Women of the Fur Trade is an amazing, multi-layered, 110-minute satire with a hot emotional core around land, love and loss. It’s a delightful feminist twist on history and an insight into a conflict over land and culture that very much reverberates today.
Running without intermission at Neptune’s studio theatre until Oct. 11, the play by Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright Frances Koncan is so funny you are unaware of its serious undercurrents until the perfect, poetic end.
Women of the Fur Trade, an award-winner at the Toronto Fringe Festival, a Stratford Theatre production in 2023 and in Halifax today as an A Thousand Island Playhouse production, is a fast-paced, hyper-real, tragi-comedy about three women stuck in time and place “on the banks of a Reddish River in Treaty One Territory” during the rise and fall of Louis Riel.
Eugenia (Joelle Peters) is an Objiwe woman who can leave the fort to sell her furs and see her family; she is most deeply connected to her culture and has strong opinions on politics and men. Opposite to her is Cecilia (Alison Beckwith), a European settler’s wife and young mother who is obsessed with drinking tea and just wants everybody to get along. In the centre of this trio is Cecilia’s best friend, the lively Métis woman Marie-Angelique (Danelle Charette), who was abandoned by her Indigenous mother. Apart from this pain, she loves to have fun and has a tremendous crush on Louis Riel, sending him letters that are magically mailed and delivered by the wind and unusual props. As the Red River conflict builds, it stresses these solid, playful friendships.
Because Koncan doesn’t set her play in a specific time and place you are never exactly sure if these women are alive in real time or perhaps ghosts awoken to insert themselves into male-dominated history.
This time-stretching fabulism allows Koncan to raid 21st century slang and pop culture in a highly-effective, extremely funny way and to give her characters an unreal quality, as if they were both in Manitoba in the 19th century and in a time-stretching alternate reality. These characters love to play-act as does their creator. A comic high point is Riel and Thomas Scott fighting with sticks as if they were guns and spitting out famous movie lines like, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
The male characters, Louis Riel (Elliot Gosh) and Thomas Scott (Eli Ham), are often very silly and very comical as the fictional bromance between Riel and Scott founders with Koncan inserting the true history of Scott’s fate. The actors and Koncan find the complexities in each man, as ridiculous as each can be. Riel is both an egotistical poet and prophet, and a hero; Thomas Scott is an Irishman simply seeking a better life but also a villanous traitor to Riel and the Indigenous way of life.
While the male characters exist in the outside world, Cecilia and Marie-Angelique are trapped within a confined space. Director Keith Barker has a great sense of limited versus open space and how to craft movement and gesture within those spaces. He is blessed with a very fine cast delivering excellent, intense and nuanced performances. The shifting tones between and within Cecilia and Marie-Angelique are particularly fine because, like the two men, they contain a lot of conflict in world views. Can friendship trump cultural and political differences?
Women of the Fur Trade is beautifully staged on a set, designed by Jay Havens, that makes you go “wow” the minute you enter the theatre. The walls are covered in hanging portraits of famous and rich men throughout history from Sir John A. MacDonald to painter Bob Ross. The cloistered fort interior contains miniature houses that are boxes for tea cups and dolls. Outside the wall of the fort are a huge array of tiny figures and objects from history.
Asa Benally’s costumes of heavy fur coats with a fantastic turquoise and pink dress for Marie Angelique are wonderful as is the lighting — very key to the creation of this world — by Kahentanó:ron Brianna Montour. Lucas Ruddell is the sound designer and composer and Meg Lydon the stage manager with Eve Rowlett as apprentice stage manager and Stephanie Fung as apprentice director.
As you may have noticed, Women on the Fur Trade is hard to describe; you can go for a great night of guaranteed comedy but you’ll likely come home intrigued by history — both Indigenous and feminist — and how it encapsulates painful and problematic issues that rage throughout the world today.
Women of the Fur Trade is a co-presentation of the Prismatic Arts Festival and Neptune Theatre; tickets are at https://www.neptunetheatre.com/
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Tags: a-thousand-islands-playhouse, books, feminism, frances-koncan, indigenous-theatre, neptune-theatre, reviews, women-of-the-fur-trade
