'Mischief' at Tarragon Theatre is a blow-up-the-colonizers comedy with cheeky laughs and heart

The Mi’kmaq artist’s first full-length play is a riotous, blow-up-the-colonizers comedy stuffed with laughs, and supplemented with a sensitive, emotional core that’s filled with heart. Not only did Nasson write this piece, but she stars in it too, in an impeccable production directed by Mike Payette with Joelle Peters. 

In Nasson’s “Mischief,” there are echoes of Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change,” but especially Ins Choi’s “Kim’s Convenience.” Both are set in convenience stores (one in the Regent Park neighbourhood of Toronto, and the other on a reserve near Halifax). Both explore themes of intergenerational tension between children and their elders, along with the idea of resisting and embracing change. And both so deftly balance humour and pathos, often in the same breath. (To extend these parallels further, “Mischief” would also make for a perfect television series.)

In some ways, though, “Mischief” offers even more depth than Choi’s family comedy. At its centre is Nasson’s Brooke, a young Mi’kmaq woman who works at her Uncle Chris’s (Jeremy Proulx) convenience store. 

Ever since her mother died three years ago, Brooke is stuck in a stubborn state of stasis. It’s not so much that she can’t change; it’s that she’s afraid of what would come out of that. Instead, Brooke spends her days stocking the shelves of her uncle’s corner shop, selling cigarettes to the local fishermen, including Fred (Devin MacKinnon), and putting up with their microaggressions along the way. 

But, whether she likes it or not, Brooke’s world is constantly in flux. Tammy (Trina Moyan), a fellow denizen of Chris’s Convenience, is leading an Indigenous movement calling for the removal of a statue in downtown Halifax of Edward Cornwallis, the city’s 18th-century founder who infamously placed a bounty on the local Mi’kmaq people. 

When Brooke is unexpectedly visited by a mischievous, trickster-like figure named Emily (Nicole Joy-Fraser), a wise-talking, walking anachronism who speaks with a hilarious Valley Girl twang, she’s finally forced to confront — and embrace — her own identity. And it’s this that sets Brooke on a journey of self-discovery, arcing across the play’s two acts. 

Nasson’s comedy is rich and varied. She can craft a joke that slowly builds throughout a scene, climbing toward a finale of a punchline. Elsewhere, her humour is borne out of the quick back-and-forth repartee of her snappy dialogue. (Moyan and Proulx, in particular, are a winning comedic duo.)

“Jesus Christ! Who the hell are you?” asks Brooke when she first encounters Emily. 

“Not Jesus. That’s a first. I’ve never been called that before,” the latter snaps back, with a note of sass and earning crackles of laughter from the opening night crowd. 

But underneath these laughs, this deceptively hilarious artifice, “Mischief” opens up in its second act to reveal something far deeper and poignant — a celebration of empowerment, an embrace of the weirdness inside us. 

“I think the crazy ones are the most fearless of us all,” Emily tells Brooke. “The fish lives with more excitement if it jumps out of the water to tease the bird.” 

This motif of the fish and the bird recurs throughout Nasson’s play, with the mischievous prey tricking its predator. In this analogy, it’s the Indigenous folks who are the fish, and the settlers are the birds — or the fisherman, in the case of Fred. 

“Mischief” doesn’t quite tie up neatly. A late second-act twist feels unearned, and too many threads feel unresolved by the play’s conclusion. But Payette’s production makes Brooke’s story worth the journeying. 

He stages the action beautifully on Andy Moro’s set, resembling the cavernous insides of a whale carcass. Moro’s projection designs, as well, are also among the most gorgeous I’ve seen on a Toronto stage. Paired with Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting, they conjure, in one memorable scene, a constellation of stars. They come to represent Brooke’s family and community. And as she finds her way to them — slowly, gradually — we feel as if we’re right there alongside her, like a school of fish forging ahead upstream.