Gravel Run

Cecily M. Barrie is a graduate drama student at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

Massing’s Gavel Run is a deftly-textured presentation of a family
ruled by parents competing in eccentricity: Papa, who predicts the
future with macabre omens, and Mama, who selectively changes the past by
contriving pleasant memories, which she then imposes on her family. Len,
the fiancé whom daughter Leona has brought home to meet the family, is
the “normal” outsider who, like the audience, feels odd in this
strangely embracing household of co-dependants.

The play is an esoteric comedy about the peculiarities and history that
a family’s members share (termed “family mythology” by Len in his
anthropological studies of other cultures). Massing explores how the
family ideal is itself a myth; how families can be a place of comfort or
confinement, especially when they are ruled by manipulation and haunting
secrets (which in this family are hints of incest, a suspicious
accidental death, and a ghost-like sister, Sarah, who may not be real).

The play’s title is the name of an initiation rite undertaken by
younger members in the small Prairie community where the action takes
place. But the title also has a dark side, for it resembles Mama’s
dream (which always ends as she is about to be run down by a truck on a
gravel road). In fact, Massing has interwoven a whole tier of sinister
devices (Papa’s lurid jars and their overtones of animal sacrifice,
Billy’s menacing playing with a baseball bat, lighting effects) to
create the play’s subtext: pervasive malevolence. Her dialogue raises
dramatic tension by using highly evocative words so that the audience is
never quite sure what is irony, hyperbole, forbidden secret, or mere
colloquialism.

The final scene is a surprise and yet appropriately enigmatic in that
it leaves the audience with several unanswered questions. With distorted
memories and dreams as its prominent features, this play resembles one
of Leona’s own nightmares: “not the monster scary kind—the slow,
creepy ones where everything quietly goes wrong.”