Montreal playwright looks at Canada’s water supply with ‘The Watershed’ play

By Victoria Ahearn, The Canadian Press

TORONTO – In penning a play about Canada’s fresh water supply, Montreal-based playwright Annabel Soutar decided she needed a first-hand look at the issues surrounding it.

So she took her two daughters, who were 10 and eight at the time, on a five-week road trip that went through Ontario’s Great Lakes and ended at the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alta.

Their journey is reflected in the documentary play “The Watershed,” which makes its world premiere on Tuesday at the Berkeley Street Theatre as part of the Pan Am Games arts and cultural festival Panamania.

Cast members include Eric Peterson of “Corner Gas” fame.

“I feel that the oil sands are such an easy scapegoat for Canadians who care about the environment to say, ‘How can we have this dirty oil being extracted? And if we’re trying to combat climate change, shouldn’t we stop building infrastructure to export that oil out of our country?'” said Soutar.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s easy to say, but is that easy to do?’ We all drive our cars around like mad. Here we were in a gas-guzzling Winnebago asking that question, and I thought, ‘Maybe it would be good to go talk to people whose livelihoods very directly depend on those oil sands.’

“And we found out, of course, that all our livelihoods depend on that particular industry in Canada.”

Soutar said she and director Chris Abraham were asked to do the play in 2012 by Don Shipley, creative director of arts and culture for Panamania.

He’d seen their critically acclaimed documentary stage show “Seeds,” about a Saskatchewan farmer engaged in a legal battle with biotech giant Monsanto, and wanted them to do the same style of theatre for Panamania.

As with “Seeds,” Soutar made herself the central figure of the piece (Kristen Thomson plays her) so it would be personal, familiar and more digestible.

“Sometimes we have to take issues personally in order to really do something about them,” she said.

Also like “Seeds,” Soutar transcribed her conversations and interviews on the subject and put them into the script verbatim. She also included speeches from politicians and media reports.

“There are political stories in the play but also very personal stories about how, in a domestic universe, we try and cope with environmental questions, sometimes deeply failing at that,” she said.

Some of the most poignant questions came from her daughters, whom she also interviewed for the play, which is co-produced by Crow’s Theatre and Porte Parole.

“They ask sometimes the most obvious and basic questions that you’ve stopped asking yourself,” said Soutar.

“Then you realize that your reasoning is often very faulty and that we’re often delaying doing things that we should do now because we’re doing other things that have taken on more importance.”

Soutar said the play has transformed her more than any of her other theatre shows, in terms of examining her own behaviour and wondering about how she’s going to move forward.

She’s considered moving to the countryside to feel more connected to the natural world.

And she now feels water “is the most valuable resource we have in Canada.”

“They say the Americans are already knocking on our doors and starting to bulk export our water out of the country and very, very soon we will learn that we maybe took it for granted a little bit too much.”

“The Watershed” runs through July 19 and will then go on a national tour.

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