Trent and Peterborough fade into the rearview mirror when arriving outside the quaint town of Millbrook for a late-evening open-air performance of “The Cavan Blazers” at the 4th Line Theatre. 20 years since it was first staged, “The Cavan Blazers” returns to the farm where its playwright, Rob Winslow, was raised.
The play follows the Blazers, a group of Orangemen who burn settlements and torment a small Catholic minority. After scenes of exterior confrontation, the play gives us access to both sides as it alternates between the interior scenes of Catholic and Protestant life. The seating structure of the theatre resembles parliament or a tennis match; the audience split in two face each other, following the tension drawn on historical and religious lines in Millbrook and Cavan County.
Winslow reminisced that when the play first opened in 1991, “What was going on in Ireland was completely transported into this show.”The show was controversial at that time. Winslow explains, “growing up it was 99% Protestant but I found out that there were hundreds of Catholics who lived here in the 1840s-1850s whose collective memory was erased.”
The pendulum of violent acts between two sides in “The Cavan Blazers” explicitly asks its audience to consider how acts of intolerance continually shift into new forms. In the play; men and women of Catholic Cavan cannot have their marriages recognized in Protestant churches, the only churches in the area at the time. In turn, today’s Catholic Church would have allied in phobia with the Protestant Blazers of the 1840s, for refusing to recognize same sex marriage or the ordination of women priests.
Local history in the “Cavan Blazers” takes on a new significance for the Trent community as President Franklin stated in the Examiner that he “would like to ensure there is a smooth transitions for students” of a new Catholic College in Peterborough, a private institution he hopes Trent Students will take advantage of to “round our their studies.” In a Peterborough Examiner article this June, Bishop Nicola De Angelis claims the Catholic college in Peterborough was “the Pope’s own idea.”
Trent’s founding president Tom Symons believes a relationship with the Catholic college “would be a very good thing for a public university to have as a complimentary college.”Yet the connections between phobia and tolerance, and private and public spaces seem at times predicated on staying out of each other’s space, which complicates the interests of Mayor Daryl Bennett and Dr. Symons, who sit on the board of trustees for the Catholic college.
Could a “smooth transition” between Trent University’s new Positive Space policy to “to challenge homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia” not be compatible with constitutionally protected freedoms of religion exercised within a private institution?
I can’t help but drawn feel into the depth of historical and current conflict evoked by the play; in Tahrir Square; the Canadian House of Commons; the streets of London; and the soon to be surveilled streets of Peterborough.
After the Catholics are banished, with regret, Cavan Blazer leader Daine Swain recounts the cost of victory to his rival, realizing “we should have talked.”
The play finished with sadness in the night’s sky held by the symbolic weight of an ending, where hope and belief can go on, unobstructed and finally heard.
