A lone girl walks to the front of the stage. She climbs down softly, into the audience. She takes out a compact, and with a neutral face, applies makeup. She then digs in the other pocket, removes a single bullet, and gently places it at the front of the stage.

It is this bullet that remains constant in the first act of Native Earth’s production of Almighty Voice and His Wife, now on at Theatre Passe Muraille’s mainspace. The bullet is a symbol of White Girl (Cara Gee)’s recollection of the death of her husband, Almighty Voice (Derek Garza), which haunts the audience as the couple’s world disintegrates after Almighty Voice’s illegal killing of a privately owned cow for their wedding feast. They go on the run through Saskatchewan, their situation growing more dire after Almighty Voice slays one of the pursuing Mounties and the couple is forced to separate, resulting in the capture and incarceration of White Girl and the death of Almighty Voice.

It is difficult to review Daniel David Moses’ script as a whole, as the first and second acts are so completely different. The first act is deeply intimate, coming out of the Native oral tradition, with the audience expertly drawn into the characters’ strange courtship and deeply loving relationship through the expert direction of Michael Greyeyes and the ambient lighting design by Sandra Marcroft. Jackie Chau’s simple set features the moon watching over the pair, aided by the lighting that transitions through the moon’s phases to accentuate the passage of time and the changing nature of their predicament. At times the moon transforms into the Eye of the Christian God, haunting White Girl as a symbol of her past experiences at Residential Schools when her culture was nearly stolen from her. Greyeyes uses the actors’ movement abilities to their fullest extent, effectively transitioning between times and spaces using a combination of Native dancing and absolute stillness. The vocal framing device of White Girl stating the act and scene numbers and titles gives the audience benchmarks which add context to the action and assist in the linear timeline of the story. These devices become much more pronounced in the second act; serving as a link between the seemingly separate sections of the story.

Garza and Gee’s respective performances are effective, especially in their relationships to each other, as the dream-like space they occupy dissolves into a nightmare. They are models of strength in the face of adversity, Garza showing excellent and unexpected moments of vulnerability through Almighty Voice’s hardened warrior exterior. Gee is at once submissive and empowered, her fractured emotions grappling with the extremity of her situation and her powerful conviction guiding them both through their maze of confusion. There are times, however, when the performers’ personal connection to the subject matter rears its head and they come across as earnest. The audience loses the gravity of the situation in those moments, and the actors must work hard to bring us back in.

The second act explodes out of the gates, the theatre space opened up in contrast to the intimacy of the first act as the characters find themselves in a purgatorial vaudevillian show. Both actors enter the space in white face, Gee now with a British-colonial accent and costumed as an Interlocutor hosting a bizarre cabaret featuring white-dominant stereotypes of aboriginal people. Under the makeup, Almighty Voice recognizes the face of White Girl, now indoctrinated into white culture as a result of her incarceration and re-education. She needles away at him, forcing him to perform one demeaning act after another. Eventually he begins to engage with her in these acts, using irony to bring to light the nature of her newfound paradigm, breaking the shell that the whites have forced on to her. They are reunited as man and wife, proud Native-Canadians, and join their cultural afterlife in an infinite Native dance.

Both Chau’s set and Marcroft’s lighting change drastically in the second act, the stage now filled with cobweb-hung trappings of white society and the light now vibrant and bright, filling the entire space. Placards now serve as act and scene markers, with vaudevillian titles such as ‘tenor solo’ and ‘stand-up routine’. The open lighting implicates the audience in the action, metatheatrically casting us as the audience of the cabaret. Greyeyes’ sensitivity to the material and the actors’ brutal onslaught of racist vignettes draws uncomfortable laughter from us, each chuckle guilt-ridden despite the honest hilarity of what is occurring onstage. It is in this act that the performers truly shine, each in their element in the parodic portrayals of their iconoclast figures. Garza’s desperation is apparent under his at first confused and then faux-enthusiastic participation in the show, and Gee’s internal struggle against her Interlocutor personae create a tension and an anguish that is palpable.
The least satisfying aspect of the production, unfortunately, is the sound design by Richard Lee. The audience is welcomed into the theatre by an odd combination of songs by the likes of Tom Waits and Sinead O’Connor, presumably to add atmosphere. The grating effects during the course of the show are meant to create an air of menace, but simply come off as annoying and often frustrating, especially the gunshot which is repeated several times at greatly varying sound levels. Soundscape is integral to a piece of this nature, and it unfortunately fell short of the mark.

This is an important piece of theatre, not only to the Native community but to the community at large. Its theatricality is extraordinary, its narrative heartrending and eventually satisfying. The bullet transforms into a symbol of liberation by show’s end, and the audience leaves feeling that there is hope, even in dire times and desperate situations; that there is peace to be had even in the fractured reality of Almighty Voice and his wife.

http://www.passemuraille.on.ca/