Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
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music by Britta Johnson, lyrics by Britta Johnson and Katherine Cullen, book by Katherine Cullen, directed by Aaron Willis
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
March 21-April 2, 2017
“When will I find my way?”
In 2015 Stupidhead! won Best New Performance Text at the SummerWorks Festival. Now after workshopping at Theatre Passe Muraille, the final version has had its premiere. It’s a very funny, highly enjoyable autobiographical play with songs about living with a major learning disability that is also fully aware of the absurdity of writing an autobiographical musical about living with with a major learning disability. Katherine Cullen’s totally natural, self-effacing performance and Britta Johnson’s varied music should win anyone over to this unusual and unusually funny show.
Stupidhead! is billed as “a comedy musical about having dyslexia”. While it is definitely a comedy, it is much more a solo play with songs than a “musical” since the songs don’t occur in a dramatic context and don’t move the action forward. Since Cullen tells her story non-chronologically, the songs serve more as encapsulations of the autobiographical stories that lead up to them.
The show is also not about dyslexia as we now understand it. Cullen tells us that she suffers from a type of dyslexia called “dyscalculia” which is dyslexia with numbers instead of letters. Through the 1980s researchers were noting that there was a difference between dyslexics and dyscalculics. Most children with dyslexia have no trouble with math and most children with dyscalculia, as was Cullen, have no trouble reading and writing. In 1997 it was discovered that dyslexia and dyscalculia are two separate genetic disorders. Thus, Cullen may have grown up in the 1990s thinking she was “dyslexic”, but now we know it is an entirely different problem in origin and treatment and, in many ways, is even more troubling for a child than dyslexia.
Dyscalculia is not just a inherent difficulty doing math. It is a difficulty understanding numbers in general, such as what numbers are larger than other numbers. Even worse, dyscalculics can have an impaired visual and spatial memory and inability to plan. Cullen relates numerous anecdotes about growing up with her condition which were likely terrifying and confusing at the time but which she presents as humorous cases of evidence that she was maladapted to be a “normal” human being. Every time she went to buy something at the corner store, she had to bring her brother along to help her figure out whether she had enough money to pay for what she had to buy. She says she was constantly getting lost. Even if she went to play at the house next door, she couldn’t find her way back home without help. Her inability to plan leads her into a hilarious story of trying to meet up with some rural alcoholic Vermont puppeteers without having ascertained their meeting point beforehand.
The view Cullen’s show presents is that of an outsider to normal human activity who doesn’t know how “normal” people manage so easily or why she finds it so difficult. Yet, despite the major disadvantages of her genetic disorder, Cullen still pursues her dream of starring in a musical – this musical, Stupidhead! Cullen admits that she can’t sing but then cheerfully asks in the tongue-in-cheek humour typical of the show why lack of ability should limit anyone from self-expression.
We thus find ourselves at a musical that is not really a musical about someone with dyslexia which is not really dyslexic sung by someone who admits she can’t really sing. After making this clear at the top of the show, Cullen does give audience members the chance to leave if they want to. But by then we are so won over by Cullen’s self-deprecating candour we want to hear more of her story.
That the show works so well is not simply because Cullen’s expert comedic timing and devil-may-care “I’m going to sing this anyway” approach to the songs, but because the show is also a parody of musicals in general, especially feel-good musicals about people overcoming obstacles in life. Cullen and Britta Johnson have written an array of songs in many styles with very clever lyrics that pursues this arc of oppression to triumph even though Cullen’s actual story doesn’t follow that formulaic path.
You can’t conquer dyscalculia. You have to learn to live with it. Anyone who saw Cullen as an actor in such plays as Rosamund Small’s Vitals (2014) would never have a clue Cullen had had such a severe learning disability. Stupidhead! makes fun of typical Broadway tropes. What would be songs of triumph turn into songs heaping scorn on a boy who won a poetry prize in grade school that Cullen thinks she should have won, even though she claims she has moved on from that episode. The warm and fuzzy ending that musicals look for comes in the form of stuffed toys of a koala and a rabbit who were the heroes of a book Cullen wrote as a child.
But for all her comic portrayal of her own learning disability and her unvarnished envy of those whose lives have been easy, the show does hit one serious note about mental differences that puts the entire show into perspective. Cullen tells us about a visit to her uncle in a mental hospital. Because he had never been “right in the head” since he returned from World War II, his family had him lobotomized. Her uncle had been an artist before the war but since the lobotomy he has been unable to paint. Cullen mourns her uncle’s loss in the most moving song of the evening “Gone, Gone, Gone”, which, given that it fits within her vocal range, Cullen sings quite movingly. With the example of her uncle before her, Cullen naturally wonders if her dyscalculia for all the trouble it causes her is also something that makes her who she is.
Britta Johnson, who serves as Cullen’s genial accompanist, sometimes duettist and sometimes prompter, ends the show in the upbeats strains of a typical Broadway finale in which Cullen, rather than showing she has moved on reprises all the anecdotes she has already covered. The show thus ends with a celebration even while it suggests that their are some obstacles in life that a person cannot overcome. The fact that Cullen has managed to approach her condition with such a wry sense of humour and keen sense of irony about herself and about the genre she has chosen is really what is cause for celebration.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Katherine Cullen; Katherine Cullen and Britta Johnson. ©2017 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.
2017-03-22
Stupidhead!