At this year’s Fringe festival, two very different shows will examine our dependence on black gold

Politics is sexy. It can also be deeply moving. Crude Love and Doppelganger, two of the most political shows at this year’s Vancouver International Fringe Festival —which runs at various venues on and around Granville Island from Wednesday (September 3) to September 14—promise to be among the hottest tickets. Both of them take on big oil, but they use very different strategies.

Crude Love is a romantic comedy. In this hourlong offering, which plays the Carousel rehearsal space every day of the Fringe except for September 10, a nerdy anti-oil activist named Abbie falls in love with Phyl, a big-hearted woman from Newfoundland who drives a supersized dump truck in the tar sands. Phyl is a hard-working gal who hangs out at a bar called the Beer Hunter and uses expressions like “gentle Jesus in the garden”. Abbie is a vegan who apologizes to a fish that’s being held captive in a supermarket tank.

When the Straight reaches them by phone, Gillian and Russell Bennett, the Vancouver-based, husband-and-wife team who wrote and perform in Crude Love, are in the middle of their run at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. That’s less than an hour by plane from Fort McMurray, the toxic, frantically pumping heart of the tar sands.

“We really didn’t know what to expect from the Edmonton Fringe,” Gillian says. “We didn’t know if we were going to have tomatoes thrown in our faces, or a warm reception, or what. But it’s been incredible. We’ve sold out every show.”

“We are the only show that’s done that,” Russell adds. In fact, they’ve received rave reviews all along the Fringe circuit—in Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Saskatoon. Russell explains, “It’s the humour that wins them over.”

That and the sex. Abbie and Phyl engage in the kind of romantic sparring favoured by people who are afraid to commit. “We modelled a lot of the relationship between Abbie and Phyl on our own struggles,” says Gillian, who wed Russell on Middle Beach near Tofino in May of 2007.

“When we first met, we were both brokenhearted and we were swearing up and down, ”˜Never another relationship! I will never fall in love again!’” Then Russell went away on a Fringe tour of his solo show, The Reefer Man, and they missed one another so much they realized they had to ’fess up that they were smitten.

Apparently, sparks fly in this production. Gillian admits, “I have to say it’s very sexy to go on-stage with your husband over and over again and go into the journey of falling in love with one another.”

But the background of Abbie and Phyl’s romance has an ominous tone. The Bennetts have set their show in 2012 and they imagine the American military having a strong presence in Alberta’s north.

“We wanted to tell a cautionary tale, so we let our imaginations fly,” Russell says. “We thought, ”˜If Canada does have the second-largest supply of oil in the world, how long would it take for the Americans to get nervous about security?’ They’ve already demonstrated that they can invade numerous countries in the world. Well, why not Canada?”

The writers also posit a future in which Sweet Crude, a fictional oil company, plans to detonate a nuclear bomb underground in order to create the heat required to separate the oil from the sand.

Russell explains that in the middle of the last century, Canada had plans to do just that. (The real-life tale was laid out in William Marsden’s Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn’t Seem to Care), a recent book that was one of the inspirations for the play.)

“One of the questions we want to ask is, ”˜How far will we go before we come to our senses?’” Gillian says. “The only reason they didn’t detonate nuclear bombs underground in Alberta in the ’50s is that they found oil in Alaska that was easier to access.”

Asked if Phyl examines her role in the oil industry, Gillian refers to the tar-sands workers that she and Russell met when they travelled to Fort McMurray to do research in February. “A lot of them are from Newfoundland and I found their sense of humour and their openheartedness really inspiring,” she begins. “But Russell and I talked a lot about the golden handcuffs, which is a big issue up there. When we asked them the big questions, like ”˜Are you concerned about the environment?’ they’d joke it off or try to avoid the topic. And they’ve all signed confidentiality agreements. These are truck drivers. There is a kind of denial that Phyl encapsulates.”

Denial is exactly what Fredericton writer and director Len Falkenstein sets his sights on in Doppelganger, which runs at the Granville Island Stage September 5 to 7, 11, and 12. Although it’s often darkly funny, Doppelganger is as uncompromising and complex as Crude Love is gentle and straightforward.

In Falkenstein’s play, a young Alberta oil worker named Adam Smith wakes up in a cell somewhere in the Middle East. He is accused of being a CIA agent who has committed atrocities, including rape.

Smith denies all knowledge of these acts, but as he is beaten and drugged, he retreats to the surreal world of his psyche, where he meets another Adam Smith who proudly takes credit for them. Smith’s guilt and innocence melt into one another. In the end, he isn’t even sure who’s torturing him.

Reached in his office at the University of New Brunswick, where he is head of the drama department, Falkenstein says that the case of Maher Arar, which was prominent when he wrote the script in 2004, influenced his play’s tone of moral compromise and confusion.

Arar is the Canadian citizen who was detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in 2002, accused of having links to terrorists, and deported to Syria, a country know to abuse its prisoners, where he was tortured for a year.

“Obviously, what happened to Arar was outrageous,” Falkenstein says, “but what really struck me is that the Americans handed him over to the Syrians. What? Isn’t Syria supposed to be evil? If they’re evil, then why are you working with them, cooperating with them? Everything seems to be about pragmatism; actions are generated by specific interests- economic, political, and strategic.”

The mistreatment of prisoners held by the Americans at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and the kidnapping and beheading of westerners, including journalist Daniel Pearl, also influenced Falkenstein. His script makes it clear that since both sides are abusing prisoners, neither can claim moral high ground.

Canada is complicit, too, he asserts. Describing our country’s relationship to the U.S., he says, “We’re sort of the good twin, but we’re as messed up as the Americans—although in less hostile ways.” To support this, he notes that information from Canadian intelligence sources led to Arar being picked up by the Americans.

A former instructor at the University of Alberta, Falkenstein feels empathy for young Albertans like Smith, who are surrounded by the values and job opportunities of the oil industry. But he is also aware of a characteristic he perceives as Smith’s downfall. “If he has a fatal flaw,” Falkenstein says, “it’s his lack of critical faculty.”

Doppelganger’s form is designed to encourage critical thinking: the play contains both realistic and surreal scenes, but a chorus delivers much of the information. “Partly, the chorus is just a simple vehicle for exposition,” Falkenstein explains. “But the thing about the chorus is that they are able to be commentators; they operate at a critical distance, so they can convey the information ironically sometimes, or with a sense of scientific detachment.”

In the opening sequence, chorus members describe the damage to Smith’s body in chilling detail. Later, they enumerate the cultural riches that the West is exporting, including the pornography channel, the 15-minutes-of-fame channel, the rehab channel, and the booty-and-bling channel.

For all of their differences in tone, Doppelganger and Crude Love both encourage us to pause and examine the suffering and devastation that our dependence on oil causes.

“We want to do work that’s meaningful to us and we’re concerned about the future of our planet,” Gillian Bennett says. “We decided to do the Fringe festivals because it’s difficult to get your own work up otherwise.”

Because they offer potentially large audiences and charge relatively small entry fees, Canadian Fringe festivals are still among the best places to see theatre that challenges the status quo—in terms of both form and content.