Best Kind

After I moved to Newfoundland in the 1990s to work for the CBC, my friend Ray, born in Bear Cove Point but living in “town,” as they call St. John’s, drove us up the Southern Shore to see what the island looked like for real. What I noticed first off was that the trees were bent, as were the houses, in the same direction. As for the trees, Ray explained, “That’s how God made them.” As for the houses, it may have been an optical illusion or a metaphor: they were planted, like the people, with a shoulder against the elements, both natural and anthropogenic. Newfoundland culture, I would soon learn, is like this too: a product of forces mostly invisible to those of us from away (I left the province in 1997). It leans into the wind.

“One is up against this enormous legacy called Newfoundland culture,” Noreen Golfman wrote in these pages in 2008, “a limitless term that is intimately connected to at least four centuries of white settlement.” The island (Labrador too) has long been a colonial plaything: the English, the French, the Portuguese, the Canadians, and the Americans have all had designs on the place, from what to do with its fish to what to do when the fish were gone. Worse, they have always romanticized local culture as charmingly quaint. When I lived in the Outer Battery of St. John’s, tourists would peer through my living room window as if they expected to see me mending nets. Provincial tourism ads do not disabuse the world of the notion that Newfoundland is a theme park and that its people are Disney animatronic models of a convincing quality.

One needs the arts to cut through the bullshit. Playwrights and poets like Al Pittman (now gone) and Edward Riche (still writing) bring out the ambivalence and the strange narrative currents that run through Newfoundland, beyond its stereotypes. The comedy troupe CODCO was based on the same ambivalence and narratives: about the Catholic Church, about commercialism, about the conflicts between town and bay (there is a sketch from the theatre days about a blind passenger on the bay bus that’s an unheralded classic), about the colonial thumb, about resettlement from dead outports. The work was so rich and layered that some on the mainland who watched CODCO’s CBC show, which aired from 1988 to 1993, wondered if it was supposed to be comedy at all, or rather some kind of surreal televised performance art: to-MAY-toes, to-MAH-toes. CODCO came on the scene in the 1970s, during what Sandra Gwyn in Saturday Night called “the Newfoundland Renaissance,” which also saw the founding of the Mummers Troupe by Chris Brookes, the first music from Figgy Duff, the launch of Rising Tide Theatre, and the publication of Pittman’s popular children’s book Down by Jim Long’s Stage.

The group’s elder statesman (if not by age then because of some perceived, twisted wisdom) was Andy Jones, whose Actor Needs Restraint! gathers scripts from a series of one-man shows and comedy bits performed over the years at the LSPU Hall and elsewhere. Jones’s introductory notes are short and humble, leaving room for the work. “The critics loved it or hated it,” he writes of the Out of the Bin monologues. “It was called ‘a shaggy shapeless series of sketches,’ which I mostly agree with.” The sketches featured the Shitting Pig, the Soft-Spot Murderer, the green fog burps, Father Dinn’s dick, and so on. “I was young,” he admits, adding that it now seems all so tame compared with shows like South Park.

The book’s true highlights are the more fully grown Uncle Val scripts, about a character Jones invented to mine the local tradition of recitations: eloquent accounts of what life does and doesn’t offer in material specifics. It’s spoken word storytelling verging on a folkish performance art or poetry. Val is an “outharbour Newfoundlander” from Job’s Cove, now living, fish out of water, at his daughter and son-in-law’s suburban home. Jones performs the stories as letters to his friend Jack. In one, he describes how he scared his grandkids by explaining where babies come from (forest, wolves), which puts him in trouble with their mother. “Now in my day that was one of the prime reasons for tellin’ stories. Old fellas used to come over and sit around the kitchen and frighten the youngsters rigid,” Val says. “Like, there was always that story of the fella who — when he was alive — had struck his own mother and when he died, his hand kept rising up in the coffin like this (he demonstrates the hand snapping up from the elbow . . . ) so they had to put a little wooden tower onto the coffin to accommodate the hand.” The story is fiction and fact: to know Newfoundland even a little is to know that the hand-in-coffin incident actually happened, in every village on the island, at some point in history, in tales told in houses that lean into the wind. Jones has the most well-formed theory of theatre in Canada: the colonizers tell big stories, while the colonized tell small ones, organized or haphazard (what Jones calls “cubist theatre”), that are funnier, stranger, more true.

Jones concedes, “Maybe I am a romantic middle-class townie . . . maybe . . . but that place (this place) made me, guaranteed. And somehow gave me that extraordinary, infectious, and probably foolish — and maybe totally hopeless — yet ever-regenerating passion that we all still seem to have for Newfoundland and Labrador.” How do young people today think someone like Jones has done in life? “I guess I’ll have to telephone Alberta to find out.”