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It’s late August, and the signs are everywhere: peach pie, peach cobbler, peach chutney, peach salsa. Peaches are at their luscious, sweet, seasonal best right now. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the Stratford Shakespeare festival has recently opened a work in which the favoured fruit figures so prominently. Morris Panych’s The Trespassers features a litany of peaches scattered across its mental and emotional territory. Though it’s a challenging piece of work, it’s also easily the best show on at the Stratford Festival this year.
Writer/director/actor Morris Panych has been called the most prolific theatre artist of his generation, and with good reason. His output is enormous, and he’s worked in every possible capacity inside, and outside, the theatre world. His best-known works including Vigil, The Overcoat, and 7 Stories (to name just a few) have enjoyed productions staged around the world, and he’s been the recipient of two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Drama, along with numerous other awards and honours.

Always seeking to find new ways of stretching the theatrical medium while still telling a compelling and emotionally involving story, Panych delved into deeply creative waters with this interpretation of Melville’s Moby Dick, presented at Stratford last year. The work, driven by Debussy’s music and some poetic, near-balletic movement, garnered mixed reviews but was a beautifully designed work that hinted at the Festival’s desire to produce more experimental work.

The Trespassers covers more personal territory. Partly inspired by Panych’s trips to the Okanahan as a child, as well as experiencing his own father’s demise, the play is a mix of heartfelt emotion, clever staging, and strong writing. The play takes as its central premise a mystery (best unrevealed here) that requires careful peeling and handling. The peach metaphor is apt, and not entirely incidental. Panych provides us with a myriad of clues in providing exposition for this world full of hurt souls and unspoken truths.

Through a series of flashbacks, indicated with simple, elegant changes in lighting and spatial design within the intimate confines of the Studio Theatre’s stage, we come to grasp the world Panych envisions. Opening with the twangy earnestness of country music (by Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash), we are introduced to Lowell (Noah Reid), a precocious, unstable (and very possibly autistic) boy of fifteen who lives with his over-protective mother, Cash (Kelli Fox) and adventurous, hippie-esque grandfather Hardy (Joseph Zielger). Told in a series of flashbacks to a police officer, with simple props, movement and dialogic exposition, the audience is forced to use its collective imagination to fill in the gaps, and figure out the mystery of why Lowell is talking to a police officer (Robert King). What could this gentle, sweet, easily bruised soul (yes, again the peach metaphor is intentional on Panych’s part) possibly have done?

Despite the open qualities of Ken MacDonald’s design, The Trespassers presents a world full of secrets and unspoken facts. We learn that Lowell’s straight-rod, Christian mother has been left for a much younger woman, and that she is attempting to raise her son the best way she knows how: by having lots of rules, and relying on meds to help her son’s “condition.” Her father, Hardy, scoffs at the notion there’s anything wrong with Lowell, insisting it’s her over-protectiveness making the boy ill. He keeps interfering (or helping, depending on your viewpoint), plying the teen with tequila, nude centerfolds, and lessons on the redistribution of wealth as provided by the surfeit of peaches that sit on the lawn of an abandoned property next door.

Rough, flat slats resembling the blades of hockey sticks poke upwards resembling a kind of wild semi-forest, as soft, sensuous, round spheres hang from the slats and are scattered along the floor of the stage beside wooden crates that alternate as chairs, hills, and living spaces. The competing, surreal worlds of two and three dimensional realities are underlined as we are lead through a story by an unreliable narrator, with Lowell recounting past events through his jumbled, confused mind. Interestingly, he remembers moods, emotions, and feelings much more than actual events, and Panych has his talented ensemble match these memories with equal amounts of tenderness and passion.

Yet amidst the sweetness of the interplay between grandfather and grandson, a larger sourness lurks; love, freedom, and mortality are all notions Panych explores, with keen, sometimes painful insights. Macdonald’s subtle, classy set design is hugely helpful in allowing us to determine the clashing ideals between father and daughter; the contrast in textures, colours, and light says just as much as the rough, brunt exchanges between the two.

Kelli Fox is all quiet, internalized rage; though passionate in defending her Christian ideals, her flattened confidence is palpable and heartbreaking to watch. When her son suggests she fix herself up, she shrugs, “I should get my hair done” before scuttling offstage like a beetle, eyes lowered, shoulders slumped. As the troubled youngster, Noah Reid balances typical teen awkwardness with torrents of bursting passion. He effectively conveys his character’s inward struggles through cautious, halting steps, twisting his grey shirt into little twists, pacing the floor where Robert King’s stern police officer prods him with questions, stuffs his hands in his pockets and hikes up his shoulders in spinning his mother a yarn about a sick friend.

Stratford stalwart Lucy Peacock plays Roxy, Hardy’s “paramour” and the figure who, at the opposite end of Lowell’s uptight mother, provides the kind of forthright honesty and no-BS attitude the teenager is seeking. Though the role could easily slip into the “hooker with a heart of gold” cliché, Panych steers away from such an easy characterization, making Roxy just a degree on this side of seedy. With a ratty robe, unkept hair and rough voice, Peacock conveys a deeply unglamourous, if fascinating performance that nicely contrasts Fox’s hard-working, heart-broken mother. Each woman serves to highlight a different aspect of Hardy’s character, providing a more rounded portrait of a man in love with life but scared of it at the same time.

While the women are important to the play, it’s really the relationship between Hardy and Lowell that provides the main emotional thrust of The Trespassers, and it’s Joseph Ziegler’s tender, knowing performance that is the glue binding everything, and everyone, together. The actor/director (perhaps best known to Toronto audiences for his work with Soulpepper Theatre Company) gives a marvellously nuanced performance of a man who, despite all appearances, is just as easily bruised and dented as Lowell. His subtle timing and casually-delivered observations about life, love, sex, family, and his experiences of fidelity could so easily come off as treacly witticisms filtered through a yokel-y Red Green-esque patriarch, but instead, are smart, comic, sincere, and deeply moving.

Performances, together with keen design, subtle direction, and strong writing, make for a wonderful, moving evening of theatre. The Trespassers may be playing at the smallest of theatres at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, but it’s easily the show that has the biggest heart this season. Peaches never seemed so sweet.