✭✭✭✭✭

by John Mighton, directed by Daniel Brooks

Necessary Angel and Tarragon Theatre, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

March 1-April 3, 2005

"Full of Life, Full of Thought"

John Mighton’s new play “Half Life” has the aura of a classic.  His assured but elliptical style is perfectly matched by Daniel Brooks stylish but minimalist direction and the detailed, precise performances of the entire cast.  Little of consequence seems to happen during the many short, humorous scenes that make up its 90 minutes, but by the end you’ll feel as if what has happened comes very close to tragedy.

The story parallels the relationships of two couples.  Donald and Anna, two middle-aged divorced singles, meet in the lobby of an nursing home.  Donald is waiting to visit his mother, Clara, as is his daily habit.  Anna is there to admit her father, Patrick, who has become increasingly depressed and dangerous.  Anna seems open to another relationship, but Donald, whose father has died recently, seems to want no further changes in his life. 

Clara seems to enjoy being in the home and revels in the ever clearer memories of her happy past.  Patrick, who played an important but mysterious role in World War II, resents his new situation.  Yet, when Patrick and Clara meet each other, they are sure they have known each other before and begin to rekindle the romance they are convinced they once had.  Was this romance real?  Is it just a folie à deux of two people with failing minds?  And how important is it to know which is the case if the effect is so strong?

These are the initial questions the play asks.  But to consider them fully, Mighton brings up larger issues of remembrance and forgetting, time and change and how all play a role in defining identity and in determining knowledge.  Donald claims that forgetting is as important as remembering and is what makes us human, even if he doesn’t follow his own advice.

The play is structured as a series of short, discreet scenes.  In a play about memory lapses, Mighton forces us to determine for ourselves how much time has passed between scenes and what may have occurred.  We are given brief, usually very funny glimpses of the surface of the action but have to work at constructing the deeper story that holds these glimpses together.  It’s an ingenious but simple strategy that a play about memory also forces us to exercise it to understand the play.

Daniel Brooks’ brilliant production and Dany Lyne’s simple design reinforce the structure of the play.  The stage is painted completely black.  It is a kind of nowhere that become “somewhere” only when a few tables and chairs are placed in a certain way and when the characters begin to speak.  To heighten the sense of isolation, Andrea Lundy lights each scene with discreet, hard-edged squares of light.  Richard Feren creates a soundscape that only tangentially makes reference to the setting or subjects discussed, a spacey ebb and flow of sound whose sci-fi connotations ask us to look for what larger events are going on beyond the banalities of the on-stage conversations.

Daniel Brooks has drawn performances from the cast perfectly in tune with the issues of the play and its physical presentation.  Each actor is able to suggest that beneath their restrained words of conversation and formulaic expressions lie realms of emotion and thought that they cannot or intentionally will not bring to the surface.  As in the best minimalist theatre, these realms of the unsaid invest every small word or gesture with greater allusive power. 

The cast is superb.  Diego Matamoros’ performance as Donald is so subtle you likely won’t realize the coup he has engineered until the very end.  His ruffled, self-deprecating, professorial persona leads us to take him as the moral centre of the play.  Yet, this apparently easy-going nature hides a less-than-positive personal rigidity that becomes more clearly manifest throughout the play.  Laura de Carteret gives Anna the sense of someone who gives the appearance of coping with life, belied however by her interest in Donald that shifts from attraction finally to frustration and rage.       

Carolyn Hetherington gives a luminous performance as Clara.  She fills her character with benevolence and life and seems to glow when Clara reminisces about the happiness of the past.  Eric Peterson convincingly brings about the gradual change in Patrick from cynic to romantic as his character becomes convinced he has found again after so many years the love of his life.  One of Barbara Gordon’s roles is nursing home resident Agnes, the humorous, crotchety foil to the blooming lives of Clara and Patrick.  In a complete change, Gordon also plays a younger no-nonsense worker in the home.

Maggie Huculak plays Tammy, a nurse in the home, whose sing-song voice of cajolement with her elderly patients barely conceals her frustration with them.  At the same time she shows that Tammy has developed a special relationship with Clara that may have more to do with Tammy’s needs than Clara’s.  Randy Hughson is a treat as Reverend Hill, a minister clearly not cut out for the job, who can never speak pleasantries without given them unwanted connotations.

“Half Life” is a wonder of a play that explores the enigmas of memory, identity and life. It grows rich with questions and possible answers that will make it stay with you long after you leave the theatre. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Eric Peterson, Carolyn Hetherington and Barbara Gordon. ©2005 Cylla von Tiedemann.