The Rural Voice, 2004-08, Page 37Trash talking
Ted Johns finds his inspiration for his new play Cricket and Claudette
in a trip to the local dump
Story and photos by Keith Roulston
e was the man
who wouldn't
come out of
his barn in protest
with the way farming
was developing in He
Won't Come In From
the Barn. When he
finally did emerge
from the barn, he got
lost in the
complexities of
large-scale farming
and genetic engin-
eering in Bam-
boozled: He Won't
Come In From the
Barn, Part ll. Now
Ted Johns is going
through your
garbage.
Even for a
playwright who has
set his hits in such
unusual places as a
barn, a garage and a
small town bar, the
setting for Johns' Ted Johns: down in the dump.
newest Blyth
Festival production Cricket and
Claudette has got to take the cake:
the town dump.
The play, which opens August 5 is
a comic look at issues from
municipal amalgamation to post -
Walkerton bureaucratic
environmental rules, Claudette
(Shauna Black) is an intelligent,
beautiful and very urban
environmental official who comes to
inspect the village dump.
The idea of dealing with garbage
has been lingering in Johns' mind
since he was writing Jake's Place
back in 1995. At the time Huron
County was in the midst of an
expensive search for a new landfill
site and one possible choice was near
the home of some friends. He
contemplated putting something
about the situation in that play but
34 THE RURAL VOICE
decided to leave it for later. Now is
that time.
"Dump politics for me are bizarre,"
he says, noting that a change of
government from Bob Rae's NDP to
Mike Harris's Progressive
Conservatives totally changed the
need for that new county landfill.
Part of the push for that landfill had
come from the pressure for a solution
in Wingham where the landfill was
supposedly full. The county
inventory of landfill capacity,
meanwhile showed Blyth, to the
south, had 40 years of capacity
remaining. Suddenly things changed
and Wingham was approved for
expansion with plenty of excess
capacity and Blyth was being pushed
to close.
"What's odd is you tend to think of
engineers as dealing with hard cold
facts," he says. "It
turns out they're
subject to changing
their minds too."
The landfill site is
also interesting
because it's a place
where rich and poor,
young and old meet
and interact, he
says.
The play is sub-
titled "passion and
politics at the
dumpsite" and there
are two love affairs
going on: one young
love and one with
an older couple
(Festival veterans
Jerry Franken and
Janet Amos). People
tend to think that
older people are
calmer but they
have just as
tempestuous
emotions as young
people and can be
just as worried and upset about love
as the kid in Grade 11, he says.
Most of the play comes from
Johns' imagination. "In real life
probably not a lot goes on at the
dump," he laughs. "I had to imagine
a situation that might go on."
e did interview an engineer,
H
however, and learned
something about the history
of landfills. Until the 1950s there
weren't even municipal dumps. It
was when people stopped buying in
bulk and packaging increased the
amount of waste, that the province
required municipalities to provide a
way of getting rid of garbage. At first
even then it was a minor function for
municipalities but packaging grew to
the point where 70 per cent of waste
in landfills is packaging.
With the growth in importance of