Just let go, Bert. The final words of playwright Matt Heiti’s Mucking in the Drift have been rattling around in my head since Friday.
Scott Overton, Northern Life’s theatre reviewer, has an excellent critique of the play on Page 8 of this edition, but I was so moved by the production, I felt compelled to share my own thoughts.
First, let’s just get this out of the way: Heiti is a superb writer. As an aside, I wouldn’t normally plug another news outlet, but Heiti’s novel, The City Still Breathing, earned a stellar review from Shawn Sims in the National Post on Oct. 25. The book is next on my reading list and from everything I’ve heard, it’s fantastic.
But back to Mucking.
This is an important play, not just to Sudbury, but to every northern town and city, every community with a resource-based economy that has, for decades, suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and boom and bust cycles).
There are striking moments in here. When character Bert Pilgrim describes the first time he became unstuck in time, the audience was in awe at the mechanics of the scene — hats off to director Lee Wilson.
Speaking of the audience, the reaction from the opening night crowd was the envy of directors and playwrights the world over. There were gasps, words of recognition bubbling unbidden from mouths too invested in the story to keep quiet.
It was almost as though there were no fourth wall here. The audience was as much a part of the production as the people on stage. The main character, Bert, may be a pilgrim, but the journey he’s on is a pilgrimage taken by all of us.
The archetypes of Northern Ontario are here: the unforgiving wilderness and treacherous mine tunnels, labour unions and sinister union-busting mine owners (coalesced into the character of “Scratch,” another name for the devil), company sports teams battling for dented trophies even as their owners battle for market share, slapdash housing juxtaposed with architectural splendour.
Because of these archetypes, Mucking would play as well in Timmins or Thunder Bay or Sault Ste. Marie as it does in Sudbury, because ultimately, this is a Northern Ontario story, not solely a Sudbury story.
For its historical content and context alone — and despite the sometimes salty language — Mucking is a play students in the North should see.
There’s an interesting dichotomy of ideas at play here. Heiti has written a lament for a Sudbury that no longer exists even as he reminds us — with those three little words, “Just let go” — that time moves on despite our desire for stasis. He is telling us that while it is important to remember the past, to celebrate and learn from it, it’s just as important not to dwell in it.
This isn’t a play about Bert Pilgrim or baseball — it isn’t even a play about mining. Mucking in the Drift is a play about Northern Ontario, about the men and women who journeyed north to carve a life out of unending bush, about owners and unions, about the architecture of our past we in the North cast aside like set pieces when their purpose has been served.
It is lament for things lost and a call not to hold onto those things too tightly. It is our story, Northern Ontario’s story.
Just let go, and just go see.
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life.
