Our Ghosts

Firehall Arts Centre to April 2, 2023
Tickets from $25 at www.firehallartscentre.ca or 604-689-0926

Posted March 23, 2023

Written by Vancouver playwright Sally Stubbs, Our Ghosts is a love story that spans almost seven decades. But of those years, Vic and Moira were actually together for only a few.

Fighter pilot Vic and the T-33 Silver Star he was flying  disappeared, leaving  Moira, his young, pregnant wife and Kate, a toddler, to grieve. Moira never gave up hoping he would be found and she never stopped loving him right into her 90s.

What lends power to Our Ghosts is that this is the playwright’s real life story: her father, Flying Officer Gerald Stephen Stubbs, went missing on a routine instrument flight out of Comox RCAF Base on March 22, 1956 and was subsequently declared dead after what appears to have been a hastily and inadequately conducted search. At first it was thought the plane crashed over the Pacific Ocean but years later the crash site was discovered in the rugged Coast Mountain Range. It also became apparent that Stubbs and his co-pilot might have walked away from the wreckage but no searches had ever been conducted in that area at the time of the incident.

The tragedy became the central defining story of the Stubbs family and the obsession of playwright Stubbs’ mother who claimed, right up to her death, that she thought about her husband “every day” despite the fact that he had by then been missing for many decades.

In the play, Flying Officer Gerald Stephen Stubbs is called Vic, his wife is Moira, his daughter is Kate and his son is Stevie.

The play opens with Vic’s now adult daughter Kate (Corina Akeson) looking through old photographs following the death of her mother Moira (Barbara Pollard). The photographs bring memories flooding back and in a series of flashbacks we see Vic and young Moira (Lucy McNulty) meeting in Winnipeg for the first time; we see them ‘jiving’ to music of the period and then we see Moira, pregnant, making peanut butter cookies with toddler Kate looking on.

Then the terrible news arrives: Vic, his co-pilot and the plane are missing. But not to worry, Moira is told; the search is underway and, no doubt, they will be found.

What follows is Moira’s escalating fury at the bungled search, the dearth of shared information and the lack of support she gets from the RCAF; the other wives on the base sympathize by bringing  soup and casseroles, the usual fare delivered to widows when disaster strikes. The playwright takes us through the years of unanswered questions and lack of consideration including being moved out of their home on the base.

But what is the most compelling feature of Our Ghosts is the impact the crash had not only on Vic’s wife but on his two kids, especially on his son Stevie (Sebastien Archibald) who looked a lot like his father and was constantly being compared to him by his mother who maintained a sort of hero-worship of the man she married. In many ways, seeing the damage that was being done to Kate and Stevie by their mother’s obsessive behaviour, it’s difficult, eventually, to empathize with the mother. The children not only lost their father but, in many respects, lost their mother, too. Stevie, in his early teens, turned to alcohol and drugs and died young.

The obvious bleakness of this story is tempered with some humour, mostly offered by Barbara Pollard in the role of Moira who, in her 90s, remained scratchy and abrasive – a taker of no nonsense. Pollard doesn’t hold back and just lets ‘er rip.

Corina Akeson’s warmth comes through in Kate who, in spite of losing patience now and again with her mother, indulges her and loves her. Sebastien Archibald is Vic before the crash; an uptight RCAF officer; and at his best as Stevie who although a charming free-spirit, can be seen heading to a disaster of another kind.

Lucy McNulty, is feisty as young Moira; and chameleon-like Raugi Yu fills all the other roles.

The wide Firehall stage is hung by set designer Jessica Oostergo with floor-to-ceiling white parachute silk like giant spider webs and three low platforms – like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle – that are moved around to show the different locations. Moving of these low stages is efficiently done but perhaps not necessary to the telling of the story.

Sarah Rodgers directs this Vancouver premiere that opened March 22, sixty-seven years to the day that Flight 21454 went down. It must have been both unimaginably painful and unbelievably rewarding for playwright Stubbs to see her family’s story, presented by Our Ghosts Collective Production in association with Western Gold Theatre,  played out to an enthusiastic Firehall audience.

In the programme notes Stubbs acknowledges Whistler Search and Rescue (WSAR) who eventually found some parts of the T-33 Silver Star’s fuselage in the Callaghan Valley south of Callaghan Lake; no human remains were found. The case remains open with WSAR using the site each year for training volunteers. The story of Flying Officer Gerald Stephen Stubbs and co-pilot Flyer Officer James E. Miller can be found at www.whistlersar.com.