Michael Healey's drama moves at its own unhurried pace. It takes place in 1972, when two Ontario farmers are visited by an impossibly naive acting student (Miles) from Toronto who wants to learn about farm life.
Mitchell Hébert has a lot of fun as Morgan. He's the farmer who plagues Miles with, at first physically demanding but important, then increasingly ridiculous tasks: "crop rotation" means digging up the hay growing on the sunny side of the house and moving it into the shade. But he never quite tells us why he's doing this to a well-meaning stranger: the part feels a bit under-written.
A light touch from Marty Lodge as Angus, the one-time draftsman ("drawer") and now amnesiac veteran, means good work. Also a good job from sound designer Neil McFadden, who fills scene changes with farmyard sounds and reserves music for the play's closing moments.
It's too bad that you can see the second-act revelation a long time coming, like a freight train rolling over the Ontario plains. With only three characters, there's only so much that Healey can do to distract us from that inevitabilty.
But some good moments come when the plot does finally twist.
Touchingly, Morgan
tells of a trench dug in the driveway as another character's trunk is being dragged away. And Miles gets the last laugh.
