Reesor

Brief Review of earlier "Reesor" production in Toronto by David Rogalsky in Canadian Mennonite (April 13, 2009)

In 1925 Thomas Reesor, a Mennonite pastor from Markham, Ont., assisted a group of Russian Mennonite refugees from Ukraine to settle in Northern Ontario. While the latitude was similar to that of Winnipeg and Regina, grain-producing areas to the west, the muskeg soil of the Canadian Shield was too acidic to grow crops. After the forest was cleared in preparation for farming, there was no income to be derived and by 1948 so many of the settlers had left, many for Harrow, Ont, that the Mennonite congregation dissolved.

But Reesor lives on in annual picnics, once held at the site of the settlement, and in a play by Erin Brandenburg, a former Harrow resident, and Lauren Taylor. Reesor was first performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2007, and then in Markham and Leamington, Ont. It was resurrected at the Factory Studio during The Next Stage Festival earlier this year.

Brandenburg also starred as Anna, 12 years old when she, her father and brother arrived in Reesor at Mile 103 of the CNR track between Cochrane and Hearst, in the dark, to find no settlement awaiting them. All they find is an abandoned attempt to settle with the sign “Given up, help yourself.” Much of the play happens as Anna recites letters she is writing to her sister, who has not accompanied them to Canada from Ukraine, but who, according to her father, will soon follow with their mother. In the course of the play we find that Anna, her father and brother had fled Ukraine after an attack by bandits. Anna managed to hide, but her last sight of her sister was of her standing in the middle of the yard in her night gown. No one will follow.

This realization dawns on Anna as the family comes to the conclusion that they need to abandon Reesor. While the place has not worked out, Canada has become home. The human longing for security in the present has been realized as the past finds closure and a future opens.

Although the proverb “in silence is grace” guides Anna’s father, she gains grace through the pain of assisting at noisy childbirths, both in the Mennonite and Finnish communities, and gains a sense of self through participating in a sauna after assisting a delivery. Anna grows up through the course of the play, through both the drudgery of being the only woman in the household and through interactions with Ivan, one of the Finnish youths in the community.

Reesor is not a straightforward play or story. Besides Brandenburg, three musicians on stage—Andrew Penner, Dave McEathron and Gord Bolan—play a variety of instruments to create mood and sound effects, and act out roles, both hilariously and devastatingly as the women’s group who let slip Anna’s mother’s fate. Reesor tugs at our own longings for closure and an open future.