Review: Committed, quirky performances in 'Parade'

A low-budget independent production of John Murrell's "Waiting for the Parade" provides an engaging evening of theater enlivened by committed, sometimes quirky performances.

Murrell's two-act dramatic comedy focuses on the intersecting lives of five civilian women in Calgary while the men in their lives are either overseas fighting Hitler or — in the case of a German Canadian — confined to an internment camp for allegedly subversive activities.

Director David M Fehr, working with a minimal budget in tiny Studio 116 at the UMKC Performing Arts Center, captures clearly delineated performances from his talented cast. The episodic script cuts back and forth between locales like a screenplay and at times viewers might not be sure just when and where certain scenes are taking place. But for the most part Fehr frames the story with admirable clarity.

The five women constitute an amusing, always interesting collection of odd ducks.

Catherine (Lauren Lubo, one of the show's producers) is a passionate young woman working at a defense plant who feels guilty about her attraction to other men when the man she loves is away fighting. Janet (Kira Mayo) is a taskmaster who runs USO rehearsals and emergency drills like a martinet.

Margaret (Anna Brungardt) seems older than her years thanks to her prudish, disapproving ways. Eve (Rachel Nelson) is so obsessed with film star Leslie Howard that she goes into mourning when Howard's plane is shot down in the war.

And Marta (Stephanie Sommer) is a naturalized Canadian whose German immigrant father's eccentric ways have landed him in a camp for suspected spies and subversives.

The performances may lack polish but they're highly effective. As we follow these women from 1939 to the European war's end in 1945, we get a sense of real lives unfolding before our eyes. We feel the strain, the heartache, the disillusionment, the resignation — and the slow, agonizing passing of time.

Murrell's play performs a neat trick by conveying the brutal realities of a war on the opposite side of the Atlantic through the reactions of those left behind on the home front. It also prompts reflection on our own country, which is now fighting two wars that affect relatively few of us personally. Murrell's depiction of Canada in the '40s shows us a culture in which every man, woman and child led lives shaped by that country's commitment to what we think of as a just war.

So it does what a play is supposed to do: It makes us think about where we've been and where we're going.