THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2026 | Volume 261

 

Talk about the wrong show at the wrong time. The Arts Club, like all large theatre companies, has to choose its seasons a year or so in advance. So they couldn’t have known how little appetite Canadian audiences would likely have right now for an American play spouting patriotic slogans about the US in the midst of a stupid, tragic, pointless imperial American war that’s helping drive the Canadian economy to ruin.

While other Canadian theatres are advertising their “elbows-up” seasons, featuring Canadian nationalist repertoires, the Arts Club’s play revolves around elements of the US, American historical celebrity, and the American Revolution obscure and unimportant to most Canadians. And, it turns out, a play that just isn’t very good on its own terms. (Confession: I chose Franklinland as one of the Vancouver Sun’s “must-see theatre” choices for October, based largely on American reviews. Mea culpa.)

And Omari Newton’s Arts Club production, featuring a couple of first-rate actors, does little to elevate the material.

The 75-minute one-act covers the period 1752-1785 in the lives of Benjamin Franklin (Brian Markinson) and his illegitimate son William (Luc Roderique). Ben is enthusiastic and driven, performing his famous kite experiment, promoting science, imagination and sexuality, and generally overwhelming his apparently not-so-bright son who hero-worships his dad. Ben has his eye on 2000 acres in Nova Scotia where he might establish his own centre for research and experimentation he’d call “Franklinland.”

By the 1760s, Ben’s enthusiasm turns to politics at the same time asKing George III has appointed William Royal Governor of New Jersey. Revolutionary father and loyalist son argue over their political positions, with William admitting his resentment of the father who has always neglected, dominated and belittled him, and revealing that he now has his own illegitimate son.

By the end of the play, with William in exile in London, Ben has transformed his notion of Franklinland to the United States itself, “the greatest invention of my life!” Will is reduced to lending money from his father who now boasts Will’s son Temple (Jakobe Jenkins) as his servant.

The play has some funny moments—especially an argument about the new alphabet Ben has invented—that Markinson and particularly Roderique milk effectively in a hybrid contemporary/classical style. “Oh man,” “pecker,” kissing ass” are all in Ben’s vocabulary while Will wears running shoes with his 18th century suit and trousers. But nearly the entire play consists of lengthy discussions that go nowhere and take place in a kind of nowhere environment, on Kimira Reddy’s ultra-modern, stepped, multi-level, entirely bare set.

And what is the Vancouver audience to make of references to the Stamp Act and Samuel Adams? Not much, at the performance I attended. Most revealing is a bit where Ben tries to get Will to renounce his governorship by belittling the appointment. He does this by repeating “New Jersey” a dozen or more times. “New Jersey” is both the set-up and the punchline to a joke that any American audience would immediately get, the exact equivalent to what used to be the Surrey joke in Vancouver. It was met with dead silence Thursday night, no matter how hard Markinson worked it.

At the end, despite Temple’s paean to American democracy and exceptionalism, echoing his grandfather, I don’t think anyone in the audience would have voted to become the 51st state.

 

 

 

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