Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
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by Itai Erdal, directed by James Long
The Chop Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
May 8-13, 2012
“The Light of His Life”
In 2000 when Israeli-Canadian lighting designer Itai Erdal learned that his mother would likely die of cancer in nine months, he went to Israel to be with her. While there he interviewed her and took hundreds of photos and hours of video. With her permission he decided to make a documentary about her death. After she passed away he found no one to finance the film and now most of the film stock has degraded and only fragments survive.
Erdal’s play from 2011, How to Disappear Completely, incorporates those fragments. Contrary to what you might expect the play is not morbid at all. It is often full of humour. Paradoxically, by focussing so intently on his mother’s inescapable decline as she succumbs to the disease, Erdal in fact memorializes her vitality. He also presents us with a truth we all must face.
Erdal begins his performance by saying that he is not an actor. He always wanted to become a documentary film maker but instead became a lighting designer for the stage. Instead of making a record about happenings in the real world, he has chose the most ephemeral aspect of the art of theatre. Erdal’s show alternates for 75 minutes between telling the story of his mother’s last months and demonstrating the art of lighting design. The irony of the juxtaposition, though never explicitly stated, is that while his occupation is to use light to create ephemeral effects in an ephemeral art form, his documentary uses light to give permanency to an ephemeral life.
At the back of the stage is a large screen hidden by a black curtain that Erdal can open fully or in halves. Here he shows videos of his mother from when he first arrived and she felt the most well, to her bouts of chemotherapy and loss of her hair, scenes of him taking photos of her body just after her death. He includes interviews with his best friend who was also a medic, his sister who began to turn away from Erdal’s project and an interview his sister held with him.
Otherwise, the stage is bare except for key lighting instruments like Erdal’s favourite, the so-called “shin buster”, a lamp place at a low level that shines up at an actor. For the first half of the show Erdal controls most of the lighting himself from a hand-held panel, explaining what he is doing and the effect it has as he does it. He creates a square of light and says that this design is useful for suggesting that a character has something important to say, and then he stands in the square and begins to discuss his mother’s death. He uses blue gels in the side lights trained on his face when he tells the bizarre tale of when he was almost raped by a dugong in Vanuatu. He tells us that his favourite instrument of all is the PAR can (parabolic aluminized reflector lamp), because the light grows warmer as it goes down in intensity, and he demonstrates this by taking the lamp down from 100% through various degrees all the way to just 1%. Even at 1% he does not disappear completely. And early on, he puts out the lights entirely to disprove the actor’s myth that they must be seen to be heard.
Erdals’ discussion of lighting and its effects is fascinating in itself and theatre-goers who have never paid much attention to the artistry behind lighting design will gain a new appreciation of it from this show. The point of Erdal’s demonstrations shows his mastery of his craft. His videos of his dying mother show his attempt to create a sense of control over something – dying – that is totally beyond his control. Erdal thus uses several means to distance himself and us from his subject – the formality of his interviews, his simultaneous translation of what is said from Hebrew into English and the self-consciousness he fosters about his performance as performance on stage. His stage presentation of the film excerpts parallels what he is doing within the film itself – using a rational framework to capture a subject fraught with emotion. Because of those frameworks the play become a personal tribute to his mother’s own calm and rationality in the face of death and sobering memento mori for the entire audience.
Erdal’s mother, a professor of Latin American literature told him that all literature has only two subjects – love and death. Erdal’s play links both. Ultimately, his play does not show us How to Disappear Completely. Through the art of her son Mery Erdal lives on in the minds of all who see the show.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Mery Erdal on film and Itai Erdal on stage. ©2011 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2012-05-09
How to Disappear Completely