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<b>written and directed by Tine Van Aerschot
Kaaitheater (Brussels), Vooruit (Ghent), Mousonturm (Frankfurt), PACT Zollverein (Essen), The Theatre Centre, Toronto
May 14-18, 2014
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“There is no story that can be told so beautiful and so sad as the story of death”
The Theatre Centre has just presented the Canadian premiere of <i>we are not afraid of the dark</i> written and directed by Belgian theatre director Tine Van Aerschot. The 70-minute-long performance piece has already been seen in several locations in Europe after it premiered in 2012. But in coming to Toronto it has in many ways finally come home since the piece is inspired by much-loved Toronto actor Tracy Wright (1959-2010). It is a beautiful work – profound, humorous and comforting – whose simplicity reflects the humbleness of the person it honours.
In 2009 Wright was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died from it six and a half months later. After her diagnosis she decided to continue to work as long as possible. Her last stage appearance was in a revival of Daniel MacIvor’s <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/A601DBF5-F731-43EB-8F2F-5684260BFDF9">A Beautiful View</a></i> in 2010. She also decided to collaborate on <i>we are not afraid of the dark</i> with Van Aerschot, began to talk as long and as often as the circumstances allowed about fear, specifically of death, how that fear can change and how it can be overcome. Van Aerschot wrote a performance text based on these conversations and combined them with other real examples of survival under inhospitable conditions.
The performance space of The Theatre Centre is empty except for 30 lamps designed by Luc Schaltin of three heights – tall, medium and small – each consisting of a metal stand and pole rising to a hidden wire framework holding a lightbulb that glows through its shade, an ordinary white plastic bag. We first see the lamps, all turned off, in four groups. The piece begins in total darkness when performer Valerie Buhagiar enters and turns off the house lights. After she speaks a preamble she begins to turn on the lamps, first the nine downstage centre, before she moves on to the rest. We humans naturally tend to anthropomorphize objects and it very difficult not to see these three sizes of lamps with glowing heads as abstract people – men, women and children. Van Aerschot reinforces this notion when she has Buhagiar move one of the lamps that is about Buhagiar’s height around with her for various sequences as if it were her double. During the course of the piece Buhagiar begins to move the lighted lamps out of their original formations to spread them out in a seemingly random pattern over the performance space. Because of the work’s theme of death and because of our anthropomorphizing, the conclusion of the piece, when Buhagiar turns off the lamps one by one is incredibly moving.
I puzzled long over the question why the lamps had plastic bags as shades and the answer did not hit me until the following morning. Van Aerschot and her designer force us to see these “people” as figures of light shining through a superficial covering that is a symbol of disposability. The lamps thus become apt metaphors for what Wright came to see as human life. The performer, Buhagiar, functions even more as a stage manager than the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s <i>Our Town</i>, since she is also in charge of the show’s lighting and sound. If the lamps seem to be lit randomly, moved randomly and extinguished randomly that is exactly the point. The whole performance reflects a coming to terms with the paradox of death.
At the start when we are in complete darkness, Buhagiar gives us the fullest statement of this paradox:
There is no story that can be told so beautiful and so sad as the story of death. It is
the saddest most wonderful story in the world and when it is told right, it is the
most humble, the most joyous, the most honest celebration of life.
There is no story that can be told so horrible and cold as the story of death. It is the
coldest most awful story in the world and when it is told right, it is the most
gruesome, the most terrifying, the most honest condemnation of life.
The remainder of the piece is a concatenation of statements – some spoken by Buhagiar as a performer, some read from cards in the pockets of her sweater, one read from a book, and others played on tapes by characters listed as Ghost 1 (Claire Marshall) and Ghost 2 (Don McKellar, Wright’s husband). The statements Buhagiar makes as a performer seem to reflect Wright’s own views. Dying is not as bad as the thought of leaving people who love you behind. When a person dies it is like having a chunk taken out of you and makes you feel what Adam must have felt when God removed his rib to make Eve. When your bodily functions, normally never discussed in public, become a topic of conversation and praise, then you know you’re on your way out.
The statement about Adam and Eve leads Buhagiar to play a long speech by Ghost 1, who in speaking of growing up in Europe after the war, must reflect the experiences of Van Aerschot. The speech is all about raising rabbits for food that people were encouraged to do to become self-sufficient after the war. Like Adam and Eve, Ghost 1’s family started with only two rabbits. To avoid the problem of inbreeding after the first kits are born, you must force one of the sons to mate with his mother and one of the daughters to mate with her father. Mating rabbits by skipping every other generation keeps them healthy and produced rabbits with more meat. Though the Bible does not mention a sister to Cain and Abel, this anecdote helps explain how the world could be peopled from only one couple. The distastefulness of the subject is negated by the completely matter-of-fact way Marshall speaks. The bane of rabbit breeding is a disease called snuffles. Contrary to its cute name, the disease (technically known as pasteurellosis) so serious and contagious that if an outbreak occurs all the rabbits must be destroyed. This example quite simply demonstrates that genesis and the apocalypse are not metaphysical notions but occurrences an ordinary girl could witness growing up.
The introduction for Ghost 2 is a story Buhagiar tells about a young boy who drowned in a freezing river. He was eventually revived with constant attention, the reason being that he had frozen before he had drowned. Ghost 2, whose recorded comments Buhagiar periodically turns on, discusses the viability of cryogenically preserving people in a state he calls “suspended death” (not “suspended animation”) while they wait for science to discover the cure to their diseases or to find a way to prolong life. McKellar, too, speaks in a completely matter-of-fact manner, but the more we hear from Buhagiar about coming to terms with death as part of the natural cycle of life, the more Ghost 2’s comments grate on us as grotesque and foolish, especially when he begins speaking of what rights those in suspended death should have.
Parallel to the agonizingly slow return of the frozen boy to life is a story of a man, seemingly in perfect health, who gets meticulously dressed for church and then suddenly keels over dead. In a story Buhagiar reads we hear of a doctor’s horrific journey to reach a boy with an infected leg which he later cured that serves as a parallel to a story of a boy whose loses his leg in a farm accident. Throughout the works stories of life balance those of death, stories of saving balance those of loss. The key to understanding these anecdotes is the notion of balance. Balance is also the key to understanding the role of death in life.
Much of the piece’s humour derives from the cards Buhagiar periodically reads from detailing the experiments of Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) from his work, <i>Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observation on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera</i> (1882). Buhagiar reads various of the amateur scientist’s experiments with drowned ants. Lubbock would submerse ant for various lengths of time and note how long it took to recover, but he was especially interested in the reaction of ants passing by the recovering ant. In all the excerpts but one, the passing ants completely ignore the suffering ant. The point of these excerpts is to provide a counterpoint to the care Wright received during her suffering and the recognition that care for the dying is not universal.
The piece Van Aerschot has created is beautiful because of its utter simplicity. In its mixture of wisdom gained from experience and its collection of odd anecdotes she both captures Wright’s personality and suggests how the fear of death is replaced by the joy of reaching that act that balances birth. Buhagiar gives a touching, wry performance with an endearing sense of the impromptu about it. We all should be so lucky to have such a tribute paid to our lives as Van Aerschot has paid to Tracy Wright.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Valerie Buhagiar, ©2014 Jim Miller; Tracy Wright, ©Guntar Kravis.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://theatrecentre.org">http://theatrecentre.org</a>.
<b>2014-05-15</b>
<b>we are not afraid of the dark</b>