It is a simple play with a simple plot, simple score and simple set. But the characters of the play, Come Down from Up River, which is mostly set in a modern-day Saint John couple’s living room, are anything but simple.
It’s refreshing in a way to find ourselves in a normal family situation. Come Down from Up River—directed by Canada’s most-produced playwright, Norm Foster—is not a blockbuster-type play, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Rather, it’s about a modern Maritime family reconnecting after just over 20 years of silence.
It starts off with Liv and Bonnie, a couple living together in Saint John, discussing the stay of Bonnie’s uncle Shaver at their house. Bonnie is a lawyer and Liv is a graphic designer working from home.
For the audience, Liv, played by Kirsten Alter, is our access point. She’s fun, instantly likeable and just a little bit quirky, or, what she likes to call, “detail-oriented.”
However, Bonnie, played by Amanda Parsons, is the more serious one. She’s a bit cold and restrained and always wears business attire, but still has a heart underneath all her defence mechanisms.
Shaver Bennett, or Uncle Shaver, played by Peter Krantz, is gruff, stubborn and a little confused by women and urban lifestyle, having descended from somewhere north and secluded on the Miramichi River. But he’s got a big heart, even if he isn’t one for many words. With his sarcastic humour that many people will find in their own grandfathers or older relatives who have, as they say, “been around the block a few times,” we quickly grow fond of him.
The play starts just as Shaver arrives in town to get some medical examinations done, and Liv and Bonnie bicker about whether to pick Shaver up from the bus station, only a five-minute walk away from their home.
Bonnie warns Liv that her uncle may be against their lesbian relationship. He might even be racist and a bigot. She clearly has something against the man she hasn’t talked to in 20-some years, and the mystery makes up a big part of the play’s plot.
Bonnie goes into work for an important meeting, so Liv,not sure how to handle her wife’s uncle, braces herself to receive this stranger.
But then as he arrives, the two start talking—just small talk—and Liv and Shaver develop the beginnings of an easy friendship. The man doesn’t appear to be a bigot homophobic or racist at all.
So the questions remain: why does Bonnie have such a terrible relationship with her uncle, and will they be able to mend it?
The play mostly consists of small talk, the awkward talk that sometimes occurs upon meeting a person or the conversation one might expect to have with a long-lost relative with whom tensions are high.
The banter between Liv and Shaver quickly becomes natural as they cover topics like marriage, fly fishing and Shaver’s love life, and the audience feels drawn in by their conversation as if they’re a part of it. It’s simply any conversation one could expect to have with a family member. The banter may feel a bit long at times with the lack of frequent scene changes, but Shaver’s jokes keep the audience laughing and deliver the humour expected from a man living by himself in deep rural New Brunswick. His jokes about beer made in bathtubs and a simpler life without ensuite bathrooms fit his character perfectly.
The conversation between Bonnie and Shaver is tenser—she answers most of his sentences with the shortest replies possible. But as she opens up slowly, it becomes deeper than Liv and Shaver’s comparatively amusing and light small talk. Their conversations, largely in the second act, give the piece its depth—not so much through words but through hesitant healing.
Each conversation, even those between Liv And Bonnie themselves, each give a glimpse into Maritime life and Maritime families. It compares the rural and urban way of life with how, even though one may leave small town life behind, family remains an unconditional bond. Despite life, pain, prejudices, grudges and stubbornness, the play tells us family prevails.
Overall, Come Down from Up River is a discussion of family, love (lost and found), small-town values and lifestyles and big-town values and lifestyles. It’s a play that discusses the difficulties of living in a world that still seems split by traditional and progressive values. But how, despite all that, one can walk through it.
The set never changes, and there are only a few seconds of music between scene changes, but it doesn’t take away from the play. Rather, it helps you focus on what’s there.
Come Down from Up River teaches us it’s never too late to forgive and love once again with a story that is just like New Brunswick’s core: simple and homey.
Showtimes:
11.09.18 – Fredericton, NB @ Fredericton Playhouse 7:30pm
11.10.18 – Fredericton, NB @ Fredericton Playhouse 2:00pm
11.10.18 – Fredericton, NB @ Fredericton Playhouse 7:30pm