A rich brew Steeped in loss and trauma, play taps into complex history with sensitivity and humour By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:23 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 24, 2023

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This article was published 24/03/2023 (902 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some long-overdue history was made Thursday night at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre: for the first time a show written by an Indigenous playwright received its world première on the John Hirsch mainstage.

The show is The Secret to Good Tea, the playwright is Rosanna Deerchild, and the reception from the audience was rapturous, with every joke landing with a thunderous clap of laughter and every bit of dialogue striking at the heart of an ongoing saga that will forever define this land and the people who call it home.

A broadcaster, poet, writer and actor, Deerchild has put her entire self — the boisterous humour, the disquieting silence, the tightrope tension — into this sensitively told story of family, loss, comedy, trauma and resolution. As the daughter of a residential school survivor, Deerchild has produced with the MTC’s Pimootayowin Creators Circle an undeniably powerful piece of theatre that acts as living testimony. This show, a fictionalized version of Deerchild’s own, is a national truth that will stand the test of time.

Gwynn Starr (Kathleen MacLean) is a radio host who is going through changes. Her husband Michael (an excellent James Dallas Smith) has been philandering. Her boss, Mr. BigChief (the larger-than-life Jeremy Proulx), is demeaning and bumbling. Her best friend, the tough-as-nails Nicki (Kelsey Kanatan Wavey, a scene-stealing Winnipegger to watch) is always willing to share wise auntie wisdom and lend a helping left hand to whoever needs it.

But the one person Gwynn really needs support from is her mother, Maggie Mooswa (Tracey Nepinak), a woman who prays to God each night for forgiveness, and for a taste of victory at the next bingo game.

Sleep does not come easily for Maggie. Each night, as she twirls her hair into braids and asks the heavens for rest, she knows it will not be peaceful. As soon as she closes her eyes, her innocent wonder and optimism fades away. She sees, through video projections designed by Carla Hernandez, the faces of children.

She hears their laughter as it becomes a muted scream. She tries to forgive, but can she ever truly forget?

On stage, Nepinak, a proud member of Peguis First Nation, is generous. She gives, and gives, and gives. As Maggie writhes in agony, she remembers the scissors that once snipped her braids, the metre sticks that once hovered above her fingers, and the nuns who terrorized her and her sisters. When she is called on to deliver a punchline, Nepinak never misses. Not once. Nepinak, also the daughter of a residential school survivor, gives the performance of many lifetimes.

As suggested by the title, much of the show plays out over cups of brewed tea, usually Red Rose, but sometimes Tim Hortons peppermint. Across her round kitchen table, Maggie talks to Gwynn about her arthritis and her ongoing feud with her downstairs neighbour Shirley, all the while grilling her daughter on whether her separation from her husband is a sign of a shift in Gwynn’s sexuality. This is one of the funniest running gags in a show overflowing with them.

But while the two matriarchs speak of the commonplace, they artfully dodge that one destructive space: the Guy Hill School, a residential school where genocide was carried out in Manitoba until 1979. Maggie Mooswa made it out alive, but she questions each day which parts of her did not survive.

“I never survived. None of us did,” she says during a particularly heartbreaking monologue, delivered while massaging the dough for a batch of fresh bannock. In her language, she says, there is no word to describe the crimes against humanity that were carried out. This is true of all crimes of such magnitude and scale: the word genocide was only coined in the 20th century.

As happens with discussions of any trauma, laughter is a frequent and potent coping mechanism, and at Thursday’s première, it was clearly a welcome medicine. Deerchild, with Renae Morriseau’s sure-handed direction, capably alternates between the darkness and the light.

The action unfolds on a poetically constructed set, designed by Lauchlin Johnston: beneath the kitchen table is a stage-spanning, rotating tree stump, which spins around as the perspectives shift from mother to daughter. There is a subtle brilliance here: the grounds beneath the actors rotate clockwise when there is healing progress, but each time an antagonistic force arrives, the stump turns the opposite way. This is the nature of processing grief: two steps forward, two steps back, and repeat.

Often, that antagonistic force is characterized by the spirit of the Trickster, played with grace and power by the dance artist Emily Solstice Tait, who, in donning a crow’s head and wings, transforms. This shapeshifting is the very essence of the Trickster, described by Cree-Ojibway playwright Tomson Highway as a figure as pivotal in Indigenous storytelling as Christ is in Christianity and its associated ideologies. Moving to the rhythms of the soulful music of Jason Burnstick, Solstice Tait is a wordless marvel.

MacLean keeps pace with Nepinak, and embodies the dichotomous struggles of those living on either side of a generational divide: Gwynn wants to understand, but she knows she never really can.

“I don’t know what that means,” is the play’s most frequent retort. Whenever a pop culture reference comes up, Maggie says it. Whenever a folksy aphorism comes out of Maggie’s mouth, Gwynn says it. This is the pain of intergenerational, and all relational, trauma in an idiomatic nutshell: neither party can truly know what is going on in the other’s head. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to.

The first act of the play serves as Maggie’s warming-up period. After 50 years of silence, she is forced to consider sharing her story after Gwynn invites her to a reunion at Guy Hill. This is the tea steeping. In the second act, the leaves unfurl, and the painful story emerges during a moving coda to a life hard- and well-lived.

In a seven-minute stretch, elevated by a peaceful drum song, the offspring of survivors quietly erect a teepee on stage. Solstice Tait dances around, tightening the rope around the segments, thereby binding one generation to the next. It’s a sacred ceremony, graciously shared.

As Maggie Mooswa tells her story, the audience leans forward to hear each and every word.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com