The Supine Cobbler: a woman’s view of abortion

Abortion is never a simple topic to discuss. Despite being decriminalized in 1988, it’s still too much of an emotional hot button issue on both the pro and con sides.

When artists tackle the subject of abortion with its boundless personal, political and social ramifications, it’s too easy to tip the scales into self-indulgent overkill.

But Canadian playwright Jill Connell’s The Supine Cobbler now running at Backstage Theatre until Saturday, April 23 is like nothing you have seen before.

It flies into the realm of edgy drama peppered with huge bursts of comedy. Using a similar literary style to Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “magic realism,” Connell sets her characters in a modern world with western tropes that mix reality and fantasy so the distinctions blend together.

The Maggie Tree production that opened last Thursday night elicited two distinct reactions. For many in the packed house, it was a brilliant, non-judgmental satire. For others it was the vanity project that left too many unanswered questions.

However, whatever side of the fence theatregoers sat on, the play’s hairpin turns, navigated meticulously by director Vanessa Sabourin, kept everyone on edge.

The set is a flexible rectangular playing space with audiences seated on two opposite sides of each other. A rickety old building with an attached ladder, a tent, a shovel and bucket sits at one end and a doctor’s office sits at the other. Connecting the two is clothesline.

The Cobbler (Kristi Hansen) is ageless with the distinction of having no name. She arrives at the clinic accompanied by the Kid (Jayce McKenzie), an apprentice cobbler with a few loose screws.

The Cobbler meets the mysterious Doctor (Michelle Milenkovic), a mamma bear/wise woman personality reminiscent of the Dr. Loretta Wade character on NCIS: New Orleans.

An impoverished woman, both financially and emotionally, the Cobbler goes through the sterile procedure of a clinical abortion without sentimentality.

While waiting for the procedure, her long dead sister The Dancer (Lora Brovold) and her missing best friend (Melissa Thingelstad), possibly a lover, come a visiting.

In Connell’s universe, these two women are not memories or spirits but real beings straddling a boundary between the afterlife and reality. The laws of existence do not bind them, but they are still constrained by them.

The five women are a powerful ensemble cast, one of the strongest I have ever seen, working together fluidly and naturally to drive the story home.

But at the end, as the Cobbler move on and walk off into an Edmonton version of a Western style sunset, it was difficult to sympathize with her many tragedies.

Connell’s intellectual, unsentimental approach deliberately separates the audience from the Cobbler and by removing emotional connections, the question “Why should we care?” pops up. Unfortunately, there is no answer.

Costume designer Tessa Stamp’s incredible collection of western wear and the three-piece band’s prodigious music and soundscape deserve special kudos for their heightened production elements.

The Supine Cobbler is a show that will challenge viewers in quite possibly a way never imagined.