Review: (Ottawa / Theatre) Oil and Water

Alison Woolridge, Ryan Allen, Mike Payette (photo by Peter Bromley)

Warmth on a Cold Rock
by Jim Murchison

(Originally, I wanted to send another writer to review this production. My principal reason was that I have auditioned for the director, so there might be a perception of conflict. An unfortunate medical emergency required me to write at the last minute.)

Playwright Robert Chafe tells the true story of the disaster in Newfoundland where the Truxtun, an American ship carrying 156 passengers went down in 1942. Only 46 survived. The central character in the play Lanier Phillips' life was transformed by that experience having only known bigotry prior to being rescued. Chafe alternates between Boston school riots in 1974 and the Truxtun disaster allowing the real people to do the storytelling. It is an effective device in showing how an act of humanity can change a life.

The Sunday Read: Robert Chafe on Oil and Water and Lanier Phillips

Chafe and Phillips (photo credit: Don Ellis)

Lanier Remembered

Oil and Water explores the consequences of lives lived

by Robert Chafe

In February of 2011 my company, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, premiered my new play Oil and Water in St. John’s. The première marked the culmination of three years of research, scripting, workshopping and revisions, but truly the story of Oil and Water and its genesis stretch back for me as far as 1996. That summer myself and my collaborator, Jillian Keiley, had the occasion to spend a significant amount of social time with Newfoundland painter Grant Boland. On one trip to his studio he showed us a work in progress, a large striking canvas depicting tired, near naked men, covered in dirt being bathed by a set of angelic women, they themselves stained by their labours, their toil visible on their cheeks and aprons. One of the hallmarks of Grant’s work is its consistent narrative clarity. There was a story behind this painting, and I had to know it.

On a stormy night in February 1942 a convoy of American Naval vessels ran aground on the south coast of Newfoundland. Two of the boats sank in the ensuing hours, with a huge loss of life. The USS Truxton had wrecked a mere one hundred feet from land and a few miles from the small isolated town of St. Lawrence. The men of the town, mostly workers at a nearby Fluorspar mine, mobilized to help the survivors, collecting them as they reached shore, exhausted, frozen, and coated in the thick black bilge oil leaking from the foundering ship. One of those surviving men was Lanier Phillips. He was eighteen years old, on his second voyage since joining the navy, a private, a lowly mess attendant, and one of only four people of colour on the entire ship. He was to be the only black man to survive.