Hurricane Mona

The Cultch to December 3, 2023
Tickets from $21 at  604-251-1363 or www.thecultch/com
By donation at the door: November 29 at 2PM

Posted November 23, 2023

A comedy about the climate crisis? You’ve got to be kidding. But playwright Pippa Mackie isn’t kidding and yet Hurricane Mona is very funny. It’s also more than a little surreal; one of the characters is a human-sized frog.

A self-described climate activist, Mackie once covered herself in molasses and pretended to die on the beach at an anti-oil tanker demonstration so she’s deeply acquainted with her character Mona (Alex Gullason), a 20-something activist recently convicted of bashing a police car during a protest. She was covered in oil and bare-breasted at the time.

It’s 5 AM when Mona straggles in, wearing an ankle monitor, to the family home she hasn’t been to for months. Are mom, Susan (Diane Brown), and dad, Rick (Craig Erickson) and younger brother, Jay (Sherine Menes) thrilled to see her? Not really. This isn’t Mona’s first conviction and except for the generosity of her pro bono lawyer Uncle Doug, it wouldn’t be house arrest, it would be jail this time.

But, as they say, it is what it is, so the family rallies. Or tries to.

Thankfully, playwright Mackie doesn’t take sides – unless you consider the planet. She’s definitely on the side of the planet.

Mona is a holier-than-thou environmentalist. Right away Mona dumps on her mom for the coffee machine. Mona only drinks yerba maté.  Yerba maté good; coffee bad. She says she’d rather be in jail than living back at home but she really has no idea. Gullason, as Mona, is all outrage and opinion, sledge-hammering her character’s ideas home. (Never have I seen anyone as comfortable in her naked body in public as Gullason and I’m not talking about a little costume failure.)

Mom is a flake, an over-mothering mother with a drinking problem. Brown dithers and flusters and wrings her hands. But her character is right about something: family is important. Susan loves her children.

While dad isn’t an out-and-out climate change denier, he understands that ending our fossil fuel dependence will require a transition. We might be able to stop fracking and expanding pipelines right now (preferably yesterday) but, damn, most of us heat our homes with natural gas. Erickson is always terrific in these gruff, aggressive but also slightly bewildered roles.

And that leaves young Jay who is simply overwhelmed; he’s medicated because he has tried to kill himself several times. He is Us – especially young people who are going to inherit the earth: frightened, feeling hopeless, confused and angry that we are moving closer and closer to the brink of complete disaster. Menes is quiet, soft-spoken and breaks our heart when, as Jay, Menes says, ”Maybe it would be better if I didn’t wake up.”  Heartbreaking.

And, oh, there’s Raugi Yu as Frog. And what a character the playwright has created. Yu has a terrific sense of humour so this role gives him the opportunity to shine. His fantastic green and warty full-body costume was designed by Sheila White and constructed by her and the Cissors Studio team.

And after all the chaos – and there’s plenty of it, thanks to the design team (John Webber, set; Hina Nishioka, lights; Mary Jane Coomber, sound; and Apollo Palmer, props) – Frog’s conversation with Jay at the end is a quiet moment of real reflection. What a terrible mess we have made of this planet. Is there time? Is there hope?

Presented by Touchstone Theatre and Ruby Slippers Theatre and under the excellent direction of Roy Surette, Pippa Mackie’s Hurricane Mona comes full circle. A comedy about climate change? Or is it a playful call to arms?