✭✭✭✭✩

by Adam Pettle, directed by Jordan Pettle

Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

May 1-26, 2002

"Love in Face of Death"

It's not very often that a living playwright has two shows running simultaneously in Toronto--but 29-year-old Adam Pettle does.  "Zadie's Shoes", his 2001 hit, is still running at the Winter Garden Theatre in its Mirvish remount.  The Factory Theatre has just opened a fine new production of Pettle's first play "Therac 25".  One can already see in that 50-minute play the same characteristics that would make "Zadie's Shoes" a critical and popular success.

"Therac 25" was first seen in Toronto at the SummerWorks Festival in 1997.  It concerns two cancer patients who meet at the Princess Margaret Hospital between sessions of Therac 25 computerized radiation therapy.  Alan, like Adam Pettle in real life) has had an operation for a tumour wrapped around a vocal cord and has had eleven lymph nodes removed.  Moira has an inoperable medulloblastoma (a cancerous tumour near the pineal gland).  Despite a wariness on Moira's part, they both fall in love. 

From the plot summary alone, the play sounds like the typical subject for an emotionally manipulative movie of the week.  The surprise in Pettle's play is that he avoids any of the clichés or heartstring tugging of the genre.  He does this primarily by focussing not on the characters' struggle with cancer, although they do, but rather on their struggle to accept each other's love.  In this way the play gains resonance.  The particular disease is not the question.  Rather we two young people who have had to confront their mortality earlier than most people ever do and have to decide whether further involvement with the world or another person makes any sense.  A scene in a church where Moira curses God for his indifference only to throw up in a font reinforces the existential theme Pettle has brought out from a realistic situation.

The play is not gloomy.  Rather we see how both have developed ways of coping with the pain of their conditions.  Moira sings the Cat Stevens song "Moonshadow" during her treatments or when afraid.  Alan has developed a kind of gallows humour and thinks of writing a book on "100 Ways to Pick Up Cancer Patients" : "I don't want to brag, but I've got the lowest blood count on the ward."  A sense of humour is what causes them to link up.  But each has a private rule.  Moira can't be asked "How are you feeling today?"  Alan can't be touched.  The reality of love in the face of death makes gives them the courage to break their rules.

The acting is excellent.  The playwright playing essentially himself shows a young man who uses his wry humour as a cover for immense loneliness.  Alan's joking may suggest he is outgoing but his body language shows how restricted he feels.  Patricia Fagan is a mercurial Moira.  It may have been the idea of director Jordan Pettle (Adam's brother) to make Moira emotionally labile, but I think Fagan's performance would be stronger if she could show Moira's emotional state less sequentially and more simultaneously as she does so powerfully in the last moments of the play.  There is a palpable tension between the Alan and Moira that grows from merely playful to highly charged.     

Jordan Pettle's direction is straightforward and unfussy and shows an excellent sense of pace.  Few one-act plays are blessed with as handsome a design as this.  For a play that requires both indoor and outdoor scenes, Vikki Anderson has created a non-realistic set for the small Factory Studio space.  Two greenish walls, each with two nondescript doors face each other at an angle opening at the back onto a stand of leafless trees suggesting both confinement and freedom.  With the aid of Andrea Lundy's inventive lighting and Derek Bruce's soundscape, this wedge of space becomes various rooms in the hospital, Alan and Moira's separate apartments, a church and a park.

This is a one-act play that doesn't feel slight at all.  The strength of its impact may take you by surprise.  Its resonance and compassion for its characters take it out of the ordinary.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Adam Pettle. ©2003.