Lion in the Streets

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University.

This intense, two-act, 28-character play premiered at the Du Maurier
Theatre Centre in 1990, with the playwright as director. The large cast
allows the playwright a wide range of speech, and she uses it
brilliantly to create convincing figures on both sides of the question
in this morality tale. This essentially plotless work holds the
reader/audience’s attention through the strength of its recurring
characters.

Thompson’s main interlocking character, Isobel, is “a deranged and
very ragged looking nine-year-old Portuguese girl,” who is murdered by
a man in a playground 17 years prior to the present action. She is
searching for her home and for somebody to take her there—a home that
the final stage directions inform us is “heaven.” The wandering,
tormented, homeless soul finds her way home when she finally forgives
her murderer at the very moment she seems most capable of taking her
revenge on him.

But the play is neither sermon nor allegory; rather, it is vivid
theatre, with humor, song, dance, and a series of emotionally riveting
tableaux. The central question is this: Assuming “lions” walk the
streets and use their power to humiliate and destroy the weak, what is
the place of love, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice? The lionlike
characters believe in their natural dominance and act with appropriate
heartlessness, while the compelling vulnerable figures—among them a
woman with cerebral palsy, a woman dying of bone cancer, a woman whose
husband has abandoned her and their son, the young, the gay, and the
uneducated—simply call out for deliverance. Isobel, the main
character, gains her own deliverance in the end, while the rest of the
characters remain in a “hell” devoid of redeeming grace.

In his introduction, Richard Paul Knowles discusses Thompson’s view
of the power of grace to intervene in even the most hopeless situations.
While Thompson does not show in this play that grace is easily found,
she makes the reader/audience consider how necessary and valuable the
search for it might be.