JUSTICE: A tragic event still searching for its stage presence

Photo: Bruce Barrett

Playwright Leonard Linklater from the Yukon, and founder of the Gwaandak Theatre, has joined with dramaturg DDKugler on the West coast as well as director Yvette Nolan from the Native Earth Performing Arts group in Toronto to tell us about the tragedy of the two Tagish Nantuck brothers. It appears in two parts. The first part shows the meeting and the killing. And second part becomes the murder trial. The sequence of events is the following. The brothers executed two white gold prospectors during the period of the Gold Rush. I say executed because the deaths were shown to be ritual killings. Other prospectors had accidentally poisoned two native people with the cyanide used for mining the gold. The brother’s did not kill these white men as acts of vengeance but rather as a debt that the prospectors owed to the families of the dead. The killings were therefore justifiable from the point of view of the Native culture.

 

The main source of serious malaise was the fact that neither group understood the other’s language or the other’s culture. The wall between them was perfectly sealed. Thus, during the trial, there was no defense, no explanation, and no discussion about motives. When the defense lawyer starts getting glimpses of why the boys acted the way they did, he states that this clan must have had its own justice system before white people arrived. The lawyer seems to get it but it doesn’t matter because two systems of justice have already collided. Finally, to justify his position, the presiding judge declares that our system is the dominant one and we cannot have multiple legal systems in this country.

In fact those are the laws under which we live now and it appears that, at the end, Linklater suggests that the problem has contemporary meaning. Questions of land claims are still very present. Many people, native and more recent “settler” populations want to operate under their own religion-driven laws. A recent controversy created by the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario had a cataclysmic effect. However, can one equate the practices of founding peoples with those of the more recently arrived peoples? That is a real problem. And what about the legitimacy of the colonial process that brought us all here in the first place? The debate is enormous but it has been a long time since questions of such dimension have come to the Canadian stage.

However, the main thrust of Linklater’s play is the tragic result brought about by the lack of communication between the two groups of people and unfortunately, the result was disappointing. The author had spent much time pondering over the history, the facts, the need to explain the cultural differences and the clearest way to express them. It also appeared that he gave relatively little thought to the form of this event and how one might best transmit such ideas using all the most effective strategies of a performance grounded in the technique of storytelling. .

As a story telling performance, this show would have been a lot more powerful with a narrator present in some form. The absence of an obvious narrator to transgress time and spatial boundaries, integrated directly into the show made it much less powerful. What the story telling mode did was produce a lot of talk. Much of it was repetitive, some of it was even poetic, some became caricature, much was didactic, much of it was intended to create an illusion of realism but none of it moved me at all and the actors, whose performances were generally weak, certainly did not reach those emotional heights. In fact the need to constantly explain cultural differences eventually diverted us from the tragedy because it became overkill as all sorts of personal anecdotes kept intervening. Ultimately, the word broke the rhythm of the show. .. There were some good moments of ritualized movement where the music, the sound effects and the bodies dancing and singing expressed much because they stirred the imagination and went beyond the illusion of reality.

The fact that we know the outcome of the play poses a problem. It means the story is no longer the centre of dramatic interest. The real motor of the tragedy is the fact that in this situation, human communication was impossible, that language was impotent, even harmful because it created deadly misunderstandings. And still, the characters never stopped talking. Curiously, the play did nothing to symbolize that impotence of language by substituting that useless verbal language with a more symbolic corporeal language or else with a heightened form of spoken word. Some of the visuals and certainly the soundscape created a sense of strangeness and malaise that underlined this but the form of storytelling became extremely problematic.

Absent voices from the past, absent voices of those dead men, telling us what they saw, knowing what the brothers saw, heard and felt at that time, would have made much more sense and been a lot more gripping. That would also have eliminated the repetitive dialogue which was not working. No thought seemed to have been given to those kinds of questions related to the performance of stories, the way the oral storytelling traditions renews the use of language, or the performance of space and time and even changes in acting styles. Story telling opens the portals so “other” worlds, to transcendent worlds to worlds that are more flexible than illusions of reality which is what we saw here and that realism is very restrictive on stage.

Justice could be an important play but this present version for the stage is still very much a work in progress. It tells the story and defines the cultural misunderstanding and perhaps for the moment, that is enough. But it is not great theatre, and given the material involved, this could become an important work within the Canadian canon. Let’s see where Leonard Linklater and his colleagues go from here.

JUSTICE by Leonard Linklater

A Gwaadak Theatre production

Directed by Yvette Nolan

Set and properties design: Linda Leon

Lighting design: Graham Ockley

Sound design: Dave Haddock

Costume designe: Melina Sheldon

Dramaturgy: DDKugler and Yvette Nolan

Original music: Jared Lutchman, Ga Ata, Sean Ltáguhâ McDougall

Tagish consultants: Pat Joe, Jared Lutchman