Carol Shields’ airport vignettes set to take off again

The first play by one of Manitoba’s finest writers is scheduled for a return flight to local stages this weekend, with the Shoestring Players bringing Carol Shields’ Departures and Arrivals to the Forrest Nickerson Theatre at 285 Pembina Hwy.

Set entirely within the old Winnipeg International Airport, where the Pulitzer winner landed in 1980 with her family from Vancouver, Departures and Arrivals is a series of comedic, romantic and light-hearted vignettes inspired by the terminal’s comings and goings.

The show premièred in 1984 with the University of Manitoba’s Black Hole Theatre after Shields became an assistant professor of English at the school.

“The airport is a microcosm of life,” says Shoestring’s Marilynn Slobogian, who spent 34 years as a flight attendant with Air Canada.

For director Sara Arenson, the airport is a liminal space that feels both open to possibility and sealed off from the outside world, creating tremendous storytelling potential.

Featuring a cast of 17, Departures and Arrivals opens Friday at 7:30 p.m., with two shows (2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.) on Saturday. A matinee performance (2 p.m.) closes the three-day run on Sunday. Admission is $20 or tickets can be purchased via e-transfer to shoestringplayerswpg.com.

“In the airport, there’s this quality of timelessness. It’s this sort of existential space where you have time to think,” says Arenson, a first-time director for Shoestring, which has been producing community theatre since 1969.

“It makes for a nice background for Shields to tell stories, and what’s really striking is that those stories are so varied. Some are of loves lost, some are of families or groups of people on the go. One of the funniest scenes shows Rachel and Janet, who are both buying insurance for their husbands who just boarded the plane.”

Who knows whether these vignettes were dreamed up or if Shields witnessed them herself while doing airport lounge reconnaissance. Whatever the case may be, the beloved author of works such as The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party, who died of breast cancer in 2003, was hardly the first or last artist whose imagination took flight at baggage claim.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports

An unpleasant listening experience at the Cologne Bonn Airport in 1977 led the former Roxy Music member to revolutionize ambient music, creating a soundtrack — gentle, sustained, unintrusive — built to support public space and the built environment.

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno wrote in the album’s liner notes.

Airplane!

Though many of its jokes don’t exactly fly today, this ZAZ Production is surely one of the most influential comedies of all time.

Placed 10th on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Laughs list, the spoof took on the trend of 1970s disaster films and superseded them as an artform, giving the career of Regina’s Leslie Nielsen a second wind that made him a bankable star.

Home Alone

In this nostalgic classic, the McCallister family rushes through Chicago O’Hare Airport without realizing they’ve forgotten one piece of precious cargo at home: son Kevin, played by Macaulay Culkin.

When screen mom Catherine O’Hara died earlier this month, the third-busiest airport in the U.S. paid tribute on social media. “Forever our legendary Mrs. McCallister.”

Up in the Air

A somewhat forgotten hit from 2009, this mid-recession dramedy directed by Jason Reitman follows Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who flies across the country to do the dirty work of firing workers at downsizing corporations.

As he clears security with his potential protegé (Anna Kendrick), Bingham reveals his shrewd, problematic and capitalistic ethos: to get through life with rigorous efficiency and without much regard for those left behind.

Come From Away

A tiny airport in Atlantic Canada is the wellspring of this Broadway smash, which takes place in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when 7,000 passengers were grounded in Gander, N.L.

When it closed on Broadway in 2022, the musical had grossed more than US$206 million, enough to purchase at least four Boeing 737 Max planes.

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