Deja View

When we published our Cultural Master Plan for Bowen Island back in 2017, I had the observation that the best way to make a living as an artist on this island was to sell Bowen Island to Bowen Islanders. It seems that every household has paintings of the scenes that lie just outside their windows. Songs I have written about life on the island have been taken up as markers of our collective experience. Poems about the place always make people nod with approval about the beauty and deep currents of the place.

And then there is The View.

Jackie Minns and David Cameron are two of our cultural treasures (link opens in Facebook). They are playwrights and actors with a particular knack for capturing the absurd and funny and the tender in their satires about island life. These last two weeks they have remounted their production of The View, originally staged in 2007 at the Legion, before we had a performing arts centre to work in. This week, finally – after 30 years or so on the island and numerous productions staged in pubs, parks and pop-up venues – they brought it home to our new performing arts centre. Under the direction of their son Andrew Cameron and featuring two other stalwart Bowen Island actors, Kat Stephens and Fraser Elliot, The View was unleashed upon us.

The play is about neighbours. A new couple from well to do West Vancouver, Deborah and Kenneth, begins building a house on the west side of the island and find themselves next door neighbours to Zorg and Angel, long time islanders who practice tantric yoga, chakra healing and chainsaw sculpture. The fifth character in the play is the never-seen Douglas-fir that grows on their property line. Zorg and Angel love the tree, Deborah say it blocks her view of the sea and wants it gone. Kenneth just goes along with whichever person is yanking his chain at the moment.

Somehow, on a single set, with merely four actors, the cast finds a way to skewer almost everyone on Bowen. The old timers, the newcomers, the artists, the community builders, the wealthy and the just-scraping-by. The developers and the eco-greenies. The stoners and the sophisticates. It is a feature of the play that every single person in the audience has at least one little squirm, all the while having a good belly laugh at who we are.

There was truly something for everyone. Little cultural anomalies like “Just take my truck. The keys are in it and you can leave it in the Cove…” The cast themselves aren’t spared either. Ironies such as the fact that the hapless Kenneth, the stunned but up-for-it newcomer to the island is played by local real estate agent Fraser Elliot. Jackie Minns is a yoga teacher. David does many of the things that Zorg does for a living. Kat is the furthest thing from her character. She grew up on Bowen, acted since she was a little kid, babysat the director Andrew when he was small, and survived as the only girl a well-loved family of fastball-playing brothers.

Every community needs its bards and storytellers. On Bowen we are lucky to have these ones. They capture a little piece of our character, tender self-deprecation, that lightens the sometimes intensely specific conflicts that can divide a small community. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you aren’t doing it right. These folks help us do it right.