In Strife, playwright Matthew MacKenzie takes aim at whitewashed activism

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• Title: Strife
• Written by: Matthew MacKenzie
• Performed by: Jesse Gervais, Grace Lamarche, Tracey Nepinak, Valerie Planche, Michaela Washburn, Teneil Whiskeyjack
• Director: Yvette Nolan
• Company: Punctuate! Theatre, in association with Tarragon Theatre
• Venue: Tarragon Theatre Extraspace
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until April 26

Consider the talking bird. In Canadian theatre, such creatures are often vessels of gossip – “a little birdie told me” and so on – or sources of vital truths off the shoulder of a human protagonist. Caleigh Crow’s There is Violence and There is Righteous Violence and There is Death or, The Born-Again Crow, with its tricksy, titular corvid, comes to mind. So does the avian imagery of Joelle Peters’s Niizh. Even The Moors, Jen Silverman’s genre-bending farce currently being produced by Riot King at the Theatre Centre in Toronto, features a chatty hen.

In Strife, Matthew MacKenzie’s intimate drama about the perils of activism, the sharp edges of academia and their intersection at the centre of Alberta’s oil sands, a bird does the most important talking: Great Grey Owl, played by Tracey Nepinak. She watches the events of the play unfold with the critter’s archetypal wisdom, and with MacKenzie’s trademark whimsy.

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Indeed, much like MacKenzie’s last bird-centred work – the muddled but evocative Takwahiminana, which feasted on the trauma of the ortolan bunting – Strife extends its central metaphor past mere symbolism. In both plays, the feathered beasts onstage are mouthpieces for grief, and for inner journeys too nuanced to represent solely through prose.

But also, much like Takwahiminana, Strife feels incomplete and wispy, with MacKenzie’s compelling ideas about identity and complicity woven loosely between its plumes.

When we meet Monique (Teneil Whiskeyjack), she’s in the throes of mourning: Her brother Nathan was killed at a recent protest, and his assailant has walked free ever since. Nathan was a special guy, we come to learn – he was a devout activist willing to do whatever it took to shoulder the causes that mattered most to him. That included, to Monique’s chagrin, the environmental and cultural implications of Alberta’s oil industry, in which Monique, a truck driver, is happily employed.

Slowly, a portrait of Nathan and his relationship with Monique fizzes into focus. We meet his girlfriend Sarah (a standout Grace Lamarche), and Eleanor (Valerie Planche), a Métis, white-passing professor who reacts poorly to being called white-passing – even when the people around her present evidence of the ways she’s benefited from a whitewashed career in academia.

Eddy (the well-layered Jesse Gervais), Monique’s boyfriend, adds further tension to MacKenzie’s interrogation of communities – what they are, how they work and how they disintegrate. Before long, it becomes clear that Eddy doesn’t fit in Monique’s world, nor did he fit perfectly in Nathan’s. His grief, we come to observe, is singular and sharp – and at odds with the rest of Nathan’s chosen family.

Zaiba Baig returns to the stage with a pair of – sort of – trans rage plays

The whole thing’s stitched together by Sopranos-esque therapy scenes between Monique and Andrea (Michaela Washburn), in which we see the latter evaluate the former’s capacity to return to work. (More than once, Strife echoes Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job in its skewering of capitalism through the prism of psychotherapy.)

Much of Strife is excellent: Lamarche’s performance and MacKenzie’s dialogue between Eddy and Eleanor, in particular, are top-notch. MacKenzie’s pithy deep dives into Indigenous identity – what it looks like, how it feels and how it mutates between individuals – are also epic. (“One person’s spiritual experience is another’s poor driving conditions” is just one of Strife’s many laugh lines.)

But in Yvette Nolan’s spare production, those pieces never quite coalesce into one story. MacKenzie’s characters are elevated by the actors but largely underwritten – especially Great Grey Owl and Monique, whose largely internal journey seldom floats to the surface – and Nolan’s staging eschews the specificity of MacKenzie’s strongest dialogue for a dreamier atmosphere, in which a small collection of metal tables is used to represent platforms, bridges and cliffs.

It feels as if there’s a full, powerful piece of writing lodged between the cushions of Strife and Takwahiminana, both fine plays in their own right with similar points about the scourge of white saviourism in racialized community spaces (and with similarly charged explorations of birds). On its own merit, Strife is a quiet meditation on violence and its ability to curdle families, but there’s room yet for it to evolve from a hatchling to a full-blown raptor.