Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Hume Baugh, directed by Mark Cassidy
Optic Heart Theatre, Videofag, 187 Augusta Ave., Toronto
November 27-December 8, 2013
“Long before she died, my mother disappeared”
Hume Baugh’s solo show with the long title The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone begins with a picture and a sound cue. The picture projected behind him shows a group of his relatives picnicking in the 1930s somewhere in Ontario. The only non-adult, a young girl, sits looking aloof from the rest of the group. The sound cue, even when played twice, is very hard to decipher. It sounds rather like pebbles falling in clusters on a microphone in a box. By the end of the hour-long show, Baugh reveals what the sound is, but by then our puzzle about what the sound could be has been replaced by the much larger puzzle of life, death and love.
Baugh tells us that the girl in the picture is his mother and the show is his about his coming to terms with her life and death. “Why write a play about your mother?” he asks. By the end we know why even before he tells us.
Baugh grew up the fourth child of six in the unhappy household of his two parents, both academics, who argued constantly until they divorced. We hear that Baugh’s mother was a strong, beautiful woman whose presence tended to cow other people. Feminism became her creed in the 1970s and Baugh even accused her of hating men. Yet, he noticed that from her divorce onwards she began to drink ever more heavily. It was clear to everyone in the family that she was an alcoholic and was ruining her health, but only Baugh tried to confront his mother about it.
While she was aware she suffered from bouts of depression, as her mother had before her, she refused to see anyone about it or her drinking. Baugh and his siblings were faced with the fact that their mother was seemingly intent on drinking herself to death. Baugh recounts calmly what for years must have been a nightmare. In a typical strict, Scots-origin family, shows of emotion were discouraged along with any discussion of important family issues. The view of one of Baugh’s brothers was just to let “things take their course”. Speaking up would only embarrass or anger their mother. Though Baugh did confront her, it had no effect.
Baugh wonders what kind of love allows a once vibrant mother to destroy herself slowly for 25 years, but Baugh faced what many others have faced. Rational argument, or even argument from the deepest emotion, cannot change irrational behaviour. This is why Baugh was faced with the terrible reality that “Long before she died, my mother disappeared. Inside herself. Into a fog of alcohol.” Yet her former tough spirit would show itself occasionally. Though initially put off, Baugh now is pleased that the last words he remembers his mother saying to him were “Get your face out of my face!”
The show is beautifully written. Baugh displays a knack for precise, often poetic, description. Except when he is re-enacting arguments of the past, Baugh delivers the piece in a calm, elegiac tone as if the worse has passed and the healing has begun. In creating a portrait of his mother, Baugh includes the comic as well as the tragic and one of the show’s many highlights is Baugh’s rendering of a letter he wrote to his mother when he was only eight, very much concerned about noting the time and about letting his mother know he loved her. Baugh also is a great mimic in rendering his mother’s voice as various ages, and his own and the voices of three of his siblings, his father and the clueless Anglican priest who presided at his mother’s funeral.
If the life of Baugh’s mother had a mystery at its heart that he will never understand, he finds that life itself has the same mystery. His show answers his question about its subject because in recovering from his grief, Baugh comes to see that his mother has never left him. She is present in almost everything he does. A play about trying to discover mother thus becomes a play about discovering himself.
On a white wooden stage, one metre by two, with six candles at the rim and only a wooden chair as a prop, Baugh gives a quietly powerful performance. The simplicity of the presentation reflects the deep honesty of Baugh’s purpose and means of expression. The play is about a search for clarity and Baugh conducts it in a manner devoid of sentimentality or artifice. This sense of integrity is what is most affecting and ultimately uplifting.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Hume Baugh. ©2013 Optic Heart Theatre.
For tickets, visit thegirlinthepicture.eventbrite.ca
2013-12-04
The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone