Peace Country confronts tensions between Northern and Southern B.C.
Pedro Chamale’s new play shows there’s more to people from the North than resource-industry jobs
Peace Country performers (from left) Sofía Rodríguez, Montserrat Videla, Sara Vickruck, Kaitlyn Yott, and Garvin Chan. Photo by Sewari Campillo Photography
ON B.C.’s SOUTHERN coast, climate action might include choosing to take the bus instead of driving a car, or composting using your sidewalk pick-up service. In Northern B.C., caring for the planet is much harder to participate in. Public transit and recycling or compost programs are basically nonexistent, and anxieties run high about how the shift to eco-friendly sectors will affect the livelihoods of families currently working in the resource industry.
Latinx-Canadian theatre artist Pedro Chamale brings his experience growing up in B.C.’s Peace River region to Peace Country, his new play about five life-long friends who grapple with the changes to industry that must happen in the face of climate crisis.
The Peace River area, known colloquially as “Peace Country”, lies in the upper half of the province from the east side of the Rocky mountains to the Alberta border. Chamale, now based in Vancouver, grew up as one of the only four Latinx people within thousands of kilometres.
The play took unexpected turns almost as soon as he began writing it: “When I started I thought maybe the piece would be about the Site C dam, but when I went up North to talk to folks, it was not really something they wanted to get into,” Chamale tells Stir via email.
Peace Country follows two sisters (Sofía Rodríguez, Montserrat Videla) and their three friends (Garvin Chan, Sara Vickruck, and Kaitlyn Yott) who grow up together in the Peace River Region. The story is told in flashbacks to the characters’ childhood and teen years, while in the present, one of the two siblings has returned North as a newly elected MLA to roll-out plans for green-industry retraining facilities. The group forms tight bonds in spite of cultural differences, and Chamale doesn’t shy away from the grittier parts of Northern living. Peace Country includes the racism, homophobia, and hard teen drinking of small-town B.C., but tensions dissipate with a smart comment, a good-natured fight, or a spontaneous two-step. The characters of Peace Country, are witty, politically aware, and have multiple pillar responsibilities in the community.
“I wanted to show how, even though in communities like these, our childhoods are carefree (sometimes), and our teen years are filled with booze and aimlessness, but that doesn’t mean we are not capable of becoming more than that,” Chamale says.
Pedro Chamale.
News travels fast in a small town, and as a result people sometimes hold things back. Chamale gives the audience a glimpse of the characters’ lives behind those barriers through monologues.
“[The monologues] came from a place of wanting to give each of the characters a bit of time away from the group, for the audience to be present with them and to get a bit of insight to who they are outside of the town or the friend group,” Chamale says. “Also, the play has a big moment happening for all of them and these words of theirs are coming at the culmination of a decision that they are all now going to be faced with.”
Chamale fully captures rural life with intimately developed characters and Northern slang. Towns referred to by a single word (such as “Prince” for Prince George); phrases like “Yea, I’ll take a Pils,” and banter mixed with cribbage scores abound in the play.
“The funnest part of writing Peace Country was sourcing from my life growing up in the North,” he says. “Getting to put in phrases and idioms that the folks up North I know say, and putting that on stage, had me just cackling.”
Peace Country is a rare chance for small-town folks to re-visit their roots and an invitation to bridge the distance between Northern and Southern B.C. in matters of climate action, legislation, and beyond.
“I hope that folks in urban centres see that simply because we are the population centre of the province, of the country, that we need to remember all of the people who reside across these lands—that it’s time to stop thinking that it’s individuals tied to industry that are at fault for where we are in this climate crisis.”
Chamale says he hopes that people from small-town B.C. will feel represented. “I hope that they feel seen,” he says. “And [that] they also see that simply because they are ignored by larger centres except for when it serves a purpose, that they have strength to make changes that will have great impact.”
Although Peace Country is nostalgic and often hilarious, at its core it is about difficult choices. Chamale reminds us that our survival depends on speaking across differences and rising to meet those challenges.
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