Black hole tackles moon

Footprints on the Moon promises bathrobes, lunar metaphors

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

With the Black Hole Theatre Co. gearing up for their next mainstage extravaganza, a presentation of Maureen Hunter’s family drama Footprints on the Moon, I decided to rudely interrupt a vigorous rehearsal session to speak with director Rob McCorrister and a good chunk of the talented cast, including cute lead Marleigh Chapman and two of her on-stage love interests, played by William O’Donnell and Raphael Saray, about the impending performance of this pensive prairie play.

Footprints centres on Joanie (Chapman) a lonely single mother whose husband Boone (O’Donnell), after a 10-year absence, contacts their daughter Carol Anne (Andrea Karr). The play then focuses on the family fallout that follows from this fatherly return. “Carol Anne starts going to Toronto to visit her father. She gets these ideas about the big city, and now she wants to go live there. So that’s where the play starts,” said McCorrister. “It’s a rockumentary,” added Saray helpfully. The play also features Candance Heyliger as Joanie’s best friend, Beryl.

“Then Joanie runs into this guy, Dunn (played by Saray)” explained McCorrister, “and the two of them — ” “hook up” interrupted Chapman enthusiastically, “in a truck!”

“Then,” continued McCorrister, “Carol Anne shows up, after the fact,” (in Latin: post-coitus). This is when the play kicks into mother-daughter conflict mode, as Carol Anne reveals that she wants to go to her father in Toronto. “Joanie tries everything to get her daughter to stay: bribing her, giving her a bigger phone, a bigger room.” “Hitting her,” interjected O’Donnell, sadistically. So there’s abuse? “Oh yeah!” according to O’Donnell, though Chapman sees it differently: “No. Well not really. No, Carol Anne mouths off and . . . I give her a little whack in the face. Just a little one! She deserved it!”

Virtually the entire second act of the play is a tortured, protracted argument between Boone and Joanie, in which the proverbial skeletons in their relationship closet wreak havoc on their reunion. Kudos to both actors for handling this lengthy scene; Chapman, for her part, manages to play the whole scene, in all her diversity of emotions, in a bathrobe. “I’m almost always in a bathrobe,” she bragged, presumably referring to the play and not her everyday life. “She looks like Obi-Wan,” added Saray.

Though the play takes place in a fictional town called Rose Coulee, which, Chapman helpfully suggested “is kind of like Plum Coulee,” I have my doubts about the town’s eponymous coulee; I suspect it’s more of a gulch. But that’s neither here nor there.

In the end Footprints is a play “about hated mothers, dedicated to mothers,” according to O’Donnell. The title is a metaphor for the way Joanie wishes the world operated. “Joanie believes that time stands still on the moon, because the (first) footprints are just sitting there. She just wants time to freeze,” said McCorrister.

To close on a selenogeological note, I’ll mention that this titular metaphor is made possible by the fact that the moon a) is not subject to the same erosional forces as the Earth; and b) is covered with a loose layer of heterogeneous material called “regolith,” the softness of which allows impressions, such as footprints, to be cast in its silvery surface.

Footprints on the Moon runs March 6 to 10, 13 to 17 at the Black Hole Theatre, in the basement of University College.