"Three Little Birds"

"Ever little thing is going to be all right" (Bob Marley) What makes two people wake in the morning with the same song in their heads? "Three Little Birds", the previous evening would do it!

The stage play by Kenneth T. Williams laced with Bob Marley is funny and emotionally charged. It opens with Tantoo Cardinal's soliloquy as Annie in her home on the reservation. She is dying with a painful cancer and has no grandchildren Her "take charge" only child, Kerry, played by Ntara Curry, has spurned relationships and clings to her identity as a professional. There are fire works between the two of them which blaze into a storm after Troy, Aaron Stonechild, falls into the house though a window! With a baby in his arms.

Laughter seems almost inappropriate to the subject matter but wells up frequently and unexpectedly.

The stage lighting was faulty but the actors were so professional that the audience was left to ponder over the meaning of the intermittently darkened stage! Spirits at work? Passage of time?

Aaron Stonechild was remarkably convincing as the teen father who wanted to do right by his baby girl, Anne-Marie, played by what appeared to be a short roll of cloth with off-stage recorded crying (it did mostly work).

Tantoo Cardinal was exquisite with just enough lightness to keep us convinced that she was, indeed, in pain and dying. Seeing her off stage, it was remarkable how convincingly she had become a dumpy frumpy old woman who just wanted to become a cookum before she died.

Ntara is our daughter so I cannot really be very objective about her stage work. I always like watching her! She had a most difficult role - convincingly career-driven, upset and angry for the entire first act having to soften up on cue - a bar in Toronto, at her dying mother's bedside. It was courageous for Lorne Cardinal to cast a white girl in a Metis role.

Criticisms? Two. It came as a compete surprise that rez-born Aaron was illiterate; neither his script nor his accent were convincing. And missing was the sense that Tantoo and Ntara cared enough for one another to want to spend more time together. There are a couple of precious moments where they come together but not much softness between them.

"Three Little Birds" - see it if you can! It's good. (I wish that it was accessible to the cookums and others that I see in La Loche.)

(Find about Tantoo's social activism at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001987/bio)