My evening at the Art Gallery ended with Métis playwright Colin Wolf’s play Lumber, which comes to us from Thumbs Up Good Work Theatre via the Calgary and Edmonton Fringe Festivals. We meet Jack Bennett, a young man with a chainsaw who has been working cutting down trees. He is good at this work and has a passion for it, but he is reckless in it, which causes him problems. When he gets fired from a job he got through his uncle’s connections it is compounded by also losing his housing situation, breaking up with his girlfriend, owing his uncle money, and a heavy grief hanging over him (compounded by guilt) centred on the death of his dog. Overwhelmed, he makes the rash decision to leave everything and head up to the Yukon to look for work. Once there he enters a sort of magical realm that slowly helps him to learn how to stop running from connection and hurt, and to begin to learn how to ask for help.

Jack is a fish out of water in the Yukon, as is creatively depicted by his bureaucratic dealings with two absurd puppets who keep sending him in circles, and the fact that folks he encounters can physically smell something off about him. He keeps seeing a mysterious figure in the woods, and he reflects on a relative of his who once came here during the gold rush, and then the family never heard from him again. At first Jack thinks this is a success story, but the longer he stays in the Yukon the more he feels drawn to thinking about it in another way. He is coaxed along by Claire, who comes from an old Yukon family, and who is wryly kind to him. Read more at the link!