My Chernobyl

By Aaron Bushkowsky. Directed by Britt Small. Coproduced by the Gateway Theatre and the Belfry Theatre. In Studio B at the Gateway Theatre on Friday, March 7. Continues until March 15

Pulling off a comedy about somebody else’s tragedy is no easy trick. Aaron Bushkowsky sets his new play My Chernobyl in a Belarussian village irradiated by the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Having been disinherited because he’s an actor, a Canadian named David arrives in the community to deliver the money from his father’s estate to a distant relative. When the relative turns out to be dead, the inheritance reverts to David. That’s when his Belarussian cousin, Natasha, starts to angle for wealth through marriage, plus easy immigration to David’s less toxic homeland.

Celine Stubel’s performance as Natasha highlights the best that this play has to offer—and its best is fantastic. Stubel’s work is both absurd and deeply felt. Terror and desperation drive Natasha. The fundamental honesty of the actor’s delivery is compelling, and Natasha stops the show when she talks about the deaths of those close to her from the combination of cancer and poverty. On the comedic side, Natasha’s fears release a spectacularly wacky resourcefulness, and Stubel makes the most of that with her vivacity and unpredictability. It’s delightful to watch her flirt with David: “I am the unusual girl with the rich internal world.”

My Chernobyl plays with cultural differences. Bushkowsky parodies the supposedly extreme feelings of Slavic people, and reveals a weirdly inverted kind of joie de vivre. Allan Morgan plays an old farmer and former actor named Yuri. Finding himself the victim of theft, Yuri pounds the earth with his fists and bellows, “I curse you, potato bandits!” Later, he says, “Don’t talk about the potatoes. I overacted. I’m embarrassed.”

I have just one niggling discomfort with the script. Bushkowsky doesn’t completely shy away from the darkness of Chernobyl but, because he doesn’t fully explore it either, his script ends up feeling like it’s doing less than complete honour to real suffering. Even when his characters die, they’re only clowns. To be fair, combining absurdism and genuinely resonant human tragedy might be impossible to do in a two-act play.

Still, My Chernobyl is a splendidly original work, and director Britt Small gives it a stylish presentation. She has certainly cast well. Colleen Wheeler is monumental as a depressed mechanic named Katrina, and Andrew McNee slyly understates his performance as the haplessly nice Canadian. In a particularly deft touch, Small has her actors dance through the scene changes like po-faced Russian folklorists.

My Chernobyl repeatedly surprised me into laughter—and challenged me to think seriously about why I had laughed.