Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
Clara (Carolyn Hetherington), with great presence and authenticity, plays a serene-natured woman, ‘of a certain age,’ whose strength is ebbing and whose memory is dimming. As her memory wanes, it seems also to be artificially racking up a host of pseudo-recollections that are so plausible, convincing and desirable, that they pass for truth. I say—seems—because the jury is still out on the absolute facts of the matter. Revisionist history or not, whether anyone believes her or not, Clara’s mind is reconfiguring her personal memories to suit her place and time.
Patrick (Eric Peterson) gives a superb, more than convincing performance of the strong-minded, crusty old former WW2 code-breaker who falls head over heels in love with Clara, and you know it would take more than guns and tanks and commando operations to keep him away from his beloved. He is one of the brightest, funniest, wiliest and most determined of all the characters in the play; you might say a ‘life force’ without parallel in his universe.
So many elements are at interplay with one another during this tender, philosophical, intellectual and emotional exposé of Time passing: human beings aging; generations unfolding and replacing one another; love thwarted by separation; scientific fact at odds with intractable mystery; religious faith waxing and waning; natural organic growth and its inevitable decay.
Mighton presents us with three generations of the family, each with its own perspective on the other. The second generation of single parents, Anna (Laura de Carteret) and Donald (Richard Clarkin) randomly bump into one another when visiting the Seniors Home. Both of them portray an engaging, comedic, totally real-life view of the way things are.
Mildly cynical, Anna distrusts just about anything her father, Patrick, says; Clara’s son, Donald, obsesses over his mother’s well-being, as well as her unsupervised stock of petty cash. In this weird mirror-imaging of Nature, each of them becomes ‘virtual parent’ to their own non-autonomous parent, an exhausting and worrisome duty, especially when needing to deal with the blossoming courtship between the elder two. There’s a tragic hint of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the air.
Barbara Gordon and Maggie Huculak are spot-on, lifelike and true, in their roles as determinedly bright and chirpy caregivers; Robert Persichini as Reverend Hill, is openly fallible, but tenacious in his role of ‘minister to the soul.’
With its staged chiaroscuro of deepening, shifting layers, the relentless choreography of non-sustainable heartbeats, the eerie hammer and hum of the institutional ventilators—or is that ghosts?—this outstanding drama (without ever once being maudlin) manages to convey, with compassion, humour and respect, the onset of the bedimmed, muffled, semi-uterine existence of a human being’s ‘end of days’.
http://www.InvisibleCitiesNetwork.org
WINNER
2005 Governor General’s Award for Drama
The Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize in Theatre
The Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play
This production will present Centaur audiences with the award-winning play of one of Canada’s most successful playwrights, John Mighton, directed by one of Canada’s most recognized directors, Daniel Brooks, along with a stellar cast, including Centaur audience favourite, Carolyn Hetherington, and the star of CTV’s Corner Gas, Eric Peterson.
This elegantly constructed play is a gentle and humourous exploration of how vital and filled with yearning people are as they get older and how indifferently we relate to them. Mathematician and playwright, John Mighton, is fascinated with patterns and quasi-patterns our lives throw up. Clara is in a wheelchair and her memory is failing but sometimes what she says has its own beauty. Patrick, a new admission to the old peoples’ home, also has gaps in his memories but he’s cagey about his codebreaking past and is a bit of an escapeologist. Clara and Patrick are attracted to each other; the rest is history.