Democracy One Whole Day Beside a Pond

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and director of La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

John Murrell has written a play that, in the 1991–92 period, saw at
least four major productions and attracted directors as prestigious as
Robin Phillips and Christopher Newton. The concept is reminiscent of A
Walk in the Woods: a meeting between two figures who represent
contrasting political philosophies. Here the two figures are poetic
giants in the panoply of American icons: Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Appropriately enough, their encounter is set in the wood by the
edge of a deep pond. Not surprisingly, the dialogue is powerful and
lyrical. In dramatic terms, it ranges from mutual respect to political,
religious, and psychological confrontation.

Escaping the trap of a wordy two-hander, Murrell has the staging genius
to include two other figures, who bring the focus back to earth, water,
and real men. One—a perfect, whole, naked body almost constantly
within our sight as he slips in and out of the water or the woods—is a
deserter from the Confederate Army; the other—wounded, blind, and
coughing blood—is a private from the Union Army. Together they
represent comradeship and the hopes of a new generation, which are so
stridently denied by war and its unfeeling political agendas. The
underlying fear is that “every healthy idea [is] shaken and bruised
and trampled into a powder.”

Murrell paces each scene with vocal intensity and music, and—a lesson
to many—proves that the description of violence can be as shattering
as its depiction. This could be his best from an already distinguished
opus of dramatic writing that includes Memoir and Waiting for the
Parade.