ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Tara Manuel’s anxiety over Muskrat Falls began in the bathtub.
Newfoundland winters are cold and long, and the Corner Brook-based artist found herself worrying about how much longer she’ll be able to take her beloved hot baths, telling herself to enjoy them while she can still afford them.
Like many, Manuel had not been closely following the details of the plans for the hydroelectric megaproject, having given up on paying keen attention to politics. With a family and two jobs, her priorities were elsewhere, and she says she had faith, at that time, that elected leaders had the public’s well-being in mind.
“I had faith in their ability to make decisions in a better way than I could. I had faith that they had better education that I did, and that they had the best interest of our province at heart,” Manuel says. “And that loss of faith was kind of poisoning me and made me so angry.”
Manuel’s point of view isn’t an uncommon one among Newfoundlanders and Labradorians when it comes to the Muskrat Falls hyrdroelectric megaproject, which has grown in cost from $6.2 billion when it was sanctioned in 2012 to more than $12.7 billion. It represents about 30 per cent of the province’s debt, though it has yet to produce energy.
A report released by commissioner Justice Richard LeBlanc in March after a lengthy public inquiry was a scathing one, finding former governments had been blinded by political bias and unrealistic goals when it was “determined to proceed” with the development of the Lower Churchill, and that Nalcor Energy executives had taken frequent “unprincipled steps” to ensure the project got approved.
The federal and provincial governments announced in February they had agreed on a plan to try to keep electricity rates affordable for Newfoundland residents, though details were yet to be discussed. That same month, the Public Utilities Board forecast a 75 per cent increase in average domestic rates for people living on the island in 2021.
The situation gives Manuel a sense of despair. It also gives her fuel for her art, which is the way she feels she can have a voice — and lend one to others.
“I’ve been asking myself what my responsibility is as a citizen and what it is as an artist,” she explains. “I can use my skills to inform my community.”
Manuel is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and performed in productions across the country before deciding a career as an actress wasn’t necessarily for her. She was being cast in a lot of cigarette-smoking, low-cut dress-wearing femme fatale roles, she says, and she found it limiting. Between getting married, having two sons and moving back to Newfoundland, Manuel wrote two books and began teaching drama in rural communities on the west coast. She found herself itching to get back to theatre, but knew it had to be in a different capacity than before.
Her interest in puppets started one winter when her sons were sick with the flu, and she made costumes and shadow puppets to keep them entertained.
“I thought this would be a great project to bring to schools, so my husband helped me design a collapsible wooden set. He did all the background design and the shadow puppets for me, and I wrote the play and toured that show. I would roll up in a community with five hundred pounds of gear and perform a show and break it down and do workshops.”
Through support from the province’s arts council, Manuel toured the show to 60 communities between 2010 and 2015. Another puppetry show, “The Lady of the Falls,” was developed during a residency at the Corner Brook Arts and Culture Centre and toured the province last year. A school tour would be happening right now if it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, Manuel is working on “Muskrat Dreams: A Love Story,” a political puppetry play aimed at adults and youth, telling the story of the handling of the Muskrat Falls project to date. It’s a love story because she believes a lot of the politicians and bureaucrats involved did act out of love for their province.
“A lot of them believed they were doing the right thing, but the fact is they let us down,” Manuel says. “They were so cavalier with just throwing away billions and billions of dollars of our money, of our future, of our children’s birthright.”
Manuel is creating puppet representations of the major players in the project herself, but is hoping to engage the public by asking them for help creating smaller versions of certain MHAs, MPs, journalists, outspoken artists and others. She’s keeping a list of characters she needs and says the puppets need not be elaborate; they could be as simple as tissue-stuffed cloth formed over a pill bottle, with yarn for hair and Sharpie marker facial features.
One of those characters will be Geoff Meeker, media consultant and former journalist, who often posted about the Muskrat Falls project in his media analysis blog on The Telegram website. He says he is impressed by Manuel’s creativity.
“Of all the ways we could have parsed this economic disaster, who would have expected puppets?” he asks. “A lot of things happened — or didn’t happen — to bring us to this point in our history, and a puppet show is an ingenious way of telling that story in an entertaining, easily digestible way.”
Public interest has been good since she put a call on Facebook last week, with many potential puppet-makers hoping to snag one character in particular: former premier Danny Williams.
Manuel hopes theatres in the province will be open and running again before too long, and she will have the chance to tour the show. She’s considering alternative avenues if this proves impossible due to the public health crisis, including making “Muskrat Dreams” a web series instead.
She’s not interested in hyperbole and she doesn’t want to be mean, she says. She wants people in government and everyone else involved in the hydroelectric project to hear the perspective of those who will be affected by their decisions.
The final scene will feature a bathtub.
“I want to see our leaders take responsibility, the ones who were involved in this project take responsibility for the mistakes they made. Very likely they’re well enough off that they’re not going to be worried about hot water or the amount of baths they take affecting their well-being or their bottom line. But I am, and a lot of other people are going to be affected by that and I think they need to hear it.”
Anyone interested in helping Manuel create puppets for her show can get in touch with her through her Facebook page, Shadowy Souls.
