Waiting For the Parade was well worth reviving
By Vit Wagner Toronto Star
January 3, 1992
A welcome development in theatre in the past couple of years has been the apparent interest in rediscovering important Canadian plays of an earlier vintage.
The Stratford Festival, for instance, is threatening to make a cottage industry out of Michel Tremblay revivals and Canadian Stage got into the act last year by resurrecting David French's Of The Fields, Lately.
At the forefront of this admittedly modest movement is Tarragon Theatre, which last season staged a gripping revival of Judith Thompson's The Crackwalker and is currently returning audiences to John Murrell's well-loved 1977 drama, Waiting For The Parade.
The production, which opened last night on the theatre's mainstage, is not a radical re-envisioning of Murrell's character drama about the lives of five Calgary women during World War II. But interpretation is not a strong suit of director Marti Maraden, who mounted an exuberant revival of Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs at Stratford last summer.
Instead, the characteristically unobtrusive Maraden trusts her talented cast to convey the undeniable power of Murrell's script. The result is a solid, competent production that could stand to be a little less predictable, a little less like the image of the play you already have in your mind if you have ever read it or seen it performed.
Built on a series of well-crafted tableaux, Waiting For The Parade both comically and poignantly examines the needs and feelings of its characters, who are struggling to emerge from the shadows cast by the men in their lives.
A cross-section of experiences and viewpoints are represented in the various characters, led by Janet (Barbara Gordon), a stern, officious and bullying volunteer fired by the responsibility to provide support to men bound for the front. Her charges include Catherine (Catherine Disher), a vivacious free spirit who works in a factory and dates another man while her husband is off at war, Eve (Patty Jamieson), a klutzy pacifist school teacher married to a gung-ho armchair general, and Margaret (Jennifer Phipps), an older woman with one son in the military and another in prison for protesting the war.
The fifth and in some ways pivotal character is Marta (Susan Coyne), who moved to Canada at the age of 9 from Germany and is distrusted, partly because of her father's perceived Nazi sympathies.
The characters get equal hearing, but the production leans heavily on Gordon's fine performance. She is as good at being laughably self-serious in the scene in which Janet complains about the absence of pears in an arrangement of fruit for the troops as she is at garnering sympathy when it becomes clear that her brave front masks the disintegration of her own life.
And Gordon's is but one of five impressive performances, all of which successfully convey the essence of the respective character.
Together, they make Waiting For The Parade well worth its revival, especially for anyone seeing it for the first time.
Written by John Murrell. Directed by Marti Maraden. Set and costume design by Victoria Wallace. Lighting design by Kevin Fraser. To Feb. 9 at Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave. 531-1827.
Copyright 1992 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.