THEATRE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2025 | Volume 257

 

Robert Chafe’s Between Breaths, a touring show from Newfoundland’s Artistic Fraud company, is a throwback of sorts to the do-it-yourself Canadian theatre of the 1970s. It tells the story of real-life Newfoundlander Dr. John Lien and his dual battles: to save whales entangled in fishing nets and to deal with his own developing Alzheimer’s. Utilizing a few simple set pieces, three actors and a trio of musicians,director Jillian Keileycreates a narrative grammar that eloquently expresses the life of an admirable man and the ethos of the culture he embraced.

We meet Lien (Steve O’Connell), his devoted wife Judy (Bernardine Stapleton), and friend and co-worker Wayne (Darryl Hopkins) near the end of Lien’s life. Locked into a wheelchair in near-paralysis, he’s barely able to squeak out the line that becomes his unofficial motto: “I am not done.” Behind the actors a trio of musicians (Andrew Laite, Valmy Assam, Josh Sandu) play, sing, hum and moan a mournful musical score (composed and arranged by Newfoundland folk group The Once) and provide some biographical background.

Originally from South Dakota, John Lien came with Judy to St. John’s in 1968 to study birds and stayed, gradually shifting his focus to whales after a first encounter where he figured out how to disentangle one from the region’s omnipresent fishing nets. Becoming known as “the Whale Man,” he recruited initially reluctant local fisherman Wayne to be his helper. The details of Lien’s life gradually accrue as the play unspools chronologically backwards.

The play climaxes in the early part of Lien’s life in Newfoundland, before the Alzheimer’s kicks in, in scenes that show how he and Wayne achieved the whale rescues. These highly dramatic scenes are done with nothing more than a chair, a bench, the actors’ bodies and voices, and the musical underpinning. It took me back to the heyday of companies like Toronto’s Theatre PasseMuraille (1837: The Farmers’ Revolt) and Vancouver’s Tamahnous (Billy Bishop Goes to War), “poor theatre” celebrations of can-do Canadianism. Keiley’s Artistic Fraud production of Chafe’s Tempting Providence, playing here a decade or so ago, employed the same theatrical aesthetic.

The acting is very fine. O’Connell powerfully embodies Lien’s stubborn fighting spirit in his refusal to yield to his disease or to the bureaucratic hurdles placed in his way, and in his growing infatuation with the great mammals of the sea. Hopkins’ everyman Wayne is even better in his grudging, loyal, funny commitment to Lien’s cause. Unfortunately, Stapleton has little to do as the stand-by-her-man wife except cheer Lien on and try to convince him that he needs help.

Along with the undeveloped wife role, the play could have expanded the way Lien’s campaigns changed the attitudes of the local fishermen, who used to just shoot entangled whales. He makes the point that the fishing nets themselves are worth saving, along with the whales, representing as they do the major economic asset of the fishers. The ecological and economic arguments enhance the biographical portrait of a quietly amazing man.

 

 

 

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