Miles
Miles is a twenty-something member of a Toronto acting collective that is currently workshopping a production on the subject of farmers. He makes arrangements to stay at the farm owned and worked by two older men in exchange for helping—as best he can—with some of the duties. Moving back and forth between the farm and Toronto, he works up some ideas based on what he’s learned, but none prove impressively substantial or theatrically dramatic enough to actually make into the production. Until he stumbles upon the complicated nature of the past which has led to the complexity of the nature of the nature of the relationship between the two farmers in the present.
Morgan
Morgan has owned the farm for the past thirty years, ever since returning home from fighting in World War II. He is the one of the two farmer who engages with Miles on a more “normal” basis, helping him out with the truth about the farming industry and benevolently looking upon the younger man eager efforts to help with tasks for which he is clearly unsuited. At the heart of the relationship with the other older man is a story which he has been ritualistically retelling non-stop over the past three decades. It is Miles’ discovery that the nature of this story that it is a complete fabrication which becomes the dramatic crux of the play at hand as well as the young man’s most optimistic entry point into become a significant contributor to his own theatrical pursuit.
Angus
The interaction that Miles has with Angus is quite distinctive more idiosyncratic than that he has with Morgan, but it is not made immediately apparent what is wrong with Angus. Even when Miles learns that Angus suffered a brain injury during the war which seems to be the stimulation for the necessity of Morgan’s ritualistic repetition of the same story, the truth is not made complete manifest. Lying at the heart of that story which Morgan and Angus compulsively act out as teller and listener every day is the fact that Angus cannot remember the actual truth and Morgan has determined that the incalculably sad turn both their lives took as a result of the real story is much better disguised as an illusion only slightly less tragic. The determination of Miles to dramatize the real story has an unexpected effect on Angus, however, that will serve to fundamentally alter the relationship between the two old friends.
