Wheatfields Vs. Weedfield | Glenn Nelson and Coralie Cairns are shocked to find someone growing pot on their farmland in Ken Cameron’s Harvest.
DETAILS
HARVEST
Directed by John Hudson. Written by Ken Cameron. Starring Coralie Cairns and Glenn Nelson. Varscona Theatre (10329-83 Ave). Nov. 5-22. Tickets available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/www.tixonthesquare.com) or the Shadow Theatre box office (434-5564).
“The story is very true to life,” playwright Ken Cameron says of Harvest, which kicks off Shadow Theatre’s 2009/2010 season tonight (Thursday). Like Cameron’s earlier play My One and Only, which dealth with the romance between a Canadian teenager and Marilyn Monroe (who has come to the Rockies to film a new movie), Harvest explores the culture clash between small towns and big cities.
Harvest is “a true story,” Cameron says, “based on a real-life incident that happened to my parents.” And considering the source of the story, it makes sense that he’d speak fondly of his subject matter: “The real heart of the play is the relationship between the two main characters, Allan and Charlotte, who represent my parents,” Cameron says, before adding proudly, “People are fond of telling me that it’s a great portrait of my parents.”
Considering that Allan and Charlotte, especially as played by Shadow regulars Coralie Cairns and Glenn Nelson, are the sort of sweet, rural parents who shy away from the slightest use of vulgarity (“Lord love a duck!” Charlotte often exclaims), it makes it all the more interesting that Harvest is also a stoner comedy.
Well, sort of. Allan and Charlotte certainly aren’t stoners themselves, but they do find themselves unwittingly involved in rural Alberta’s criminal underbelly. “My parents sold the farm that I grew up on,” Cameron explains, “but they didn’t sell the little farmhouse. They rented it out to an airline pilot and his wife, who turned out not to be an airline pilot and his wife.... The house was used to grow marijuana.”
Though idiosyncratic exclamations and sweet retirees inadvertently facilitating a marijuana grow-op may sound pretty specific, Cameron feels that Harvest is also very universal, and that he’s found audiences of the play’s six previous productions relate both to the story and the theme of the changing face of rural Canada, as no new generation seems willing to take over family farms. “It’s a very timely story everywhere across Canada,” he says. “Everywhere the play is produced, people really feel like it’s about their location and very much about them. And I think part of that has to do with that fact that the depopulation of rural Canada is an issue of epidemic proportions, all across the country.”
With Allan and Charlotte having not only to say goodbye to the countryside they love for retired life in the city, but also to deal with those plans being put in jeopardy by the grow-op destroying their house, Cameron also feels many audience members may relate to their fears and anxieties: “A large part of the population is facing retirement.... There’s a large bunch of the audience that’s also feeling that aspect of the play.”
Real and serious though the themes may be, Harvest is, at its core, a good-natured comedy, and above all a loving portrait. Cameron’s subjects, however, may not always agree. “Well, you know,” Cameron says, “my mother maintains that she’s never said ‘Lord love a duck’ in her life. [She says] the character is nothing like her.” He insists that his portrait is accurate, however. “She also confesses that there was one day that she was driving down the highway, talking with her friend, and her friend was telling her some sort of story, and my mother exclaimed, ‘Lord love a duck!’ And when she heard that phrase come out of her mouth, my mother very nearly drove into the ditch.”
Cameron, victorious, says his mother now “very reluctantly admits that the character is a portrait of her.”
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