Under the Hawthorn Tree: sunday school on the drive

When I was 12, I went on a family vacation to "Barkerville, BC":http://www.barkerville.ca/ where the staff dress as 1860’s townsfolk and tourists lap up the Gold Rush experience. We saw the school teacher at the one room school house, the blacksmith at the smithy, and Hanging Judge Begbie at the old courthouse.

When we got to the Church, the Old West style preacher greeted us in character, guided us to pews, only to shut the doors and preach an _actual_ sermon. It was a sermon peppered with local history, but mostly with hymns and scripture, and a very real collection plate. Turns out he was the minister in nearby Wells, and did this as a side gig in the summer. Talk about shanghai noon.

Seeing the new locally written musical, *Under the Hawthorn Tree* at the Havana brought this experience to mind. Not far into the 2 ½ hour experience, I found that basically this was a play for a Sunday school audience, and the doors were well and truly shut.

Mary Murphy Demers and Mary Clark (“The Two Marys”) fell in love with the Irish children’s book _Under the Hawthorn Tree_, secured the rights and blessings of the author, "Marita Conlon-McKenna":http://www.obrien.ie/author.cfm?authorid=59, and proceeded to create a musical version, for “after all, the truest history is usually passed down the generations through song.”

The story is of three siblings, Eily, Michael, and Peggy O’Driscoll, and their harrowing survival of the Irish potato famine. The play is bookended with an adult Eily telling her own children how she named her new born “Bridget” after a baby sister who didn’t survive the famine, and how Michael, Peggy and Eily did survive, and that is the how we come to be here.

The performance has school production values and realism. Mother serves up pretend soup from a pot, but then the children are brought a real potato each, and heroically eat them between songs. Some actors are barefoot and some are shod, a trap door has been built into the set but is barely used.

The songs – all 29 of them – are not too varied but pleasant Irish-style tunes sung along with a piano as accompaniment. There really wasn’t anything to hum coming out of the theatre, but songs featuring the word “pestilence” rarely are. There’s a couple of comic songs, but they are few; most have titles such as _My Sister is Ill_, and _Medicine Song_. Almost all praise God, with a sort of, ‘they were hardworking, religious folk’ rational.

Most of the 13 performers are recent grads of the musical theatre program at Capilano University or are performers from community theatre. The ensemble singing is skilled and everyone puts their heart and soul into things, but by the grace of God it goes on for a long time. The scenes shift uneasily from one into another, not just with adjustments to set, but with an unfolding of events in the style of a child telling a story badly, “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then…”

Entrances are made through a fire place; not in a cool way like Sirius Black appearing in the fire to Harry Potter, but just because room is cramped and there is a large cast.

Erin Palm as Eily, the eldest of the three children, is wonderful, and is on stage for most of the 2½ hours, singing a bulk of the songs. Nick Fontaine is strong as John Powers (and a couple of other characters), who joins the O’Driscoll children on their long, long journey. Ethan Shankaruk as Michael and Roan Shankaruk as Peggy are the other O’Driscoll siblings, and they do an admiral job, considering they too are on stage for virtually the whole time, and they actually are children. Everyone in the cast looked a bit exhausted at the end, and no wonder.

In the program notes, the Two Marys say of this production of *Under The Hawthorn Tree*: “It is quite a unique experience to create a new musical and we hope it will continue to grow and change after this run is complete: the dynamic of an audience is just another step in the process.” I would say choosing to charge $20 a ticket is a premature step in the process. If the Two Marys found their way to shave a good half hour off the running time of *Under the Hawthorn Tree*, and presented it as a free performance in churches as they further work on it, they could receive an appreciative audience and perhaps have a fulfilling community experience. One of the actors rather sweetly states in his bio, “thank you for supporting independent art in a time of economic crisis; we need all the help we can get.” This is too true, and it is in such times that you must particularly consider what you are offering people, and if you are asking for too much in return.

_Under the Hawthorne Tree by Mary Clark and Mary Murphy Demers; from the novel by Marita Conlon-McKenna played at the Havana Theatre, 1212 Commercial Dr from Mar. 12-21_