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by Eric Coble, directed by Richard Quesnel

Lost & Found Theatre, KW Little Theatre, Waterloo

May 3-13, 2018

Alexandra: “I’m a cornered animal”

Anyone in Waterloo Region and beyond looking for a fine night of theatre should make a bee-line for Lost & Found Theatre’s production of The Velocity of Autumn.  The 2011 play by American Eric Coble deals with the topics of aging with dignity and children’s duty toward their elderly parents.  It’s both funny and insightful about people when both their bodies and their children start to fail them and it is anchored by yet another memorable performance by L&F mainstay Kathleen Sheehy.

Nicole Lee Quesnel’s realistic set gives a clue that all is not well in with 79-year-old Alexandra (Sheehy) in her apartment.  The front door is barricaded with furniture, she has a set of kitchen knives and a frying pan on her side table and bottles of all sorts with liquid in them stopped with cloth strips sit all about the room.  Alexandra is enthroned in her lounge chair alert to any intrusion, but she doesn’t expect anyone to make an entrance through the second storey window via her favourite tree.  But that’s exactly what her youngest son Christopher (Andrew Lakin) does that sets off 70 minutes in real time of negotiations between Alexandra and Chris about her future.

Alexandra’s older children Michael and Jennifer have decided that their mother is too feeble in body and mind to remain on her own in her New York brownstone anymore.  Alexandra’s view is that she wants to die in the apartment where she has lived for 45 years.  If she collapses and dies there, so be it.  If her children want to move her, they will have to do so by force and if they attempt that she has Molotov cocktails ready to destroy the apartment and immolate herself.  Alexandra’s threat has, of course, only reinforced Michel and Jennifer’s belief that their mother has gone crazy.  As a last ditch effort they have asked Christopher, whom Alexandra hasn’t seen for 20 years, to fly in from New Mexico to try to talk sense into Alexandra about leaving her apartment for better care in a nursing home.  The wonderful aspect of the play is that the longer Christopher talks to his mother, who always liked him best, the more he begins to see her side of the argument.

Coble may begin his play as a farce but very soon Alexandra’s reflections on growing old and Christopher’s reflections on his failed life (he just broke up with  his partner) give the play a serious and even poetic weight that supersedes its

farcical set-up.  Coble gives Alexandra, a painter, a wonderful speech about how life is like walking up the spiral of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, one artwork coming into focus while the one before fades in the distance and the one ahead waits for one’s attention.  Chris, in turn, also has an important speech about art and life.  He says he witnessed a Navajo ceremony where men depict myths about the creation of the earth and the universe using coloured sand and then when the work is complete they sweep the entire beautiful work away, the sand rejoining the earth.  It is the making and memory of the work that is important not the physical work itself. 

The play is sensitively directed and well acted by both Sheehy and Lakin.  Their interactions and those of Lakin with Chris’s unseen siblings over the phone are so natural that we feel we are glimpsing the life of a real family.

Sheehy provides a multilayered portrait of a complex woman.  As an artist Alexandra is used to close observation.  Sheehy shows how Alexandra turns that skill towards examining in rueful detail the continual diminution of Alexandra’s everyday abilities.  Yet Alexandra would rather die naturally in a place she loves rather than in an antiseptic space filled with people struggling to keep her alive.  Sheehy also brings out Alexandra’s determination to preserve her freedom to live and die as she likes at all costs.  Yet, Sheehy is too fine an actor not to let us glimpse the occasional doubt in Alexandra’s mind even as she rails against the plans of Michael and Jennifer.  Despite the Molotov cocktails, Sheehy presents such a convincing and reasonable depiction of a strong-willed woman that we can’t help but be sympathetic to her cause.

Andrew Lakin gives a fine, understated performance as Christopher.  The character is supposed to be gay but Coble and fortunately Lakin also treat that fact as by the way.  The point is that both Alexandra and Chris are outsiders to majority views which is what helps them to understand each other.  Lakin makes Chris’s calm, rather defeated personality serve as a foil for Alexandra’s more fiery nature.  His quiet recounting of a terrible accident Chris witnessed reveals that Chris has realized that part of his aimlessness is that he has lived too much as an observer of life rather than as a participant.

Alexandra and Christopher may begin the play as antagonists, but the delight of the action is how understanding and acceptance grow between them and a solution to Alexandra’s predicament that neither had had in mind at the beginning of the play starts to take shape.  The Velocity of Autumn is a lovely, warm-hearted play that quite appropriately ends its run on Mother’ s Day.  Any elderly person with children or child with elderly parents will immediately be able to see themselves in Coble’s play which should help increase understanding and tolerance in both.  Lost & Found Theatre is to be applauded for choosing to produce this play and for presenting it in such a sensitive production.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive

Photo: (from top) Kathleen Sheehy as Alexandra and Andrew Lakin as Christopher; Kathleen Sheehy as Alexandra and Andrew Lakin as Christopher. ©2018 Josh Hoey.

For tickets, visit www.lostandfoundtheatre.ca.