Review: (Ottawa) Innocence Lost

Jenny Young, Pippa Leslie and Joan Wiecha (photo credit: lucetg.com)

Scales of Injustice
by Jim Murchison

The first thing I noticed about James Lavoie's set design when I stepped into the theatre were the long horizontal strips upstage that created a feeling that this little community in Clinton, Ontario was behind a closed venetian blind connected from the sky and pulled tightly to the horizon shielding it from the rest of the world. On a slightly raised platform downstage right, is a large tapered pole that could be a telephone pole at the boundary of a road, stylized just enough to be a symbol of the cross in a small Christian community. Stage left is an upstage platform with windows rising high on an upstage wall. A door takes you into a courtroom gallery, church or the Truscott home as the action dictates.

Patrick Andrew Boivin and George Allister's video design starts with home movies, with the cast gathered around watching the innocent fun of picnics, swims and bicycle rides, often using the actors themselves in the footage. Luc Prairie's lighting design, and original music and sound by Keith Thomas complete the technical artistic vision that is so rarely this symbiotic in support of the action.

Review: (Montreal) Innocence Lost

Jenny Young, Pippa Leslie and Joan Wiecha (photo credit: lucetg.com)

Cause Célèbre
Canada's awful justice
by Caitlin Murphy

In the tradition of The Laramie Project, Beverly Cooper’s Innocence Lost reminds us that there are certain crimes that don’t so much happen in towns, as to them.  The story of Steven Truscott – a 14 year-old boy falsely convicted of the rape and murder of 12 year-old, Lynne Harper – was certainly such a case, not only for the town of Clinton, but ultimately for the entire country.   Though Innocence Lost compassionately and adeptly chronicles the Truscott tragedy, I think it could have unearthed a little more beyond the facts to move us along the way.