Matthew Mackenzie’s Strife begins in the aftermath of a murder.
We’re in Edmonton, Alberta, the industrial centre of Canada’s oil patch, and the victim is Nathan, a young Indigenous climate activist. He’s left behind a jagged hole, which the people in his orbit are trying to fill with their stories and their actions. His girlfriend Sarah (Grace Lamarche) throws herself into increasingly urgent activism. His pragmatic older sister Monique (Teneil Whiskeyjack) wants dignity for her brother, but is groping after what that actually means. This question is complicated, since she and her longtime boyfriend Eddy (Jesse Gervais) both work for an oil sands company, whose interests may have played a role in his death. Eddy toggles between guilt, anger that the perpetrator has not been brought to justice, and defiance of those who would make Nathan a symbol of Indigenous persecution.
Around them, institutional storytelling is also at work. Nathan’s professor and mentor Eleanor (Valerie Planche) is using his story to re-focus waning media and community attention on the larger ongoing narrative of colonialism and climate injustice. And Andrea (Michaela Washburn), a counsellor employed by Monique’s employer, is helping Monique work through her complex feelings … to ensure she won’t endanger life (or profits) if she returns to driving her rig. Threading all of this together is Great Grey Owl (Tracey Nepinak). This watchful, witty presence is both a harbinger of sudden change and a conduit for spirits like Nathan with unfinished business.
Produced by Punctuate! Theatre in association with Tarragon Theatre, the show boasts an incredibly rich and resonant premise. And the special wonder of this world premiere production, which is directed with clarity and care by Yvette Nolan, is the way its form precisely matches its function. Strife suspends its asymmetrical arguments — about grief and advocacy, climate and commerce, identity and representation — in a theatrical container that holds them in equilibrium, so we can experience for ourselves both their depth and their dissonance.
The Director’s Note tells us the cast and crew often reminded themselves, “All of this is true at once.” In other words, all of these characters, with their different needs, goals and truths “are all right and yet often ‘diametrically opposed.'” Jackie Chau’s exquisite set makes that paradoxical promise tangible. A pale moon bisected by Edmonton’s High Level Bridge (complete with streetcar) hangs upstage. It is reflected in an on-stage circle with a field of Indigenous symbols. Also on stage are three wooden nesting tables, which are separated, regrouped, rotated and reconfigured as needed to become barriers, a bar, a bridge, or a dais.
This versatile space is Edmonton: the physical geography of the oil sands industry. It is also an arena for a cultural tug-of-war over sources of Indigenous history and truth. Here, Whiskeyjack’s Monique explains she is “not cultural”, but displays learning that she absorbed firsthand, from her Kokum. Meanwhile, Eleanor the academic reveals herself to be an aggregator of Indigenous learnings: speaking selectively on their behalf, and debating the relative merits of white-passing vs white-presenting Indigenous folk with an incredulous Eddy.
In a real sense, this stage space is also a psychic commons that holds what remains of the dead Nathan, as sketched by the overlapping and inconsistent truths of these characters. To make this point, Nolan’s staging keeps the entire ensemble on the stage and in close proximity to the on-stage circle for almost the entire play. Characters recede to sit or shuffle along the perimeter, then surge forward to claim Nathan for their cause or their need. The result is equilibrium without false balance: their contradictory tales co-exist, without being flattened.
Nepinak’s wonderful performance as the earnest and twinkle-eyed Owl both grounds the piece and un-grounds it. She opens by explaining the difference between what an owl is and the ill it portends — and how the two are often confused. (To my ear, this distinction speaks equally to what’s at stake with Nathan: there is a critical difference between who he was and what his loss means when it is pulled into public space and politicized speech.)
And after Owl’s overt speech at the start, she recedes to watch the action intently through the wood frame at the edge of the stage. At times, she glides into the circle, where she affirms for us the validity of truths that the others can barely utter. At other times, she punctures the inauthentic with sly humour (the West Edmonton Mall is one delicious victim). At still other moments, she sits silently with Whiskeyjack’s Monique: like a magnifier helping to focus her grief into resolute action. Around her, in consistently understated and emotionally resonant performances, Lamarche’s Sarah, Whiskeyjack’s Monique and Gervais’s Eddy inhabit the paradoxes the play probes, while Washburn’s Andrea and Planche’s Eleanor show how care and advocacy have the potential to both help and harm.
Strife is tense, poetic and deeply visceral. It doesn’t resolve its most burning plot questions, let alone the fraught issues which it layers, like those nesting tables, into the space. But it’s deeply moving to sit here with these characters, whose questions, traumas and conflicts are our society’s collective ones, writ local. And there’s inspiration for us all in the ways these characters gain distance and perspective, make room for different truths … and find new ways to speak to one another.
Strife runs at Tarragon Theatre through April 26, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
