by Daniel R. Pearce


One of the hottest, most controversial, most divisive issues to hit rural Ontario in many years — wind turbines — will get its own play.

It’s a couple of years away from hitting the boards and for now is in the development stage.

But accomplished playwright Leanna Brodie is busy doing research across the province for the piece she will eventually write in a joint project among three rural summer theatres in Ontario, including Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, that are smack in the middle of this broiling controversy.

Brodie is in the process of interviewing everybody: pro-wind people, anti-wind people, wind industry people, people trying to rent their land out for turbines, people trying to stop turbines from going up next to them, politicians stuck in the middle of everything, and anyone with an opinion on the topic.

Brodie says she is engaging in what is called “documentary theatre.” It can take many forms, like the show American writer Anna Deavere Smith did about the Rodney King riots in which she interviewed more than 200 people and then played all the parts, including Charlton Heston and King’s aunt.

The form this play will take is undetermined at this point and will depend on what Brodie finds and how she can adapt it to the personality of the three theatres she is writing for. “You respond to the material in front of you as a sculptor responds to the stone in front of them,” Brodie explains.

So far, she has talked to people from all sides of this debate and while they have differing and conflicting points of view, they all have one thing in common: they are furiously angry and willing to express it.

“When you are in a street fight, sometimes your survival instinct kicks in and you see the other guy as a monster,” says Brodie, 46. But sometime, she adds, both sides are merely fighting for the same thing — “for what (they) think is right.”

Most of the time, she says she simply lays down her recording device, pushes a button, and listens, not saying anything for up to half an hour at a time.

Brodie, who has had her plays produced at the Blyth Festival (one of the three theatres involved in the project), has walked into a minefield. Wind farms that sprang up across the province after the Ontario government decided to pursue cleaner forms of energy ignited a wave of bitter protest. The tall turbines and their spinning propellers have been accused of pushing down property values and worst of all making people sick and forcing them to leave their homes.

Wherever the turbines have gone up, loud, noisy objections have followed.

And not everyone is against wind power. Some want turbines so they can rent out their land and help fund their farming operation, or believe it is the right thing to do for the environment — and they too are fighting back.

Brodie, who has spent this fall at 4th Line Theatre in eastern Ontario (the third theatre in the project), says she is not taking sides. That’s not her job.

“It’s my job to listen.”

The question she is trying to answer, she says, is why wind power has raised such hackles.

“This seems to have got under people’s skin,” she says. “Not just in Ontario but across the world. What is it about this particular issue?”

What she says she hopes to do is create a dialogue on the topic where so far there has been none.

“It’s important to get in the middle of these questions and to create non-partisan spaces . . . a space where people on all sides of the issue can look at the issue and look at the community,” Brodie says.

What she has found so far is that things are not as black and white as they seem. There are, she says, all kinds of “unexpected perspectives” out there. Ideologies don’t line up exactly as one would expect.

Some people who oppose wind turbines, for example, also believe climate change is “fake” and protest alongside those who believe it is real, Brodie says.

“You build a profile of somebody on one side of the question. They may agree on this one point, but they are different in every other way.”

One mother she met in Huron County who is trying to rent out her land to a wind turbine company stopped the car in mid-interview and told her: “What I find most hurtful are the people who think I’d do anything to hurt my children. I take that personally.”

For Lighthouse Theatre, the project marks its foray into a writer-in-residence program and continues its tradition of performing not just plays written by Canadians, but plays about local history or issues.

Artistic Director Derek Ritschel says he wants his theatre to create “a responsible discussion” on wind power “rather than yelling.”

Brodie, who is working under both a Canada Council and Arts Council of Ontario grants, was in Norfolk County in September and started talking to people then. She will be back in Port Dover next summer for about four months to do more research.

Brodie says she wants to talk to as many people as possible and welcomes anyone with any experience or opinion on the matter to contact her.

She can be reached at:

leannabrodie@gmail.com


This article first appeared online for The Simcoe Reformer on November 1, 2012.