A Tidy Package

by Berni Stapleton and Amy House
Rising Tide Theatre Festival, Trinity, NL
June 1 – August 31, 2024

Reviewed by Aley Waterman

Most Newfoundlanders are aware of the general grave circumstance of the 1992 Cod Moratorium, an event that rendered thousands unemployed and displaced, forever changing the province’s economy and cultural history. Fewer, unless directly impacted, would be as likely to trace the edges of the more interpersonal, nuanced tensions that arose from an event that turned so many communities upside down. Yes, job insecurity, identity crises, and general precarity are some concepts that echo the public sentiment of the time, but what does such a massive shift do within communities, amongst family members and friends who don’t necessarily have the same proclivities, or values, or losses resulting from the event itself? 

In a deft, often hilarious and just as often harrowing two-hander that takes up the foreground as a character study, writers Amy House and Berni Stapleton zero in on these possible dynamics in A Tidy Package, a comedy/drama that runs this summer at Trinity’s Rising Tide Theatre festival, directed by Donna Butt, and starring Amelia Manuel (‘Sarah’) and Michelle Rex Bailey (‘Grace’). Two adult sisters, six years apart in age, struggle in the aftermath of the moratorium with vastly different obstacles when it comes to rebuilding in the face of loss. Sarah, the younger sister, opens the show in a quaint, cheerful conversation with her husband: What will they have for dinner? Can they cozy up later and watch something comforting? We find her laughing and relaxed – the twinges of wistfulness in this opening scene a mark of Manuel’s mastery of her character – and quickly clock the increasingly-chilling fact that the conversation is entirely one-sided. On a spare and nostalgic set at the Parish Hall in Trinity that feels like a rural Newfoundland kitchen, Manuel addresses her husband through a dark window, but then, the rug is pulled out as Sarah’s older sister Grace, a now cash-strapped mother of three, enters the house and Sarah goes quiet, revealing that Sarah is talking to a disappeared husband, whose hope for life she fights to uphold in delusion as it dawns on the audience that he has died at sea and the body hasn’t been returned. Here, a theatrical mirroring occurs and introduces the dynamic between the siblings: when older sister Grace tries to pull Sarah out of her grieving revelry, Sarah fails to respond to a single word for the first few minutes of the play, unwilling to let the world in so that she might hold on a little longer to a recent past where her job at the Fish Plant and her role as a loving partner remained intact. Through the play, over three acts that are each about two years apart, we watch the sisters draw each other out as they face their own struggles of denial and acceptance and it becomes clear that the fish may not be coming back anytime soon.

A Tidy Package hones in on some of the historically accurate products of the moratorium that can feel funny, hopeless, and absurd at once. In the second scene, the sisters talk while Grace tries to do a perm and dye on Sarah in light of skills retraining that finds half of the female population trying their hand as hairdressers in a community that barely needs more than a couple of people for the job. As Grace starts to uncoil the curlers, the audience understands that Sarah, hopeful, won’t be happy with the resulting tangled mess, and her outburst once given a mirror makes for a lively, anticipatory scene full of humor and risk. But what’s most central here is the relationship between the sisters, powerfully conveyed by Manuel and Bailey, whose tender intimacy and easy laughter together reveal how deeply the sisters love and need each other, even when the smallest offhand comment leads to an explosion of conflict revealing the depths of tension beneath their shared but ultimately dissimilar plights regarding family, money, and unprecedented loss. This is a play that is as heartening as it is ruthless and as funny as it is sad, a profound and intimate look at two women whose explosive tensions never take away from their sharp wit or underlying tenderness towards one another. 

Aley Waterman is a writer of fiction, poetry, and music from and living in Newfoundland. Her first novel Mudflowers was published by Dundurn in fall of 2023. She has had work appear in Border CrossingsBrooklyn Review, Bad Nudes Magazinethe Trampoline Hall PodcastRiddle Fence, and elsewhere.

 

July 2024