By Annabel Soutar. Directed by Chris Abraham. A Porte Parole and Crow’s Theatre production, with support from La Coop Fédérée. At Gateway Theatre on Friday, April 7. Continues until April 15

Everything about The Watershed is huge: its physical scale, its thematic ambition, and the stakes attached to the issues it explores. There is much to enjoy in the virtuosity of this production, but not enough to sustain the play’s nearly three-hour running time.

Montreal playwright Annabel Soutar specializes in documentary theatre, drawing her text entirely from interviews, media transcripts, and other real-world sources. Vancouver audiences last saw her work three years ago when Seeds, an exploration of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser’s legal battles with agri-business giant Monsanto, came here as part of the PuSh Festival. In Seeds, the playwright becomes a character in her own play as she struggles to make sense of its source material, but the central story is Schmeiser’s. In The Watershed, Soutar’s efforts to create this script are its dramatic heart.

Liisa Repo-Martell returns in the role of Annabel; this time she’s researching water, one of Canada’s most abundant—and vulnerable—resources. In the 90-minute first act, Annabel interviews scientists, activists, corporate executives, and politicians on both sides of the former Conservative government’s 2012 decision to close the Experimental Lakes Area, a research facility in northern Ontario. She and her husband, Alex (Alex Ivanovici, playing himself), enlist the help of their two young daughters in learning about the issues. Act 2 sees the whole family taking a road trip to get a close-up look at Alberta’s tarsands.

As he did with Seeds, director Chris Abraham infuses this sometimes dry material with incredibly energetic staging: the cast of eight are always on the move, briskly trading off roles in constantly shifting locales and contexts. And the actors are terrific, whether they’re playing members of Soutar’s family or public figures like Maude Barlow and (pre-scandal) Jian Ghomeshi. Special mention goes to Brenda Robins, Molly Kidder, and Virgilia Griffith, all unaffectedly ebullient as pre-teen girls, and Eric Peterson, whose down-to-earth delivery as Soutar’s conservative father gives us some moving scenes.

The play’s design is also spectacular. Set designer Julie Fox fills the enormous playing area with wooden pallets, pipes, and plumbing fixtures before an expanse of brick wall that serves as a canvas for Denyse Karn’s exquisite projections. Thomas Ryder Payne’s immersive sound design and Kimberly Purtell’s gorgeous lighting enhance the atmosphere.
But for all its energy and passion, The Watershed isn’t easy to connect with emotionally. For one thing, the urgency of Annabel’s research is a few years old. It’s a strange feeling, summoning retroactive fury at the Harper government’s well-demonstrated contempt for science. Funding for the Experimental Lakes Area has been restored, and my outrage has moved elsewhere.

It’s also a bold move for Soutar to put Annabel front and centre; I don’t think she succeeds at making the minutiae of her research as interesting to an audience as they obviously are to her. And, at least in Repo-Martell’s portrayal, she takes herself and her project so seriously that it can be difficult to sympathize. She gets her kids in line by reminding them that it’s a privilege for them to be invited along on her work, for example. Actually, their participation is a gift to us, as their attempts to grasp sophisticated issues provide an innocence and humour that are a welcome relief from Annabel’s earnestness.

Ultimately, The Watershed is a mixed success. As agitprop theatre, it’s dated; as a personal story, it’s self-indulgent. The liveliness of its staging is no small achievement. But I was hoping for more.