Francis Končan’s Women of the Fur Trade opens tonight (Thursday) at the Aki Studio in a production by Native Earth Performing Arts.  I saw a preview last night.  It’s not an easy play to describe.  It’s a comedy.  But with several twists.  It has a historic setting.  But it plays fast and loose with time.  It’s funny, disturbing and relates events from a female point of view that rarely get seen that way.

So, in a fort somewhere on a reddish river in Treaty 1 territory three women sit in rocking chairs playing word games and drinking tea.  One is Settler, one is Métis and one is First Nations.  All are more or less obsessed with Louis Riel and, more surprisingly, with Thomas Scott.  They are surrounded by portraits of the two men (and Gabriel Dumont).  The time, initially at least, seems to be 1870 though they are familiar with a range of sages from Machiavelli to Andy Warhol to Mel Gibson and a decade and a half of events are condensed into the conversation.

Riel, portrayed as a kind of Trickster character, and Scott, rather more soft and sympathetic, at least on the surface, than one might expect appear.  Riel appears to have taken Scott on as a kind of amanuensis who maintains a romantic correspondence with the young Métis, Marie Angelique, which scandalises the prim, proper and matronly Cecilia though not the enigmatic Eugenia who appears to know rather more about Riel than either of the other women want to know.  For some reason the women are stuck in a room in the fort though sometimes Eugenia can come and go and Marie-Angelique escapes on one occasion.  Otherwise contact with the outside world, including John Asshole Macdonald, is maintained by a surprisingly efficient Canada Post.

The extent to which the women are observers excluded from events is signified in many ways.  The portraits on the walls come and go.  Sometimes they represent access to the outside world and sometimes they deny it.  Sometimes the characters they represent speak through them.  When the women want to voice what they imagine to be the thoughts and concerns of the male characters they resort to sock puppets.

Events play out as they must.  Treachery, dislocation, defeat, execution and genocide are all observed with greater or lesser detachment and from three distinctive points of view.  It’s funny, often very, laugh out loud, funny, in a slapstick sort of way but the sheer horror of the events repeatedly ejects us from any sort of comfort zone.  over time the relationship between the women changes from a kind of sisterhood to a recognition that in future their relationship will be determined by race.  It’s very disturbing.

It’s also very well executed.  Each of the three women is sharply characterised from Cheri Maracle’s Cecilia who sees woman’s role solely as mother and appendage to husband, to the Riel obsessed and weirdly romantic Marie Angelique of Kelsey Kanatan Wavey to the enigmatic Eugenia of Lisa Nasson.  The latter projects a much more active, engaged and liberated womanhood that teeters between modern feminism and the (diminishing) confidence of a woman from a matriarchal society.  She’s sassy, sometimes downright rude and capable of explosive violence but also ambiguous and (that word again) disturbing.

Jonathan Fisher’s Louis Riel, clad in a suit inspired by either a Métis sash or his grandmother’s curtains, is explosive.  In part caricature he also encapsulates all that’s really weird about Riel.  And that’s a lot.  It makes the final scene which features a deadly serious Riel going to his death that much more compelling.  Jesse Gervais’ Thomas Scott is, essentially, a foil to Riel with little left of the revolting historical character.  He’s soft and lovable in an Irish way.  A lonely Romantic rather than a genocidal thug.  Other characters mention his actual nature to which he assents but without ever acyually becoming menacing.  All of which ups the ambiguity factor.

So, terrific acting animated by tight direction by Kevin Loring.  The slapstick works because it’s paced right.  The unpleasant surprises come just unpredictably enough.  Evocative lighting by Jeff Harrison and sometimes startling sound design by MJ Dandaneau enhance the drama.

It’s rare, in any medium, for a work to make effective comedy out of truly tragic events without trivialising them or denying the enormity of the events described.  Women of the Fur Trade manages it pretty well.

Women of the Fur Trade continues at the Aki Studio until April 21st.  Bear in mind that this review is based on a preview and there may be tweaks!

Photo credit: Kate Dalton.