Cabin fervour

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This article was published 10/07/2020 (2229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The film Catch and Release comes close to being a horror movie considering its premise. A young woman named Keely (Laurence Leboeuf) awakens from a drugged sleep to find herself captive in a cabin on a remote island in the wilderness. Her captor, Du (Nancy Palk), is a religious zealot who has agreed to keep watch on Keely for however long it takes to prevent her from getting an abortion.

Their ensuing conflict reflects the larger ongoing conflict about abortion rights that is especially incendiary in the United States, where just last week, a Supreme Court ruling barely blocked a Louisiana law that would have closed every abortion clinic in that state.

Yet the movie never really veers down the horror route. While two male characters (including one played by Winnipeg actor Peter Mooney of Burden of Truth) live on the film’s outer periphery, the focus is very much on Keely and Du as they share their pasts with one another, with Keely providing compelling context for her decision.

Bear in mind that very few filmmakers have addressed the subject in a meaningful way. (With the exception of some anti-choice propaganda films, the only previous movies I could retrieve were Alexander Payne’s dark 1996 satire Citizen Ruth and Gillian Robespierre’s rom-com Obvious Child.) Conflict may be the coin of the realm of drama, but the abortion conflict has tended to be radioactive for filmmakers.

If Catch and Release required some brass to get made, it is due in part to the realm of theatre. The film was based on Jane Martin’s 1993 Pulitzer-nominated play Keely and Du, which is set in a basement, and not the rustic wild.

The stage play — which was part of Manitoba Theatre Centre’s 1995-96 mainstage season — was the first exposure to the material for actress Nancy Palk, who plays Du in the film.

“I had read it and I had seen it,” she says in a phone interview. “It was certainly making the rounds in Canada because of its small cast. It went to all the regionals.”

In Toronto, where she resides, Palk is something of a theatre stalwart as one of the founders of Soulpepper Theatre. Her tenure there withstood the scandal of co-founder Albert Schultz, who departed in disgrace as artistic director in 2018 when he was accused of sexual misconduct.

Palk attributes the theatre’s survival to current artistic director Weyni Mengesha.

“We have an artistic director now who has really been a force for the board to be able to really guide us through a very difficult time right now,” Palk says. “She’s a decent, talented, intelligent person.”

Palk says she was bitten by the theatre bug in Winnipeg, where she was born in 1955 and lived until she was 12 years old, when her family moved to London, Ont.

“I was part of the Manitoba Theatre School, which was started during (MTC co-founder) John Hirsch’s reign,” she says. “My father was on the (MTC) board, so from Grade 5 on, I was part of Manitoba Theatre School. And because I was a tall girl, I was playing all the boys’ parts, because of course there were only about three boys in the class to 15 girls.

“So I actually say I did start my career there because, although it was just a theatre school, it was where I hooked into an opportunity to be in a lot of plays and to discover a love of language, really.” (As a stage actress, Palk returned to RMTC to play the role of Sister Aloysius in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt in 2009, and also appeared in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in the 1996 season.)

When it came to playing Du in the screen version of Martin’s play, Palk says she was obliged to consider her character’s viewpoint, though the actress is very much pro-choice. For her, the whole point of the story is “the possibility of change.”

“People can change if they really just simply listen and find what is similar in another person,” she says. “(Abortion) is one of those issues that people are so on one side or the other and it’s very hard to come to common ground about it.

“And I respect that,” she says. “I can completely understand the pro-life side. But then you get into really difficult territory, don’t you? Because you can’t make the decision for people who want to do one thing or another.

“Being an actor, you have to defend your character,” Palk says of Du. “You have to enrich the backstory and the understanding of what it must be like to grow up in a completely religious family.”

Palk relied on her husband Joseph Ziegler’s family — “Minnesota Midwest American Christians,” she says — for some research.

“It was a real challenge, to be honest, to really come at it from her point of view,” she says. “Some of it is intellectual, but a lot of it had to be just kind of visceral.

“Thank the Lord for the internet. Because you really can go down the rabbit hole watching a lot of things.”

Gospel music ultimately held the key for Palk.

“I was listening to a lot of music, because I needed to find places to feel spiritual,” she says. “I watched a lot of people in stadiums listening to music and kind of tripping out on Jesus.

“It was fun but it was really challenging, in a good way,” she says. “What I was eventually able to hook on to was her growth as a human being.”

Catch and Release will be available on iTunes Canada on July 14.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing