No mystery: New made-in-Manitoba play The Flats much more than a whodunit

"Churchill is a nice place if it doesn't kill you."

So says Mel (Nyla Carpentier), the new cop in town in Winnipeg playwright Ginny Collins's The Flats, seeing its world premiere with director Robert Metcalfe's Prairie Theatre Exchange production (and a French-language production featuring the same cast to follow at Cercle Molire).

The town is Churchill, Man. 1,000 kilometres north of Winnipeg and a place known for its natural beauty as well as the unforgiving realities of isolation, harsh climate and the danger of polar bears.

But Mel knows all that, because she's no stranger to Churchill she grew up in the Flats, a shantytown on the outskirts of town where you live if you're not just poor, she says, but "Flats poor."

And The Flats is very much a play about the past, although it's ostensibly a mystery when the town doctor disappears, Mel's first job as a local constable is to find out what happened to him.

Preview of The Flats at PTE

8 years ago

Duration 2:40

The Flats, by Winnipeg-based playwright Ginny Collins, is a mystery set on the frozen edge of Hudson Bay in Churchill, Man. It runs at the Prairie Theatre Exchange from January 26, 2017 - February 12, 2017.

Everyone's a suspect here, and everyone's got secrets.

They're also all just a little bit quirky, which is where much of the considerable charm of The Flats comes from.

There's Kate (Alicia Johnston), new to town and living on the Flats. There's Chuck (Francis Fontaine), the grumpy and wheeling-dealing mayor/hotel owner/tour operator. And there's Felix (Gabriel Gosselin), a lovably simple soul drawn to the shore of the bay and the northern lights.

But the first character we meet giving a kayaking lesson to hopelessly clueless tourists is Minnie, a precocious and scrappy 15-year-old played by Julie Lumsden, who steals the show as the acerbic but vulnerable teen.

Gosselin is also great here, giving Felix a likable hoser quality. And Fontaine, a veteran of Cercle Molire productions, actually manages to give Chuck a suitably crusty shell and slickness and still make us kinda like him.

As Kate, Johnston doesn't get to do much here other than try to seem shifty and mysterious,which she does well, but it'd be nice to see the character stretch further. And Carpentier showed some tentative stiffness on opening night in the role of Mel, particularly in the play's earlier scenes, and didn't always capture the Coen Brothers-esque quirk the character seems to demand, but found more solid footing with some key later scenes.

The new script, too, isn't without some problems. Like Kate, the character of Felix is underutilized. There are also some significantly hanging plot threads here.

But the plot's not actually the point, and while The Flats is wrapped in the trappings of a mystery, it's much more than that.

Collins's ambitious script deals not just with the past, but with ghosts both the personal ones that follow us even to the edge of the world and the ones we collectively share as Indigenous people or settlers.

Even if it doesn't always work perfectly, it's an impressive feat to wrap up issues of colonialism, land rights and the sins of the past within a play that starts out looking like a whodunit.

Collins's script is also laced with some great dialogue and big laughs, mostly from Minnie, who is a multi-faceted and believable teen character something too rarely seen, and a testament to the playwright's skill.

It's not accidental that this play, a collaboration between French and English theatres, is seeing its premiere during the year we celebrate the country's sesquicentennial.

As the nation turns 150, it may be just the kind of play we need one that entertains, while also inviting us to consider our past, where we are, and where we go next.

The Flats runs at Prairie Theatre Exchange until Feb. 12. It will have its French-language premiere at Cercle Molire from March 2-18.