First World War Drama
Prairie fever
AMY BARRATT, The Mirror Published: Thursday, September 27, 2007
Unity (1918) deals with an outbreak of Spanish flu in small-town Saskatchewan
by AMY BARRATT
In Persephone Productions' latest show, opening tonight (Sept. 27), soldiers returning from war bring with them a deadly virus that quickly sweeps through their communities. Are you thinking AIDS? Bird flu? Some mysterious SARS-like outbreak? None of the above. The killer in Unity (1918) is the Spanish flu that came on the heels of World War I and caused more deaths worldwide than nearly five years of fighting.
If you don't know about the Spanish flu, don't feel bad; neither did Kevin Kerr until he started doing research for the play, which focuses on its devastating effect on the small Saskatchewan town of Unity.
"I had heard vaguely about it," Kerr told me recently from the University of Alberta where he is settling in to a two-year post as playwright-in-residence. "But when I did research and found out the extent of it, it made me wonder: why isn't this part of my general knowledge? It's astounding how massive it was."
The Spanish flu was a global epidemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people. By contrast, the war took 9 million lives. Between September 1918 and early 1920, at least 50,000 Canadians died from the virus, most of them 20-40-year-olds.
"I'm interested in those pivotal moments that don't make it into our collective consciousness," says Kerr, a B.C. native who spent his childhood summers visiting his mother's family in small town Saskatchewan. "The First World War is a big part of our national mythology, and I don't deny its importance, I just wonder if there's more to the story."
He wonders if the forgetting was deliberate; if, after losing so many lives in the war, Canadians found the ravages of the virus too much to bear. There is evidence that people at the time equated the disease with the conflict. On Armistice Day, November 11, people dropped their facemasks and their guard and poured into the streets to celebrate. Record numbers would be dead within a week.
As part of his research in rural Saskatchewan in the late '90s, Kerr interviewed several "old timers" who actually lived through the epidemic as children.
"One of the things they mentioned was that the flu orphaned a lot of people, and often these kids were taken in by other families. There may have been a desire not to talk about it as a mercy to these kids."
The central characters in Unity (1918) are women, and this was a deliberate choice, says the playwright. With the war still being waged overseas, the absence of men, especially young, healthy ones, would have been noticeable in communities across the country.
"One character, that of a young female undertaker," says Kerr, "had been floating around in my head for years." As soon as he set her down in the town of Unity during the epidemic, a story started to happen.
The play was produced in Montreal a few years ago in its French translation, but Persephone's is the first English-language production of the 2002 Governor General's Award winner. Gabrielle Soskin directs a cast of nine young local actors.
Unity (1918) deals with an outbreak of Spanish flu in small-town Saskatchewan
by AMY BARRATT
In Persephone Productions' latest show, opening tonight (Sept. 27), soldiers returning from war bring with them a deadly virus that quickly sweeps through their communities. Are you thinking AIDS? Bird flu? Some mysterious SARS-like outbreak? None of the above. The killer in Unity (1918) is the Spanish flu that came on the heels of World War I and caused more deaths worldwide than nearly five years of fighting.
If you don't know about the Spanish flu, don't feel bad; neither did Kevin Kerr until he started doing research for the play, which focuses on its devastating effect on the small Saskatchewan town of Unity.
"I had heard vaguely about it," Kerr told me recently from the University of Alberta where he is settling in to a two-year post as playwright-in-residence. "But when I did research and found out the extent of it, it made me wonder: why isn't this part of my general knowledge? It's astounding how massive it was."
The Spanish flu was a global epidemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people. By contrast, the war took 9 million lives. Between September 1918 and early 1920, at least 50,000 Canadians died from the virus, most of them 20-40-year-olds.
"I'm interested in those pivotal moments that don't make it into our collective consciousness," says Kerr, a B.C. native who spent his childhood summers visiting his mother's family in small town Saskatchewan. "The First World War is a big part of our national mythology, and I don't deny its importance, I just wonder if there's more to the story."
He wonders if the forgetting was deliberate; if, after losing so many lives in the war, Canadians found the ravages of the virus too much to bear. There is evidence that people at the time equated the disease with the conflict. On Armistice Day, November 11, people dropped their facemasks and their guard and poured into the streets to celebrate. Record numbers would be dead within a week.
As part of his research in rural Saskatchewan in the late '90s, Kerr interviewed several "old timers" who actually lived through the epidemic as children.
"One of the things they mentioned was that the flu orphaned a lot of people, and often these kids were taken in by other families. There may have been a desire not to talk about it as a mercy to these kids."
The central characters in Unity (1918) are women, and this was a deliberate choice, says the playwright. With the war still being waged overseas, the absence of men, especially young, healthy ones, would have been noticeable in communities across the country.
"One character, that of a young female undertaker," says Kerr, "had been floating around in my head for years." As soon as he set her down in the town of Unity during the epidemic, a story started to happen.
The play was produced in Montreal a few years ago in its French translation, but Persephone's is the first English-language production of the 2002 Governor General's Award winner. Gabrielle Soskin directs a cast of nine young local actors.
