Whereverville

According to Newfoundland’s first premier, Joey Smallwood, the province was dragged “kicking and screaming into the twentieth century” by ambitious government ­resettlement plans to depopulate small fishing outports. Through a kind of carrot-and-stick approach, communities were ­encouraged to abandon themselves in ­exchange for financial aid and the promise of ­better services in centralized “growth towns.” More than thirty thousand Newfoundlanders relocated under this plan ­between 1954 and 1975.

Set in a one-room schoolhouse during the ­decisive evening of a ­community’s vote on whether to stay or leave, Whereverville is an intriguing reversal of and ­homage to Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk ­Circle. Whereas in Brecht’s play the conclusion of the conflict over a community is that “those best able to take care of the land should possess it,” in ­MacDonald’s play, it is that “those no longer able to take care of the land should leave it.”

In both plays, it is the heart and mind of a young woman bereft of her future on which the action turns. It is Loam Bay’s schoolteacher, Abby Shea, herself “from away,” who holds the deciding vote as she struggles with her own phantom attachment to the community, its citizens, and its ghosts of times past, and it is she who must learn that sometimes, in order to keep what we hold most dear, we must give it away—that “nothing lasts.”