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by Norm Foster, directed by Liz Gilroy

Port Stanley Festival Theatre, Grace Auditorium, Port Stanley

June 20-July 12, 2025

Ivy: “We don’t like to use the D-word around here”

After its premiere in Orillia in June 2022, productions of Norm Foster’s Doris and Ivy in the Home spread rapidly throughout Ontario. Foster is already known as Canada’s most produced playwright with over 150 productions of his plays around the world per year. Doris and Ivy is especially funny and shows Foster in top form. The pace never slackens and the dialogue is particularly zingy. The Port Stanley Festival Theatre gives the play a fine production with a first-rate cast.

Foster has taken to writing female versions of plays that had been male-oriented. In 2014 he wrote The Ladies’ Foursome to complement The Foursome, his all-male play of 1998 or the all-female Jenny’s House of Joy from 2006 to show the distaff side of the Old West relative to his all-male Outlaw of 2004. Doris and Ivy in the Homeis clearly a reverse-gendered look at life in an assisted living facility to complement Foster’s Jonas and Barry in the Home of 2015. The underlying subject in both “Home” plays is how people manage to live life knowing that they have far more years behind them than ahead. In both plays, newcomers – Jonas in Jonas and Barry, Doris in Doris and Ivy – change the more rigid way of thinking of the older residents they befriend.

Doris and Ivy is set at the upscale Paradise Gardens in Canmore, Alberta. Recent arrival Doris Mooney is a retired prison guard who worked for 35 years at Drumheller Penitentiary. Loud, brash and earthy, Doris says whatever is on her mind whether it is appropriate or not, and usually, given the genteel setting, it is not. Seeking a friend, Doris immediately latches onto her exact opposite, the quiet, reserved and prim Ivy Hoffbauer, a former championship skier whose career ended after a spectacular crash during an international downhill competition. Ivy, a native Austrian, was so ashamed to have embarrassed her country, that she emigrated to Canada hoping to be forgotten.

The third member of the three-hander is Arthur Beech, a dapper widower who has fallen in love with the divorced Ivy. Urged on by the fact that two residents of Paradise Gardens have sex al fresco in the home’s vegetable patch, Doris decides it is her duty to get Ivy and Arthur in the sack. What prevents her plans is Arthur’s extreme gentlemanliness and Ivy’s fierce sense of propriety. As usual in Foster there is a deeper reason for Arthur and Ivy’s hesitancy. Ivy has been married and divorced three times which has led her to believe she has very poor judgement concerning men. Ivy just doesn’t think she has the strength to fall in love again. Arthur has bowel cancer and has been told he has only two years to live. Arthur is afraid of dying alone and Ivy has promised that she will be with him to the end. Arthur would be happy if Ivy returned his love, but he is content to regard Ivy as a loyal friend who will help see him out.

Thus, Foster presents us with three people who, on their own, would be deeply unhappy. Yet, with Doris and Ivy Foster has written one of his funniest comedies. Part of this is because the play examines with such insight and sympathy the awkwardnesses of such disparate people attempting to form relationships.

Director Liz Gilroy could hardly have a better cast. The most complex of the three characters is Ivy. Alison Lawrence gives what may be her best-ever performance as this character. It is a real pleasure to see how Lawrence illustrates Ivy’s gradual transition from being outraged by Doris’s unfiltered remarks to being amused by them to realizing that Doris is the just the kind of person she needs in order to take herself less seriously. Lawrence depicts Ivy’s relationship with Arthur even more subtly. Lawrence shows that Ivy is holding herself back from Arthur’s love for many good reasons. What is so lovely is to watch how Ivy begins to wonder how much reason should have anything to do with her decisions. From a purely technical point of view, Lawrence gives the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of a character who still has the vaguest remnant of a foreign accent.

The role of Doris could have been written expressly for Debbie Collins. In fact, Collins created the role in 2022. Collins’s comic timing is impeccable and she is great at showing how Doris is a person who is used to speaking before she thinks. On one level, Collins gives us the comedy of Doris’s constantly saying or doing the wrong thing. On another level, Collins gives us the more nuanced comedy of Doris realizing how wrong everything she says or does seems to be. The interplay between Lawrence and Collins is great fun. They show that just as Doris’s brashness gradually helps loosen up Ivy, Ivy’s primness gradually helps Doris to control herself a bit better.

Brian Young is a treat as Arthur. Young makes Arthur’s love for Ivy so evident in every look and phrase that we, like Doris, really do hope that Ivy can find a way to reciprocate his love.

None of the three characters in the play are like the average residents of any assisted care facility you may have visited. All three are there under special circumstances. Ivy suffers from arthritis but has joined the home just so she won’t be a burden on either of her two daughters. Doris has joined because she has fatty liver disease and thinks that the routine of the home will help her keep to the regimen her doctor has prescribed. Arthur may have two years to live but is so vigorous that he need not be in a home yet. He has joined because he was in search of someone to be by his side at the end.

The main point is that Foster has chosen three characters who through their interactions have found ways of enjoying life and relishing its quirks in spite of the shadows looming over all their lives. This expansive view makes Doris and Ivy not merely comic but also uplifting. The Port Stanley production is not to be missed.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Alison Lawrence as Ivy and Debbie Collins as Doris. © 2025 Daniel Platt.

For tickets visit: psft.ca.