The Weight of Words

“Have you read Mike’s book?” Joan Sullivan asks me, as soon as I sit down with her and Wendi Smallwood to talk about RIG, which opened this week at The LSPU Hall. Sullivan is referencing the play’s source material, Mike Heffernan’s Rig: An Oral History of the Ocean Ranger Disaster (2009). I am sheepish. “I haven’t read it,” I admit, but I am familiar with it. 

She gives me a rundown of what I need to know: “It’s a work of oral history. It’s verbatim interviews with 36 different people. It’s mostly relatives and co-workers, but he also talks to peripheral people: the bartender who worked at the lodge where a lot of the oil rig guys went and drank; one of the police officers who was at the harbour when they were bringing in the bodies.”

When Heffernan was getting the book together 13 years ago, he submitted one of its chapters to Newfoundland Quarterly, where Sullivan is the editor. They published it. Sullivan really liked the work, lauding Heffernan’s interview skills.  When the book was released, he sent her a copy. “I could immediately see the dramatic potential in it,” she says. With his permission, she went to work adapting it into a script for the stage.

RIG

RIG was first performed in Trinity in 2010 as part of Rising Tide Theatre’s Season in The Bight. It appeared again in 2012 in St. John’s at the Barbara Barrett Theatre, where 11 actors played 28 roles. In 2013, a pared down version of it was read at an evening event at The Rocket. Then, in 2015 it briefly toured the island, presented by the Arts and Culture Centre. It was re-worked for a 3-night run in 2017 at The Rooms (in typical February-fashion it was cut short by a storm). Each iteration has been different than the last. 

This year’s incarnation, presented by RCA theatre, is showing at The LSPU Hall in downtown St. John’s, a stone’s throw from the Atlantic ocean. It brings with it a stellar cast of seasoned local actors: Aiden Flynn, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, Darryl Hopkins, Stephen Lush, Wendi Smallwood, and Marquita Walsh. This time, Sullivan is directing too, in collaboration with Nicole Rousseau, and the show will be presented in different formats to accommodate audience preferences.

In keeping with the spirit and form of the book, the play takes the shape of what’s called “verbatim theatre,” a kind of documentary theatre that relies exclusively on the spoken words of actual people, where actors can also take on multiple roles. Heffernan’s book lends itself quite well to this kind of format since it contains only first-hand accounts of the people he interviewed. Though it’s described as an “oral history,” it still manifests in the written word. Sullivan brings it back into the realm of speech, so it can be enlivened by the breath and bodies of the actors. The play charts the contours of the Ocean Ranger’s enduring human landscape, traveling its depths and back again.

I saw a preview performance of RIG  this past week, on a chilly and desolate Tuesday night in February. I showed up at The Hall with the cold air still clinging to me. As I entered the theatre there it was: the Ocean Ranger, the rig in question, projected on a screen before me. A lone establishing shot of its exterior, floating with nothing around it, only the sea below. 

It looked like an image you could imagine seeing from the bow of an approaching boat. From this vantage point, it was hard to imagine that this was a place where people actually lived, 3 weeks at a time, until one day they didn’t. In the background, the rhythmic sound of lapping waves was softly playing. It was eventually interrupted by the sounds of human voices broadcasted over a radio, before the house lights abruptly went dark.  

As the show got underway, sitting in the theatre, I really did feel like I was in the presence of something sacred, something that was larger than me, that extended across space and time. I was just over a year old on February 14, 1982, that stormy Valentine’s day night when the Ocean Ranger sank. But I grew up with the knowledge of it. When people talked about where they were when 84 men were flung into the frigid Atlantic, I often thought about how I had been oblivious, fast asleep in my little warm bed, rosy-cheeked and dreaming. 

The Ocean Ranger

The Ocean Ranger was the world’s largest semi-submersible mobile oil rig. It was touted as “unsinkable” by ODECO, the New Orleans-based company that owned it. At the same time, it was nicknamed by those who worked on it as the “Ocean Danger,” at least a year before it sank. It was a remote human-made island that was not made or managed with humans in mind. It was made to drill for oil. It had apparently been designed to withstand even the harshest conditions. However, it had never been to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland before, where Mobil Oil Canada had leased it to drill an exploration well. 

The underwater plateaus of the Grand Banks, located at the auspicious intersection of the warm Gulf stream and the cool Labrador current, are notoriously hazardous for human life. But non-human life has long flourished here. These grounds after all set the stage for the world’s largest, oldest–now defunct-Atlantic cod fishery on which this newly “found” land was built. 

By the end of the last century, the cod fish were disappearing. It was as if their absence put the ocean floor into relief, revealing a glamorous continental shelf below. Prospectors quickly re-enchanted it with the allure of rich petroleum reserves lurking under the surface. When the Ocean Ranger arrived in 1980, it represented the province’s first (but not its last) foray into oil development and all the hopes and dreams that came with it. In the end, it came to represent the worst Canadian disaster at sea since WWII. For these reasons, it’s hard to think straight about the Ocean Ranger without getting tangled up in all the things. 

But 84 men died that night. It’s likely they all drowned in a hypothermic state. There were no survival suits, not enough life jackets or life rafts, or at least ones that could be safely deployed in those conditions. Some of the few men they found were wearing little more than pajamas. Only 22 bodies were ever recovered; the sea kept the other 62. 

These lost men still haunt the oil fields, and they preoccupy our collective imaginations even now. Their deaths have fueled poems and prose, songs and sculptures, public and private inquiries, lawsuits, regulatory changes, new policies and procedures, and no shortage of clichés about sacrifice and heroism. They’ve also energized critiques of corporate greed and government neglect and been used as evidence of the inherent harms of extractive capitalism and the callous cruelty of the ocean. With so much going on, it’s easy to skip over the men who lived, laboured, and died on that rig, and the lives and loves they had and didn’t have onshore.

While these men haunt our cultural imagination, RIG wants us to know, they still haunt their loved ones too. In the aftermath of the disaster, some of the wives reported hearing their front doors opening, and the sounds of their husband’s footfalls on the stairs. One mother claimed she’d often wake up to see her son standing at the foot of her bed. A daughter lamented she didn’t want to relocate, just in case her father ever ended up coming home. 

The Human Landscape 

Heffernan has mentioned elsewhere he did not intend his work to count as a factual “history.” But in the vein of oral tradition, it stands as a kind of document of memory and emotions. It may not be a dramatic recounting or even an informational reporting of the events as they unfolded, but it is truthful in how it reveals something of what it felt like to be part of the community that was left behind in the aftermath of the Ocean Ranger disaster. 

The accounts Sullivan has gleaned from this text are elevated here to the status of documents, by virtue of the relationships they have to the reality in which they are apart. They are evidence of a long-unfolding process of grieving and making sense of a catastrophe. There may not be a story as such, but this collection of connected fragments adds up to something much bigger and far more complex. It brings into view an expansive network of people brought together by the Ocean Ranger, offshore and on–a community that this cursed oil rig inadvertently made, but never called its own.

The play amplifies traces, fragments, observations. It functions like a living fossil – it manifests the weight of a tragedy impressed upon the faces of actors, carried in their bodies, expressed in their voices. As words from the past reverberated into the present that night for me at the Hall, I was reminded that echoes usually get quieter as they travel through time and space. Not here. This latest iteration of RIG has even added a new voice to the chorus. 

According to Sullivan, after a previous presentation of the play, someone approached the group and shared his story with them. Apparently he had missed the Ocean Ranger by only a day. “We ended up doing an interview with him, and so he’s a character in the play now,” Sullivan adds. It shows that RIG is still making connections, welcoming new voices and perspectives into the work. In this way, RIG serves as a beautiful, supportive communal intervention between then and now, life and death, presence and absence, actor and audience, self and other. It opens up a different way to remember the Ocean Ranger, by modelling how we might confront, live with, and process tragedy–together.

Relation and Process

These themes of relation and process are essential to the experience of RIG. The play is an invitation to consider our own relationship to the event, any memories we might have of it, and what we know about it–or don’t. “Everybody’s done a lot of research,” Sullivan says, “they could do a powerpoint presentation on the offshore oil industry, what happened on the Ranger that night… people really understand all the material.” 

Wendi Smallwood, in her third time working with Sullivan on this project, plays 4 roles: Cynthia Walker, Clyde Parsons’ widow; Patricia Ryan, the mother of Craig Tilley; Rick Flynn the radio operator at the onshore Mobil Office; and Susan Sherk, the Mobil Oil employee who became responsible for the communications during the event. While she knows one of these people personally, she says, the rest she had to get to know through interviews, communications with other people, and watching documentaries.  

In saying their words, the actors must consider the real people who spoke them. As Sullivan explains, they also have to think about what questions they are responding to in the text they are presenting. In positioning themselves in relation to this context, they are also bringing respect and honour to their dialogue, Sullivan says. Meanwhile, in order to adapt Heffernan’s book, Sullivan had to carefully attend to the text. In creating that text, Heffernan had to develop relationships with his subjects. Those subjects likewise, had to revisit their relationships to the past, to the Ocean Ranger, and their own connections to the men who died that night.

According to Sullivan, in a previous production, some people who were in the book came out to see the play. “I don’t even know what the word for that is,” she says, “you’re sitting there and you’re seeing an actor say your words.” Your words, exactly as you said them. The play seems reparative in this light, it tends to the relationships that were broken on that dark day in February, and supports them by adding new relational layers, like scar tissue on a wound.

Bearing Witness

In its purest form, RIG is an attempt to “bear witness,” an expression that emphasizes that witnessing must be beared, as though it had a weight to it. Indeed, some experiences are so heavy, they can’t be carried alone. They pull at the surrounding space. To stabilize under the weight of heavy experiences, we need many hands to carry them. 

The show demonstrates this quite literally in the way the actors hold in their bodies the accounts of these men and women. They are more than ventriloquists repeating or mimicking what was said. Instead, they are lending their voices, offering timbre, tone, and pitch, supportive affect, and facial expressions, accompanying gestures. The actors have made themselves hosts, offering up their bodies as places of sanctuary to hold the shock, the confusion, the horror, the anger, the sadness, the grief. 

These are acts of generosity, of compassion, ways of being with others where they are, and doing so in a respectful way. “I have interpreted their words as a character portrayal,” Smallwood says. “But it’s still their words so they have to inform what I decide to do physically or vocally.” It’s a beautiful kind of perspective-taking, in fact, it seems more like “perspective-visiting,” a way of being empathetic without dominating, without presuming we must fully occupy the place of another in order to know something of what it’s like to be them.

Creating Space to Connect

This kind of respectful restraint characterizes so much of RIG, across the whole production. It’s aided by Sullivan’s and Rousseau’s direction, the generosity of the actors, Crystal Laffoley’s and Kelly Lewis’ spartan stage management, Alison Helmer’s understated costumes, Reg Hoskins’ artful lighting, and George Robertson’s nuanced sound design. While the play prioritizes relation and process, it also recognizes that such things are not possible without some measure of distance. After all, how can we relate to one another, if we do not have the space through which we might connect? 

Given the subject matter, Sullivan’s script includes some devastating moments, revealing the presence of old hurts still healing–but it doesn’t dwell in them. There are even some comedic asides that provide a break from that intensity. Of course, it’s not Sullivan who put them there for the audience; they were created by the speakers themselves. They needed a reprieve. 

“Some of the characters do end up going into the emotional state of it,” Smallwood says. “You end up going there [too] because of the nature of the words and what had happened,” but then you have to come back from it, she explains, “you need to have some distance from it, and some perspective on it.” In this way, the script mirrors the rhythms that characterize the process of living with grief. 

The direction is led with steady hands by Sullivan and Rousseau, the result is measured and modest. Throughout the show, the actors drift in and out of different roles. These changes are indicated ever so subtly by slight modifications, often in wardrobe–a cardigan added, a jacket removed–or a shift in posture, a new position, the performance of a gesture, the particular placements of hands.

The restraint is there in the set design too, in the lighting, and the score. “There is a level of detachment,” Sullivan explains, “We’re not pretending we’re not in a theatre.” The set is minimal, it consists of six wooden chairs. They are mostly arranged in a line, though it shapeshifts throughout the show, gently expanding and contracting with the actors, as though they were guided by the tide. They each maintain a connection to their chair, as though it were an anchor, a little mobile island in the sea that is the stage. 

“There’s some beautiful but very simple underscorings of light and sound,” Sullivan adds. The high-contrast lighting draws attention to all the right elements. The lights go down to mark the end of the scene; they go up to mark the beginning of another. The actors are emphatically illuminated under small pools of overhead spotlights. A screen stands in the background. Slides containing intertitles are projected in white text on black for short intervals. Like bookmarks, they list the title of each scene, with the names and identities of the people in it underneath. This is an important, emphatic detail: There were so many people working for different contractors on the Ocean Ranger, that no one had a master crew list. This made contacting the families afterwards that much harder. “They didn’t know who was on it!” Smallwood exclaims, “which is kind of outrageous when you think about it. You didn’t know who was on the rig?”

Toning down all these aspects of the production is a way to foreground the testimonies of these characters, and their experiences. Giving their voices the right of way, puts into practice the respect and deference Sullivan and her collaborators clearly have for their subjects. This seems like a small detail, but it’s a significant one. There are many lessons to be learned from the Ocean Ranger disaster–but the most important one that bears repeating is that when you value people, it shows up in your practices. Your practices, repeated over time, are ultimately what ensure the value and dignity of human life.

Lasting Impressions

Restraint is also practiced in its running time: the whole thing unfolds in just one act, in the short but powerful span of 70-ish minutes. My attention never waned. And, when it was over, I was grateful to have the time to reflect and process what I just experienced.  

I kept returning to a moment when one of the wives wistfully recounts the last time she saw her husband: “I remember him kissing the kids goodbye. I remember him going down over the stairs,” she says. “I remember him looking back, his face. Why he did that, I don’t know.” 

I make up that it was probably because he was leaving to go offshore, and felt for an instant that creeping sense of loss, so he sought reassurance in the face of the woman who loved him. He found it in her wordless expression. He could see that his presence and his impending absence had an effect, that he mattered. She didn’t need to tell him. The evidence of love was simply there. 

I left RIG reflecting on how those who died never knew anything of this after life. They never got to hear these testimonies, the effects they had on the people they left behind, the impacts they had on strangers. They never got to really appreciate in life how much they could matter to us all. Here they are, mattering still, moving me vicariously even after all these years.  

RIG runs from February 9-14 at the LSPU Hall. Go see it!

Buy your tickets here.