Here along the Flight Path Review

Jeff Green | May 03, 2017

North Frontenac Little Theatre’s production of the Canadian playwright Norm Foster’s play, Here Along the Flight Path, went up last weekend at Granite Ridge Education Centre in Sharbot Lake. The play centres around John Cummings, played by Marc Veno, who is a teacher at Harrowsmith Public School.

The title of the play refers not only to the planes that fly over the apartment building in an un-named Canadian City where the play is set, but also to Cummings himself. Although he is a catalyst for changes in the lives of three women who live in the apartment next door at different times over a three year period, he does not act. We get a picture of his changing perspective on the world and his life through the interaction but he is essentially along the flight path of their lives, watching and listening as they eventually fly off to the next phase of their lives, leaving him behind.

The play also has something to say about gender and gender stereotypes. Cummings is 46 when the play starts, a cuckolded divorced man who loves his young children but may or may not be involved in their lives. He thinks about having sex all the time, but knows he wants something more in his life without really knowing what it is or how to seek it. Veno captures all this very well, but he is hindered by the character’s limitatoins. As a playwright Foster sets his characters up to reveal and maybe discover themselves, and then inevitably retreats to a joke, keeping the characters from being too “real” and this also hinders the performances of the actors playing those roles. Veno did a very good job, showing Cummings is a fundamentally decent man who respects, cares about and eventually helps each of the women living next door.

Faye Davidson (played by Ellie Steele) is the first neighbout, a ‘hooker with the heart of gold’, Angel Plunkett (played by Carol Belanger) is a ‘plucky’ aspiring musical theatre actress from the sticks come to make her mark in the big city, and Gwen (played by Barb Matson) is a 40ish woman seeking a new life on her own after her policeman husband dumped her for another woman.

Steele played Davidson as strong, unapologetic, worldly and at the same time sympathetic. The scene just before she leaves for Montreal is a classic slapstick ala the Dick Van Dyke show. She decides to have sex with Cummings before leaving town, and he refuses, leading to a kind of chase scene as they both trip over couches, all the while delivering their lines on cue.

The character of Angel Plunkett is in her early 20’s, too young for John Cummings to pursue, which she makes abundantly clear. Carol Belanger captured a lot of the naivetee of Plunkett, who clearly is never going to succeed in musical theatre, but has a second life as a country singer-songwriter back in Alberta. She appreciates her neighbour, a friendly face in a cold big city.

Barb Matson had more to work with as Gwen, who enters into an affair with Cumming, essentially using him to recover her composure and sense of self worth in order to return home to Vancouver and face her own life. Matson was very good in the role, good enough that her ultimate decision to leave Cummings with no warning takes him, and the audience, by surprise. But the structure of the play is such that Cummings is “on the flight path” not the destination.

In spite some of my issues with the play itself, the NFLT production was very solid this time around, the acting and staging and lighting were all clean, and the subject matter of the play was interesting as well.