Galactic tales from ground up

The visitors to Altona’s Community Exchange normally arrive hungry for some chitchat, and for Joan Funk’s homemade carrot muffins.

But one Monday morning last year, they were greeted by two guests from Winnipeg — a pair of theatrical producers on the hunt for the roots of community lore.

Guided by gung-ho volunteers, Gwendolyn Collins and Tanner Manson hopped from table to table, striking up conversations with dozens of area residents about their region’s past, present and future.

Floored by the generosity, Collins and Manson left Altona with a stack of stories, which they then handed off to playwright Andraea Sartison.

“We were like, ‘OK, sort through this and try and make a play out of all of this information,’” says Collins, a co-artistic director with Sartison of One Trunk Theatre, a collaborative company with an experimental approach to the creative process.

Over the course of the past 20 months, the One Trunk team has woven those strands into The Martian and the Mound, a travelling road show that’s as much about the road as it is the traveller.

Shaped by community contributions, the production, headlined by Morden’s Candlewick Players, ran for three nights in October in Neubergthal at the Krahn Barn, an arts haven run by Margruite Krahn — the show’s set, props and video designer — and longtime drama teacher Paul Krahn, the set builder who also plays a bison.

Earlier this month, The Martian and the Mound packed up and played Morden’s Kenmor Theatre. From tonight until Sunday, the production — a part of Theatre Projects Manitoba’s live-art trade route — will be at the Gas Station Arts Centre.

At each stop, the performance features live instrumentation of an original score from Paul Bergman and Andrew Braun, which was developed in concert with the production.

Though the show’s roots are local, its plot leans intragalactic. The titular Martian is Dr. Phoenix Albright (Devin Lowry, from Darlingford, pop. 200), who touches down on a seemingly barren plot of land pocked with mysterious mounds. Intrigued, the archaeologist is pulled inside the landform, which is populated by the spirits of those who lived there before a great shift.

The southern Manitoban fable, which takes cues from Alice in Wonderland and various examples of subterranean sci-fi, digs deep into those stories and memories collected by the One Trunk crew, which are then dramatized by a cast of actors from across the region.

To design the mound, which she fashioned as a halved geodesic dome, Margruite Krahn took a drive to nearby Star Mound. Vance Roberts, a 24-year-old actor from Roseau River First Nation, says mounds such as the one highlighted in the show are often made during times of great sacrifice or celebration to commemorate and honour the land.

The play’s second scene finds Roberts’ Sage — the first man to see a Prairie sunrise — in conversation with Dr. Albright, setting the stage for the play’s consideration of colonialism, environmental impacts and what it means to live in Manitoba.

Other scenes include conversations with a cottonwood tree and a foot race to win the first commercial farm.

“Our mission is to always be creating things new from the ground up in a relationship-based approach, which we do through devised theatre,” says Sartison, whose other collaborative works include Red Earth, a 2019 One Trunk piece that followed three astronauts sent to Mars to keep the human species alive as Earth self-destructs.

The Martian character Albright also featured in a One Trunk show developed with the Pinawa Players, which hints at the company’s global ambitions.

“When we’re talking about starting this process in Pinawa, and then in southern Manitoba, part of the thing we’re playing with is whether we could create a cinematic universe for all of Manitoba,” Sartison says.

Director Collins says the can-do attitudes the One Trunk crew encountered would indicate that it’s likely.

“There was never anyone who said no when we asked if something would be possible. It was always, ‘Yes, we can make that happen.’ It’s this small-town, can-do attitude. Nobody is jaded. Everyone — the actors, the designers, the musicians — it’s 100 per cent everything is possible,” she says.

“You want a starscape? We’ll give you a starscape.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca