Juanita Peters takes the audience back to Nova Scotia in 1943 and the racial divide in her play, The San Family, having its world premiere this week at Alderney Landing Theatre, Dartmouth.
Her tender drama, staged as part of Black History Month, shows how love and courage can break through racism.
The San Family is an intimate story in a small community that shrinks from the size of Weymouth to the sanatorium, where tuberculosis patients suffer both isolation and their disease.
Fascinated by the history of TB and the fact sanatoriums in Atlantic Canada were divided into black and white wards, Peters uses the device of a hospital curtain to separate two beds.
In one lays the ailing, confident and crusty radio host Stewart McKinnon, who has refused to broadcast black musicians on his radio show. In the other is the younger, healthier, black musician Will Langford, stuck in the sanatorium with his sister Marge and her family, represented here by her wonderfully precocious daughter Mamie.
Frank MacKay as McKinnon and O’Lanjah Simmonds, six, as Mamie, stand out in a strong cast of professional actors that include: Deborah Allen, wonderful as the cranky nurse; Lesley Smith, pure and clear, as a youthful, idealistic, friendly nurse; Julia Williams, convincing and empathetic as the hard put-upon Marge; and Toronto dancer and Disney’s Camp Rock actor Jordan Francis as Will Langford, an endearing, gentle youth whose passion for his guitar is a laughing matter. However, he does cheer up his family and McKinnon with his non-stop playing.
When McKinnon suggests Will participate in a radio broadcast from the sanatorium, he gives him a respect and a courage that will take him far into his future.
The San Family, directed by Peters, is episodic, with swift scenes that sometimes just get going when they are cut off. The pacing was off on opening night.
For a play about music, one wishes there was more of it. Will, perhaps because he is shy, is restrained in his guitar playing, singing and talking.
Peters, a filmmaker (Africville: Can’t Stop Now) and former radio and TV journalist, shows her strengths as a writer. There are poetic stories within stories that guide the characters’ lives. There are details specific to the time, like molasses on warm bread and the importance of church and hard work.
The San Family, in Peters’ language as well as Alison Muir’s set and Jeanie Kimber’s costume design, quickly sets up a time and a place, with the nurses in starched white uniforms, using glass thermometers for patients in severe, industrial beds. Eva Madden’s sound design includes the Andrews Sisters. Musical director is Jeff Goodspeed.
The San Family, running just over an hour, makes its audience long for more. Just as one gets attached to the characters and the time period it’s all over and the ending takes the audience far away from Weymouth in 1943.
One wants to see more of Marge and her daughter, hidden behind a screen once they get to the hospital.
Peters may turn this story into a feature film and that would be wonderful.
George Boyd and George Elliott Clarke paved the way in the 1990s for drama about black Nova Scotia experience but there hasn’t been much recently.
The San Family, produced by Peters and Marty Williams, with TD Then and Now as major sponsor, runs just through tonight, 8 p.m., with a matinee at 10 a.m.