Super Furry Animal | Ron Pederson bounces with wolves in Ron Jenkins’ Extinction Song.
DETAILS
Written and directed by Ron Jenkins. Starring Ron Pederson. Rice Theatre, The Citadel. To Apr 19. Tickets available through the Citadel box office (425-1820).
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The Citadel’s Rice Theatre may be hosting its world première, but Extinction Song, Ron Jenkins’s touching story of a boy convinced he was raised by wolves, has been kicking around the Edmonton theatre scene for a full decade. Still, coming out of last Thursday’s opening night performance, I kept thinking about two recent events that contain strong echoes of Jenkins’s script, and which give the show a surprising topicality.
First is the story of a man in Calgary, who early last week allegedly left his toddler in their car in below-zero weather while he went off gambling. The child wasn’t discovered for six hours because a series of blankets were draped over the windows — possibly to keep him warm, possibly to obscure him from sight. Second is the just-released trailer for Spike Jonze’s hotly anticipated film adaptation of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, which tells the story of a rambunctious boy who abandons his family to rule a kingdom of giant furry creatures.
If those two examples sound miles apart — one cute, one horrifying; one the stuff of dreams, one of nightmares — then it’s a testament to the pinballing fluidity of Jenkins’s script, as well as Ron Pederson’s remarkable performance as James, that the show is able to navigate between these two extremes as well as it does. James’s rambling but lucid monologue (which he delivers from his bedroom clad in pyjamas) touches on a lot of things that occupy a seven-year-old’s thoughts, and with an alcoholic father and unfulfilling school life, perhaps dreaming up a talking wolf best friend named Byzantine isn’t so strange after all.
The glue holding the disparate pieces of James’s life together, as you can probably infer, is his wild, abundant imagination. He can’t understand how he’s so different from his grumpy parents (whom he calls “Mountie Man” and “Stepwoman”), so he conjures up a completely different backstory: his real parents, he figures, died at the bottom of an icy river, and baby James would have too if not for the intervention of the wolves, who licked and nursed him back to health and raised him as one of their own.
But his two worlds come crashing together when James’s principal calls his parents in a fit of rage, demanding that James stop howling in class and trying to pass off his lupine fantasies as viable show-and-tell material. Stepwoman tells him it’s time to accept that he is a normal boy with normal parents, and shows him his birth certificate to drive the point home. For James, this is the final proof: they’re trying to make him and his wolf family go extinct. His solution? Kill Mountie Man, the evil mastermind behind the whole nefarious plot.
Surrounded by Narda McCarroll’s excellent set design, where towering trees help frame the bedroom’s walls and everything is proportioned to make him look all the more like a little boy, Pederson absolutely nails the role. He zips along in his story, screaming and jumping and delighting in every tangent, with the infinite stores of energy that seem to dry up once puberty kicks in. (Pederson’s ability to keep up this pace for 90 minutes is a feat in itself.) And he’s especially good at the tiny details: the way James claps out the syllables of difficult words as he says them, and the earnestness of lines like “the bow and arrow set Santa Claus gave me for Christmas last Christmas.”
Then there’s the flip side of James’s character, which is how he ventriloquizes Mountie Man’s voice and slurred mannerisms — and here Pederson is as sharp, though the effect becomes far creepier. In fact, Extinction Song’s saddest message, literalized during these impressions, is that sons will become their fathers whether there’s a surrogate wolf family involved or not. James’s real struggle is thus not with his imagination at all: it’s how to escape his father’s drunken shadow. But as the heart-wrenching scene where Mountie Man leaves James in the car while he saunters off to get shitfaced one Saturday afternoon shows, sometimes there’s nothing you can do but wait it out.
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