Needles gets serious about farming life
Throughout Dan Needles’ series of Wingfield Farm plays, it’s always been obvious that the Nottawa playwright feels a deep connection to the agricultural land on which his plays are set.
But Walt Wingfield, the character, is a newcomer to farming, like Needles himself a transplant from the city who views the locals with a slight remove. Whatever amount of warm feelings Wingfield has for his adopted lifestyle, he views it with a fair amount of humour, and the audience joins him in a good-natured ribbing of whatever characters and circumstances he comes across.
Needles’ latest play, The Team On The Hill, is an entirely different thing. For starters, the play – which will have its world premiere on Thursday, May 9 at Theatre Orangeville – is a drama. Or more accurately, “a drama with comedic moments,” says Needles, who realizes he might be asking his audience to suspend their disbelief that he can actually write something without a wry punchline every few moments.
But The Team On The Hill is more poignant than that. It’s the story of a family struggling to decide the future of the land that has always sustained them. A son returns from agricultural school at the University of Guelph, eager to take over the family farm with his girlfriend at his side. His father has different ideas. With the price of cattle so low that “you spend a year putting feed through a calf only to give it away,” he’s decided it’s time to sell the farm to a developer. Meanwhile, his father – the son’s grandfather – leans on the antique-plow-turned-flowerpot in the yard, believing he’s working the land as his mind floats back and forth between reality and a place where he hears “the old voices.”
For Needles, the play is a chance to meditate on those old voices – the “farmer thinking” that he feels needs to play a larger part in public life today.
“Productivity, tolerance, courage, the willingness to throw everything you have into the soil with no guarantee that anything is coming back to you,” he said. “Those are admirable traits.”
The original script for The Team On The Hill was written 20 years ago, but Needles put it away in a drawer. “I don’t think I’d been a father long enough,” he said, nor had he fully realized what it was about farming that so attracted him.
Since then, he’s read a lot by American writer Wendell Berry, whose thinking now is reflected in the themes of the play. “He writes that affectation for the land is what gives us a sense of place,” said Needles. “It’s what determines how the land will be treated. And with farm families, the land is loved like a member of the family. They’re attached to it on so many different levels.”
The play runs from May 9 to May 26 at Theatre Orangeville. For tickets, call 1-800-424-1295 or visit theatreorangeville.ca.
