Theatre can carry stories across oceans and eras. Murder at Mosquito Cove, Patrick J. Collins’s true-crime chronicle of 16-year-old Elfreda Pike’s 1870 murder, arrives from Newfoundland to Toronto as a living dispatch—about memory, justice, and what communities choose to forget. In Walnut Productions’ debut, director Liam Eric Dawson builds the bridge from Harbour Grace to 70 Berkeley Street—and ensures that we feel the crossing.
The frame is inspired: we begin in 1940 with Joey Smallwood hosting The Barrelman, the radio program that wove Newfoundland’s folklore into national consciousness. Newfoundland-accented and tightly coiled, Tim Cupples is simply magnetic in anchoring the broadcast and, in astute doubling, later presiding as the judge who drives the 1870 inquiry forward. A letter interrupts his on-air routine with a postal worker’s account of a deathbed confession, now twenty years old, which points back a further fifty years to Elfreda Pike’s unsolved murder in 1870. The production then drops us back to that year for the discovery of the body, the investigation, and an inquiry seeking answers that it will not be able to deliver.
The play is adapted from Patrick J. Collins’ novel of the same name by Dawson and Collins, and these two Newfoundlanders have trimmed it into something taut and propulsive. Once we go back in time, we could be watching a crisp, 80-minute period episode of Law & Order that (per the evergreen TV show’s standard formula) begins with the police investigation, then hands off to the courts.
Strong performances service the tight, talky script. As Constable Frank Ward and Sgt. James Furey, Zeus Fleming and Benjamin Jeffries are collegial, earnest and impassioned in driving forward the procedural. Ethan Zuchkan as Elfreda’s brother-in-law Ray Thomey bristles and explodes, while Josh Palmer as Elfreda’s brother Joseph Pike carries a burdened steadiness. Meanwhile, Georgia Grant and Christina Leonard deliver precise turns as various witnesses providing female perspectives on the emerging revelations. Finally, Aimée Tremblay Woodman’s Elfreda is a spectral constant: silent, present, and slipping in and out of the frame to haunt the men—and the system—that failed her.
The case has travelled a long way: from Newfoundland to Toronto, and from 1870 to 1940 (by way of 1920)—and and finally to our seats in 2026. Dawson stages that distance with care. Smallwood is already scribbling at his desk as we enter to take our seats–which thrusts us instantly back to 1940. When Smallwood’s recollections move us back to 1870, the officers who initially find the body deliver their speeches directly to us, even though they are having conversations with each other. It’s as if they are dictating directly to history, before the rhythm of the era accelerates and the naturalistic interrogations and inquiry gather steam. And when we return at the show’s close to 1940, Cupples thunders out the letter’s revelation, and Dawson ends with a multimedia mic drop—with no final curtain call to break the spell.
As a debut from Walnut Productions, this work is small but mighty: a time machine that engrosses, unsettles, and leaves us to find our own way back to 2026. If this brisk and distinctive work is what grows from a walnut, Toronto’s arts scene has a sapling whose canopy may one day shelter many.
Murder at Mosquito Cove runs at the Alumnae Theatre through April 18, 2026. Tickets are available at linktree/walnutproductions.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
