In John Mighton’s The Little Years, Irene Poole’s performance as Kate is a haunting creation. Kate has lost the spark she once had, doesn’t say very much except for occasional terse comments spoken with blunt objectivity, and seems a frozen life, one not allowed to feel or even be any more. As a child, Kate shows passionate interest in scientific speculation, wants to “ discover a particle from which all particles are made,” but she and her passions are squashed in every way.
Young Kate doesn’t do well in school because her learning rhythms are inconsistent with the mechanical fixed template of the educational system. Her inability to endure mediocrity, conformity, pretension, artificiality, boredom, intellectual containment and a tax on her spirit by mundane others leaves her no allies. She feels and will feel tolerated, embittered, frustrated and in time is subjected to electrotherapy in an institution. In adulthood she becomes hunched and tight.
Chick Reid is Alice, a mother brewed in tradition who is proud of her son William’s success and doesn’t like that her daughter is a failure in school. Indeed she has Kate sent to vocational school where her daughter of deep intellectual passion and imagination will learn stenography, home economics or library sciences. For Alice, Kate’s purpose is to be a “wife and mother” and she is dismayed that Kate won’t play stupid to catch a guy. Later, as an adult, Kate forgoes a potential relationship because the guy is both a “stupid artist” and a “ condescending asshole”. Kate just can’t play the game that many women do.
At one point, Kate declares, “If you think you can walk over hot coals, you can. It’s even easier to convince yourself that you can’t do something, that’s why schools exist”. It is a devastating comment and accurate condemnation of our insane educational system in which the progress toward lifeless mediocrity of spirit is inevitable for too many in some significant way. Mighton and director Chris Abraham succeed in making such tragedy intimately relevant to each of us; after all, who has not been destroyed somehow by going to school.
The cast is exceptional. Poole and Reid are chilling, Bethany Jillard as young Kate and later Kate’s niece is constantly fresh with detail, Evan Buliung compactly pinpoints the subtleties of aging, Yanna McIntosh keeps Grace’s humanity genuine, and the rest of the cast are precise and economic with life-revealing details. Like all humane productions, this one is a compassionate mirror to the lives we live or have lived and it maintains an air of authenticity throughout.