Good medicine

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This article was published 09/11/2024 (498 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s not bury the lede: The Recipe, which premièred Thursday, is among the best comedic plays Winnipeg has produced in years.

The co-production between Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and Theatre Projects Manitoba is directed by Ardith Boxall, while the script is the work of celebrated Mennonite humourist Armin Wiebe.

Wiebe’s 1984 novel The Salvation of Yasch Siemens, on which he has loosely based this new play, is something of a milestone in Mennonite lit for its irreverent depiction of Manitoba’s Bible Belt. (According to this paper’s review at the time, the novel was “off the shelves but available under the counter” in Winkler.)

Salvation recalls Mordechai Richler’s classic The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Morley Torgov’s Manitoban novel The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick in theme as much as name, all ethnic self-satires and coming-of-agers about wayward sons of Germanic or Eastern European descent.

With The Recipe, Wiebe has made the wise choice of treating Yasch as a secondary character, allowing his winning invention, Oata Needarp, to take the lead and push the story in fresh directions.

And push she does. Mouthy, defiant, fat (she says so herself) and wise in the profane ways of the world, Oata (played by Amanda Shymko) has none of the traditional virtues of a rural anabaptist housewife, but nevertheless finds herself in the middle of a tug-of-war between two men, both less than real mensches.

We guess from the fashions it’s sometime in the early ‘60s. Though the mythical Mennonite village of Gutenthal, captured by Brian Perchaluk’s elegant if deliberately a little cartoonish set, seems to exist somewhere between the imaginations of the Brothers Grimm and The Office’s Dwight Schrute.

The oily Pug Peters (Aaron Pridham), from a bigshot family in Gutenthal, has crossed over to the “wrong side of the double dike” to Oata’s farm. He’s pressuring his social lesser to fork over this symbol of her proud independence, which comes with many burdens for the unmarried Oata.

For all his talk of sharing profits and making her rich, he’s clearly up to no good. We know this because he’s knocked up 17-year-old Sadie Nickel (Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu) and covers his car’s interior with Christmas lights so he can gawk at the legs of any girl unlucky enough to get in his vehicle.

Managing the farm would be a lot easier for Oata if her propertyless suitor Yasch Siemens, played to chinless, rubbernecking perfection by Toby Hughes, had any carry-through. Oata seduces Yasch with chokecherry wine and “Evening in Schanzenfeld” perfume, but Yasch’s really eyeing her farm, which he wouldn’t have a clue how to run.

And he’ll never get his hands on it if he keeps trying to wrap his arms around Skinny Sadie. (“I thought you dreamt bigger than that!” Oata cries at one point.)

Oata, a razor-sharp fruemensch who gets most of the play’s best lines, can’t stop herself from bullying the naive Sadie, but soon overcomes her natural jealousy to help the pregnant girl. After all, both are being used by the men in their lives, Oata for her farm, Sadie for her youth and looks.

A central plotline involves a makeshift abortion. The two women scheme like witches over a recipe, passed on to Oata from her grandmother, for a sort of “morning-after pill” involving clover and cow dung. They channel a secret, pagan code of sisterhood in the face of a comically obscene patriarchy.

The Recipe’s depiction of Southern Manitoba’s conservative Mennonite community is clearly coloured by “a liberal bias,” which will likely go over just fine among the cosmopolitan types who subscribe to professional live theatre.

But we have no reason to doubt that many women like Oata have and continue to exist; the sort of archetype whose reality sometimes requires dramatic performance, like the irresistible one Shymko delivers, to become most vivid to outsiders. (Wiebe also tells us, in his program notes, that the play uses a real Mennonite midwife’s recipe for when a woman’s “monthly period is late.”)

The play’s conclusion, while believable, comes a little too rushed. But it shows Wiebe empathetic towards the young beta males of his patriarchal farm community, the wifeless and landless likewise struggling against a social world as rigid as the Old Testament God and a natural world as fickle as pre-Christian Gods.

Wiebe, after all, wants us to love Yasch Siemens, the picaresque hero of his original version of the story.

It’s the play’s language where Wiebe’s ethnographic passion really shines through. It was once fashionable of Canadian literary scholars, drawing on the towering Canadian critic Northrop Frye, to treat pre- or less-than-modern milieus as among the ripest for poetry. The poetic imagination is strongest, it was argued, where technology and rationality had yet to properly conquer nature, infusing even ordinary speech with rich metaphors and poetic figures.

In a similar spirit, Wiebe’s characters speak in what’s been called Plautdietschisms; a mixture of Low German, scriptural parable, sexual innuendo abounding in nature metaphors, and, we suspect, a bit of nonsense of Wiebe’s devising.

It’s a thing of beauty — an exotic populist vernacular almost Shakespearean in its cadences — that, as with the Bard, is worth the occasional confusion it sows.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca