Review: WALDEN at The Theatre Centre

The debate over how to save our precarious planet often boils down to looking outward or looking inward. Do we return to a simpler existence, healing the world by taking down the grid and reducing our consumption on a massive scale? Do we look to the skies, our current residence written off as a lost cause, all of the technology at our disposal devoted to creating a habitable life on another celestial body? Or, as is often the case when testing extremes, is the answer really somewhere in the middle?

Amy Berryman’s 2021 play WALDEN, set sometime in an unspecified future with a climate crisis coming to a head and Mars colonization a burgeoning reality, debates the question through the lens of a family drama. Twin sisters Stella (Emily Anne Corcoran) and Cassie, short for Cassiopeia (Charlotte Dennis), daughters of an astronaut who themselves worked their way into an elite NASA team, now find themselves in very different worlds.

While Cassie is newly returned from a lunar mission, Stella gave up space exploration to live in a remote cabin with her fiance Bryan (Oshen Aoun), an environmental activist who grows his own food and won’t even look at a screen. A story of sibling rivalry, altered dreams, and the choices we make about the future, WALDEN is more successful in its exploration of family dynamics than as a work of speculative fiction. However, Icarus Theatre’s production at The Theatre Centre, directed by Erik Richards, still takes off for an engaging 90 minutes of theatre.

Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, which inspires the title of the play and also Stella’s design for a self-sustaining Mars environment, from the seclusion of Walden Pond, where he sought to live a stripped-down existence. Richards’ set design makes the most of his resources; a cross-section of the inside and yard of the cabin, filled with earthy, wooden browns, garden boxes, and retro furnishings, it feels lived-in and immersive. Berryman juxtaposes the sisters’ choices of seclusion to make them feel more alike; both are running to a place off the grid, even if one is earthbound and the other cosmic.

At the same time, when one thinks about Walden, one can’t help but ponder the domestic labour that allowed Thoreau to thrive in his experiment, his mother and sisters regularly dropping off food and washing his dirty laundry. Self-sufficiency, in Berryman’s work, is also a myth in the face of human need, her characters’ stoic fronts belying their desperation to depend on each other. For the sisters, the connection and the hurts run deep; driven apart by competition, in the cabin they orbit each other warily, like an unbalanced binary star. Now, Cassie refuses to believe her sister is content with a relatively simple life, yet finds herself drawn to Bryan and the world he offers.

Corcoran and Dennis clearly portray the history between the sisters in both the similarities they show in their body language and the careful distance they keep from each other. Aoun’s gentleness and warmth as Bryan prevents his character from feeling preachy or stereotypical, and the debates he has with Cassie feel good-humoured rather than explosive—until things get truly serious. While the mild “love triangle” aspect of the plot feels unnecessary, one scene, a late-night encounter where the two share some (rare, in this time period) alcohol outside under the stars, shows the chemistry between the actors, making it believable that Stella would feel her sister has come to take yet another thing from her.

The raised stakes of the Earth’s nearing destruction and the irrevocable nature of Cassie’s next proposed mission, the aforementioned Mars-colonizing Hail Mary, give the play a welcome sense of urgency and melancholy. There is no easy solution here, no take-backs, and the times demand much sacrifice. Even before polluted smoke fills the stage, there’s something suffocating about it.

WALDEN definitely isn’t hard sci-fi. While Berryman’s use of language is compelling, most of the details are fuzzy enough that the crisis and the solution seem more like metaphors than fully fleshed-out scenarios. Your willingness to suspend your disbelief will likely be proportional to how much you care about the characters and hope they can rebuild their lives; luckily, the production makes it easy to care.

To paraphrase an old cliché, if you shoot for Mars and miss, you may at least wind up among the stars--

Or, perhaps, at Walden.

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