Ghosts that haunt them

The type of writing that thriller aficionado Rhonda Apetagon does on a day-to-day basis isn’t anyone’s idea of creative fun: as a trained social worker, the first-time playwright is accustomed to filing reports about “the real scary stuff” in life: loss, addiction, violence and the abuse and maltreatment of children.

“That’s way scarier for me than ghosts,” says the director of Kinosao Sipi Minisowin Agency, which provides child and family services to members of Apetagon’s community, Norway House Cree Nation.

Apetagon’s debut play, In the Shadow Beyond the Pines, premièring tonight at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, takes place at the intersection of those two strains of horror stories, sending three grieving men (Daniel Knight, Jeremy Proulx and James Dallas Smith) into the forest to light a sacred fire for their recently departed friend, Warren, who was the quartet’s “glue” since childhood, holding the group together even as the joys, pressures and traumas of adult life pulled them apart.

Apetagon wanted the play, set on the outskirts of an unnamed northern community, to highlight the double-edged nature of living in a remote environment, where the combination of intense togetherness and relative isolation presents both threat and opportunity.

Places such as Norway House, Apetagon says, are “heartbreakingly beautiful, but the challenges people go through are also heartbreaking for different reasons. Those two opposites can exist in the same place, almost like they underscore each other.”

After Warren’s sudden death, the three men, who have drifted from one another, are forced by circumstance and mutual obligation to reconvene in the bush, an environment which for Apetagon represents relaxation and calm, but also kindling for the type of incendiary conflicts that enliven both ancient legends and contemporary narratives that toe the line between life and death — consider the growing sense of dread as the pages turn in Waubgeshig Rice’s novel of isolation, Moon of the Crusted Snow.

“In this play, the line between legend and the unseen is crossed, and darkness is really at the centre of it,” says Apetagon.

That’s the spirit of the ghost stories Apetagon grew up hearing from her father, a hunter and fisherman who maintained a trapline near Norway House.

“His first language (Cree) wasn’t English, so sometimes his stories were hard to follow,” says Apetagon, who embedded a few of his staples, including the cannibalistic tale of Bluebeard, into her script, written with the mentorship of the late Ian Ross through the Royal MTC’s Pimootayowin Creators Circle program.

As she developed the play, Apetagon constantly considered how the kind of narrative she was creating differed from both her rigorous, clinical professional work and the dramatic, energetic oral style of storytelling she associated with her upbringing.

“In social work, if it’s not written down, it didn’t happen — that’s our rule of thumb,” she says.

Whereas most of the favourite stories from her youth had never been written down to begin with.

“Even though this is written down, the play is really a love letter to the oral history of storytelling,” she says.

Apetagon hopes In the Shadow Beyond the Pines can provide the “safe scared” feeling she gets from reading a Stephen King thriller.

“When you’re living in a ghost story, you can get that adrenaline rush. When you’re in a theatre, you know there’s an exit, but there’s a thrill that comes from being there,” she says.

“It’s the reason we have horror as a genre.”

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