Chris Bullough in Undiscovered Country, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Undiscovered Country (Chianti Yardbird Suite, Stage 7, replacing four of Neurotic Erotica’s time slots)

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A man in a hat, a guitar, a vision of country (the music and the place)….

Tyler Wainwright, the “90s country rock legend” we meet in Chris Bullough’s hypnotic solo show seems to be gazing inward. What does his mind’s eye see? Does he know he’s onstage?

The opening song from Tyler Wainwright’s “forthcoming independent release” is a soliloquy of sorts, almost whispered. Apparently meandering, at a pace that lulls you into a false sense of security, it charts a course from the macro to the micro — an image of “a desert somewhere with a saloon in it” — past the piano, and the bird’s nest in it, past molecules to electrons, and “a song that will save us all.”

Undiscovered Country is what happens when you let an actor/playwright/ songwriter — an artist with a sense of outrage and a sense of humour — loose on the blighted urban landscape and a world grown toxic. You get the long shots and the close-ups, and imagery that sticks, from a character who’s grizzled and slow-talking in the classic ways in Bullough’s performance.

“Thought I’d treat myself to a new truck,” he tells us, as he recounts meeting a stranger with advice for him on that very subject. What ensues is a long, slow-moving escalation of a story — the pace is kind of mesmerizing — into a fantastical vision and an ecstatic connection with its own dark comedy about it. There’s more of Sam Shepard than Ian Tyson in Undiscovered Country.

The pace is seductive, and the tone is introspective. Till it’s not. The  songs reference the great country tropes: they start in nostalgia that sidles up to you, they tap a sense of betrayal, and they nudge them a little off-centre, in rhyme and images. “Put your moon boots on the ground now,” Slow Down tells us. “You’ve gotta let it go, turn it around….”

In a city, ours, our man finds changed, he “can hear the cracks in the concrete.” In the countryside, he rhymes “polluted and looted.” The mode is lyrical, the melody lovely, and the lyrics linger. “Hide me away in a clear-cut forest,” he sings in a country ballad. “Float me away on a river polluted.”

Strange, original, powerful.

Undiscovered Country isn’t in the printed program; it replaces four of Neurotic Erotica‘s performances at Stage 7, starting Friday at 11:30 p.m.  Check fringetheatre.ca updates for times.