Titling his new play Moss Park, George F. Walker isn’t setting us up to expect a lot of pizzazz. Call it a spoiler alert, but this melancholy comedy is a couple of poor people having a conversation on a park bench. How engaging could that be? As engaging as life, because that’s what their conversation is.
One of Canada’s most produced and prolific playwrights, Walker was raised in Toronto’s working-class east end, and while he has become an uncommon success, his common-folk characters continue to teeter between despair and hope.
Walker—winner of multiple Chalmers, Dora, and Governor General’s Awards—brings back the urban realism of Bobby and then-pregnant-teen Tina from his 1994 play Tough! Now Moss Park puts us a few years farther along in their story, both still in poverty and with their second unplanned baby on the way. Tina, living with her mother, is raising their toddler, Holly. Tina and Bobby are not a couple but they have enough love for each other that a future together is still a possibility, if they could just envision a way to make it work. Bobby wants to be more involved with Tina and Holly but with his lack of skills, discipline, and vision, he can’t keep a job—whether delivering carpets or fliers—for more than a couple of days. “Don’t you ever think beyond the next few hours?” she asks. “Maybe, when the weekend’s coming,” Bobby replies.
Whereas Tough! featured the character of Tina’s friend Jill along with the two unhappily expectant parents, Moss Park is all about Tina and Bobby being on their own. No skills, resources, support from family, or even role models. It is just the two of them having it out on a park bench for 80 minutes, occasionally getting phone calls from Jill and other characters. The content is bleak but the treatment is comedic, drawing consistent laughter from the full opening-night audience from the first moments of the play to the end. Why comedic? Because if you don’t laugh, you cry.
The young parents are trying to imagine any way they could make enough money to keep the coming baby. Although Bobby tends to see the class divide as “us against them," (referring to stealing from the rich as a “victimless crime”), tough and pragmatic Tina has no time for self-pity. She tells him to think less about what others have and focus on what the two of them can do to lift themselves out of destitution. Bobby, despite feeling helpless and having nothing to offer her, clearly loves Tina and tells her so. “So what?” she replies, “I have bigger problems. …Mom and I are getting evicted.” The refrain of “got no money” is like a Ray Charles song. Tina is going to do whatever it takes to raise Holly, even if that means doing it without Bobby. He is upset when she explains that without his help she can’t keep the baby she is carrying. Trying to work out a plan, they consider the implications of minimum wage, shelters, food banks and turning to crime.
Moss Park is the opposite of escapism. The set depicts a setting grubbier than the tidy appearance of the actual Moss Park which is on my daily bike route, but the garbage strewn chain link fence and defaced park benches convey the idea that the Moss Park neighbourhood continues to be one of the poorest areas of Toronto, gradually getting boxed in by encroaching condos that are referred to in the dialogue.
The arguing and conjecturing is convincing, often both serious and funny at the same time, even-handed in the writing and well-paced in the presentation, but occasionally the delivery is a little too prepared and loses authenticity. Vancouverite Graeme McComb plays Bobby. Haley McGee (a successful Toronto-based playwright herself) bears the weight of the acting as her character Tina bears the weight of responsibility for the future of the young family Walker has created. Without beating you over the head with “Occupy Toronto” slogans, Walker and his characters get to the heart of what gives rise to such protests.
The world premiere of Moss Park marks Theatre Passe Muraille’s first Walker production and their first collaboration with BC’s Green Thumb Theatre (which has performed all over Canada, the US and beyond) and is directed by Patrick McDonald, artistic director of Green Thumb Theatre.
Moss Park, Theatre Passe Muraille’s Mainspace, runs until Nov. 16
Evan Andrew Mackay is a Toronto playwright and humorist who writes about culture and social justice.
