If you missed it the first time around, you’ll get another chance to see the Jessie Award winning play Kayak starring Bowen Islander Susan Hogan starring on January 7. Hogan plays the lead, Annie, and spends the entire hour and a half of the play suspended in mid-air, in a kayak. It is a love story, says Hogan, between a mother and son, and also one woman’s journey through the turbulent waters of culpability.
“Annie realizes that she is as responsible as everyone else for environmental destruction,” says Hogan. “The dawning of her understanding of culpability, of everyone’s culpability, is through her son.”
Hogan says that in the two years since the play ran, she has had time to reflect not only on the play’s script but also on the main subject matter: climate change.
“I recently workshopped a new play about wind turbines in Southern Ontario, and with the play there were a thousand pages of interviews with people both for and against them,” says Hogan. “And as I read those, I thought about climate change and the central problem being that everyone is willing to pay lipservice to the problem, but no one actually wants to change their lifestyle.”
Hogan says that acting in Kayak feels like a rare opportunity to do meaningful work that can actually make an impact on the audience and change the way they think – or act. She also says the play has changed her.
“I’m not on any specific committees, but I am getting closer to it all the time,” she says. “I think it is challenging to know how to act in the face of these things, unless we are given a really clear action. Like recycling, we can feel good about ourselves at the end of the day, but it really helps to have someone at the helm, telling us how to separate our plastics.”
Kayak will run at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver between January 7 – 17.
