Mischief plunges its audience into the belly of a whale – and the centre of the grieving process

Open this photo in gallery:

• Title: Mischief
• Written by: Lisa Nasson
• Director: Mike Payette
• Actors: Nicole Joy-Fraser, Devin MacKinnon, Trina Moyan, Lisa Nasson, Jeremy Proulx
• Company: Tarragon Theatre, Native Earth Performing Arts and Neptune Theatre
• Venue: Tarragon Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs to Feb. 8

There’s something comforting about a convenience store – especially when it’s your convenience store, the one with the cashier who knows your favourite kind of lotto ticket, or your preferred brand of cigarette. You know where everything is – the paper towels, the candy bars with questionable expiration dates, the day-old newspapers. You recognize the bell above the front door as a kind of birdsong – an announcement of the other locals who think of the corner store as an extension of their home.

In Mischief, Lisa Nasson’s dreamy new play about grief, monuments and the pain of growing up, a convenience store isn’t just an agora for shelf-stable treats and local gossip. As in the titular shop in Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience, the space is a hearth, a safe place for Brooke (Nasson) and what’s left of her family – Brooke’s mother died three years ago, we learn, and these days, Brooke fills her days stocking shelves and scanning smokes alongside Uncle Chris (Jeremy Proulx) and Tammy (Trina Moyan).

But when a mysterious, celestial figure (Nicole Joy-Fraser) appears in the stock room – a sacred, blissfully customer-free respite, as any former retail or food service worker will instantly recognize – things change. Brooke has to contend with the gaping, starry hole in her life, and with the history of colonialism that refuses to remove its teeth from Halifax’s Mi’kmaq community.

It’s worth noting that all this happens inside the belly of an ancient, bony whale – a creature whose ribs, if you look closely, make up the shelves of the convenience store. (Andy Moro’s marrowy set is among Mischief’s most profound successes.)

Open this photo in gallery:

There’s plenty to admire in Mischief, from Nasson’s economical script to her clear-eyed performance as Brooke. The play, directed in its world premiere by Mike Payette, is often funny – frequently at the expense of the white people buzzing around Brooke and her family like flies, or even wasps – and, at its best, the work offers a sharp, personal exploration of heartache.

Even so, Nasson’s script is sometimes overly taut, glossing over scenes and ideas that could use more space to breathe. We learn early on that the moonlit woman in the stock room is Emily, a 200-odd-year-old spirit who knew Brooke’s mother, and who understands Brooke’s amorphous pain. She mentions more than once that her head is throbbing – that her scalp feels like it’s being ripped from her head – and before long, the horrific, historical implications of that pain emerge into scorching focus.

But in the second act, Emily’s role becomes less clear. When Brooke takes the legacy of Edward Cornwallis into her own hands, suddenly, Mischief becomes a different play. While some of the first act’s nuance bubbles to the surface every so often, the play loses momentum after its fiery, pre-intermission cliffhanger. Ideas emerge, then retreat upstage, and while the play’s yo-yo pacing almost mimics the back-and-forth of grief, the end result feels a touch disjointed.

There’s also the not-small issue of Moro’s uneven projection designs, which at the end of Act One plunge the audience into a dizzying, vertigo-inducing car ride through Halifax and its surrounding trees. Initially, the forced-perspective, all-consuming video is pretty cool – how often does a stage play get to feel like a cutscene from Grand Theft Auto? – but before long, the effect grows tiresome and a bit queasy.

Elsewhere in the play, however, Moro’s projections are lovely – they conjure the stars, the ocean, the barbs of Brooke’s memories. Nasson’s writing, too, has pockets of brilliance in it, with keen observations about capitalism and its incompatibility with true reconciliation in Canada.

At present, however, Mischief feels as if it’s a draft, and perhaps a week of rehearsal, away from completion. There’s room to deepen its performances – the bruised passion of Moyan’s Tammy, the latent healing of Proulx’s Uncle Chris, the weaponized ignorance of Devin MacKinnon’s duo of white men – and to polish its pacing. As Emily, Joy-Fraser is amusing and warm, in twinkling contrast to Brooke’s calcified sharp edges, but I found myself craving more from their interactions, and particularly in the play’s finale.

But then again, what sticks with me most about Mischief is that stunning, symbolically significant whale: its multipurpose ribs, its welcoming stomach. Despite some dramaturgical blubber, Mischief offers a surprisingly hopeful future for Brooke and her community – and a complex heroine for whom whalesong serves as a mother’s lullaby.