enter the theatre.

A few weeks ago, Innocence Lost dealt clumsily and ineffectively with the Steven Truscott case and the travesty of justice which ensued. With The Edward Curtis Project, we’re drawn into an examination of issues of race, guilt (both white and aboriginal) and, above all, identity. This time, to be sure, we’re thankfully denied the simplistics of the Truscott play. Dramatist Marie Clements is inviting us into a more complex, more troublingly nuanced world — one in which the romanticized and misleading sepia imagery of Edward Curtis’s images collide with more substantial truths about First Nations culture in all its inconvenient diversity (inconvenient to those among us who prefer neater, less irksome pigeon-holing), its anguish, and its resilience in the face of adversity and denial of its real essence.

On stage ,The Edward Curtis Project has the memorable attributes of a shimmering, multi-faceted tone poem — but this does not mean that it qualifies as a viable play. If the centre cannot hold, it is because there is no real centre in Clements’s shifting kaleidoscope. There are certainly passages of yearning lyricism. Some scenes do emerge with sharp dramatic focus. And the glint of irony is frequent: in an early scene in which Todd Duckworth’s Curtis, a man in love with his own image and sense of noble mission, lectures a Carnegie Hall audience on the vanishing Indian, oblivious to the fact that he is being insufferably patronizing towards the subject of his speech; in another moment when Curtis rummages in his photographer’s case for traditional wardrobe items, including a long black wig, which he wants his current subject to wear in order to look more “authentic”; in a female Metis photo-journalist’s revealing pronouncement that she feels like a foreign correspondent in her own country.

That journalist is Angeline, portrayed with lacerating honesty by Quelemia Sparrow. She’s the evening’s most interesting character, her own agonizing crisis of identity reflecting the play’s most pervasive concern : the tension between reality and perception, a tension that found particularly unsettling utterance in Edward Curtis’s deceptive photographs — or so the wisdom of hindsight tells us and so the script would have us believe.

But how big a burden of guilt is Curtis expected to bear in the world of this play? It’s hard to say, given that he doesn’t emerge here as anyone who would particularly engage an audience’s interest. We get those glimpses of unconscious arrogance and innate white superiority towards cultures he revered but couldn’t comprehend. We learn that his marriage was a mess. And we endure his ghostly re-emergence in contemporary times as an amiable shade who calls himself Chief and seeks to provide some kind of solace to Angeline, tormented as she is by a real-life Inuit tragedy she has experienced first-hand as a journalist as well her agonizing uncertainty over the role she should be playing in a white world.

But it’s questionable how much of a contribution Curtis’s hallucinatory appearances really make to this play — despite a title that implies it’s mainly about him. Instead, they may simply add to the confusion of an audience hopeful for a few substantial guideposts. And diligent though Todd Duckworth’s portrayal maybe, he remains a shadowy figure, a cipher, a convenient foil for the playwright’s agenda, but not much more.

For all the sustained, endlessly fluid imagery of this production, it fails to conceal the evidence of a play which isn’t tracking effectively. One can nevertheless applaud the other two cast members. Kathleen Duborg is convincing both as Curtis’s estranged wife and more than plausible as Angeline’s half-sister, a psychiatrist whose eye is so much on the main chance that she’s ready to abandon her heritage. And Kevin Loring scores as a native translator with a strong BS detector. But individually impressive moments are not enough to guarantee dramatic cohesion for a script which seems wayward, muddled, and undefined. It is also astoundingly weak in exposition.

One does see the potential for a memorable play amidst the tangles of the present script — a play which would offer a more linear and in-depth look at the the trials and tribulations of Angeline, by far the most fully realized character we encounter here. But what would happen to Edward Curtis in such a scenario? And would anybody care?

The Edward Curtis Project

A co-production of the National Arts Centre and Great Canadian Theatre Company in association with Red Diva Projects

Irving Greenberg Theatre: April 2-21

Written and directed by Marie Clements

Clara Curtis/ Dr. Clara . . . . . .Kathleen Duborg

Edward Curtis/Chief . . . . . . . .Todd Duckworth

Yiska/Translators . . . . . . . . . . Kevin Loring

Angeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Quelemia Sparrow

Set Designer . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Ivo Valentik

Costumes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Barbara Clayden

Projection Designers . . . . . . . .Jamie Griffiths and Tim Matheson

Lighting Designer . . . . . . . . . .John Webber

Composer/Sound Designer . . .Bruce Ruddell

Sound Consultant . . . . . . . . . .Troy Slocum

Singer/Songwriter . . . . . . . . . .Leela Gilday

Props . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Andreas Kahre