Hayley Moorhouse and Dayna Lea Hoffman in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Meegan Sweet and Gabby Bernard in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Every once in a while you find yourself in the theatre fully absorbed in a world that’s both distant and utterly close at hand. And you laugh through tears. It happened for me at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre Friday night.

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There is a moment, both heartbreaking and funny, in Stephen Massicotte’s beautiful new World War I play Stars On Her Shoulders, when one of the five nurse characters in a convalescence hospital in France undertakes to teach another the how-to’s of happiness — in a shattered world.

In Heather Inglis’s premiere production, Helen (Hayley Moorhouse), grim-visaged in the fortress of her own gallows humour, admits “I’ve lost the knack of it.” A feeling of hopelessness has trampled everything else.

How does happiness work? Can it be learned? Or, once lost, re-learned? Georgie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann), a new arrival on the ward, coaxes Helen into the fragmentary world of her own memory — and a moment at home in Canada before the war, a buried image of sunlight through a summer storm. It’s Helen’s first smile in the play, and it will touch you in a profound way.

Stars On Her Shoulders is like that. There is a love story embedded deep in the fibre of the play — it’s for you to discover so I won’t spoil it. But it wears its World War I setting in a much different way from Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, a dream of first love the conjures the terrible war overseas through the imaginary participation of a Canadian girl back home. For one thing Stars On Her Shoulders is poised on the precarious threshold between centuries, the prescriptive Victorian sense of a woman’s lesser place in the scheme of things and the elusive possibilities of a brave new world of equality between the sexes.

Dana Wylie, Meegan Sweet, Hayley Moorhouse in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As if to conjure it visually, Inglis stages her production (beautifully designed by Brian Bast and lighted dramatically by Alison Yanota) on a gangway, a pathway between worlds that has us seated on either side. And Darrin Hagen’s original sound and composition design, with its whiffs of Edwardian music hall and its floating allusions to the “modern” world is in sync, too.

At the centre are Helen and Emma (Meegan Sweet), inspired by historical figures, who have braved grave danger to rescue the survivors in a German bombing of a Canadian hospital in Doullens, France in 1918. And these female heroes, who would not be happy with the designation ‘heroine’, are recuperating fretfully, anxious to get back to work. Both, in different ways, have a sharp-edged articulate wit about them that cuts through the traditionally sentimental male-owned landscape of heroism like a hot knife through butter, in the bright comic banter that Massicotte’s dialogue provides them. The play wears its narrative complications lightly, and carries its burden of exposition with expert ease.

Emma’s wounds are obvious: her head is swathed; her hands are bandage mittens. Helen’s are less obvious but less fixable, as we learn in the course of the play. Shell-shock and a shattering sense of “hopelessness” have overtaken her; “I’m lacking a variety of feeling,” she concedes in a rare unguarded moment without the mordant sardonic tone and entrenched irritability that Moorhouse captures so vividly in their performance. “The charm of doing nothing” has vanished, as she snaps. “Was I doing ‘nothing’ wrong?”

Meegan Sweet in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Sweet is terrific as Emma, a Canadian senator’s daughter of the activist Suffragist stripe, droll, bright, and crisply exasperated by a status quo that has kindly allowed women to participate, as nurses, in the lethal war abroad, but denied them the right to vote. Bandaged hands notwithstanding, she even smokes with a certain insouciance. And the character rises to every setback as a provocation to redoubled efforts. “Our voice was heard; the work continues!” she says of a failed protest launched on behalf of women’s gymnastics. “The answer is invariably No…. It’s persistence that pays.”

Helen and Emma are both, in their way, “odd women,” which is to say women who are out of step with the usual “husband project” — “not so beautiful, not so charming (pause), not so interested.”

Dana Wylie, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Stars On Her Shoulders, Workshop West. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The pair are surrounded by the working nurses of the hospital. In command, under the male military hierarchy of course, is Maude, a Scot convincingly played by Dana Wylie making a welcome return to theatre from the world of music. She’s proud of her charges, but speaks, from experience you assume, to caution against pressing their luck by arguing about the status of the medal of bravery they’ve been offered. “Don’t spoil all you’ve worked for here” by reinforcing the stereotype of women as “ungrateful, melodramatic creatures.” Emma scorns that view; the new century cannot come into its own fast enough for her.

The performances in Inglis’s production are closely meshed. Hoffmann as Georgie, a repository of wispy period songs and a steadfast spokesperson for the much-battered notion of hope, is a compelling figure, a tantalizing glimpse of the might-have-been for Helen. And Gabby Bernard is very funny and charming as the innocent — in a drawing room comedy she’d be the maid — trilling away cheerfully and cleaving to ‘the rules’ until she’s gradually drawn into a more wayward route to the future.

I’ve made this sound perhaps more schematic than it is. In all, Stars On Her Shoulders is a remarkably rich, full-bodied theatrical experience. And it speaks so movingly, in its theatrical way, to moments in human history that somehow feel seminal, when “comfort and pleasant thoughts” or “carrying on the best we can” just won’t cut it, and vigilance is required. Moments like ours.

I loved it.

Meet the playwright in 12thnight’s PREVIEW.

REVIEW

Stars On Her Shoulders

Theatre: Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by: Stephen Massicotte

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Meegan Sweet, Gabby Bernard, Dayna Lea Hoffmann, Dana Wylie

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Nov. 1 to 17

Tickets: All tickets are pay-what-you-will this season at workshopwest.org.