Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Emil Sher, directed by Chris Abraham
• Crow’s Theatre, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto
May 16-27, 2017;
• Grand Theatre, London
November 21-December 1, 2018
“He is what he is”
What are the feelings of parents of a severely disabled child? In 2009 Canadian writer Ian Brown published his memoir The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son that frankly discussed how the birth of his son Walker impacted his life and those of his wife Johanna Schneller and their perfectly “normal” daughter Hayley. In 2014 Emil Sher transformed the memoir and additional interviews with the family into a play that had its world premiere at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Now Crow’s Theatre concludes its 2016/17 with a new production of Sher’s play in which director Chris Abraham highlights the theatricality of Sher’s play while ensuring that the universal insights that spring from the specifics of Brown’s memoir shine through.
The play begins with Ian Brown (David Storch) describing hearing the sound of Walker beating himself about the head. In excruciating detail Brown itemizes every step he must take to calm Walker down to change his diaper (since the boy has no excretory control) and return him to his crib. Since Walker cannot eat, Brown must remove the G-tube that sends formula directing into Walker’s stomach through a feeding port. Brown tells us how he has developed a system of immobilizing Walker’s arms and legs to stop the hitting so that he is able to change the diaper. The enormous effort and patience required for the simply procedure of putting his child to bed is an introduction to the more extensive difficulties of living with such a child every day.
Both Brown and Johanna Schneller (Liisa Repo-Martell) freely admit that one of their greatest fears about having children had been having a disabled child. When Schneller was pregnant she was screened for a wide range of possible disabilities and she admits what some people may find shocking that if she had known that her child had had Walker’s disability she would have terminated the pregnancy. This admission is simply one mark of how uncompromisingly honest the play is in dealing with its subject matter.
The pre-natal screening did not catch Walker’s disability because it is so extremely rare that there is no test for it. Walker was born premature with cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC), a condition limited to only about 300 people in the world. With Walker the effects included delayed development, inability to eat and speak, poor vision and incontinence. The text does not mention the malformations of the heart, face and skin that give the syndrome its name. The most disturbing aspect was Walker’s persistence in striking his head with his fists.
Both unreligious and highly intellectual, the parents reject all the explanations that religious or less critical parents might accept as ways of coping with their situation. They can’t look upon Walker as a test of their faith if they have none. Much as they would like to believe that he is trying to communicate with them, they realize that there is no evidence that he can. They don’t even know if he dreams. By age 13 he has mentally reached only an unafflicted child’s age 3.
Brown consults a Catholic who lives with a community of disabled people to find a way of understanding his situation. He asks why he should not just let nature take its course since such a child would never survive without modern medical intervention. He is told that to do so would not be human. Schneller is driven to consult a First Nations shaman to get some clue as to what Walker is thinking. She is told that he is trying to see his face at the bottom of a well. Both parents contemplate committing suicide and taking Walker with them.
What is so brave about the play is how it prevents any sentimentalization of its subject. Brown, Schneller and Hayley are all flawed and admit their flaws just as they criticize others who try to allegorize or intellectualize the reality of what Walker is.
The parents’ biggest trial is when they realize when Walker turns 10 that they can no longer care for him and must send him away to a special home. The two feel guilt at abandoning their son but they also admit relief that their every thought need no longer concern his welfare. Then that relief causes another level of guilt. Eventually, they come to see there are no explanations. What happened, happened. He is what he is. In following so closely the course of the thinking of Brown and Schneller, Sher’s play should resonate with anyone who has had to cope with any event or condition that has defied what is “normal”.
Chris Abraham’s direction uses the entire nearly bare playing area of the Guloien Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest. Often he will have Repo-Martell and Storch speak to each other from opposite walls of the space. Shannon Lea Doyle’s set divides the space into two sections. On stage right is a dining room table that seems to symbolize family life at home. Inset in the back wall on stage left is an area filled with greenery that would seem to symbolize nature. In between these two in the back wall is a door that at various times represents the screen door of the couple’s cottage or a curtained section of a hospital.
Most unusually, Abraham has lighting designers Andre du Toit and Kimberley Purtell create a ring of white light that roves restlessly about the space. Because of the play’s title we are at first inclined to think that the light represents the absent Walker urging his parents to tell his story, for once they step within the ring they begin to speak. Yet, Sher’s text is so clear about how Brown and Schneller have to pull away from imputing motives to Walker’s actions, it contradicts the whole make-up of the play to anthropomorphize the light.
Instead, the roving ring of light has to be considered in an entirely different way. Because Brown and Schneller so often step into the ring to speak, the ring remaining still as if waiting for them to do so, the ring appears more as a metaphor for the play itself and how it provides a forum for the characters of Brown and Schneller to express their darkest thoughts and to reveal the most truthful if also the less than ideal aspects of themselves. The designers have also created a hollow, canoe-shaped projection of light with wavy blue edges that appears only in the centre area of the stage. This, linked with Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design suggests both the bathing tub, the one area where Walker always seemed to be happy, and the lake by his parents’ where the boy enjoyed drifting with Brown in a boat.
If the restless ring of light reflects the parents’ incessant self-questioning, the canoe-shaped light comes to represent the undeniable fact that there was something essentially good in the midst of the parents’ otherwise troubled situation.
Both Storch and Repo-Martell give extraordinarily emotional performances, Storch in particular goes deeper into his character than I have seen him do ever before. McNamee plays many roles besides Haley, but there is no doubt that she expresses herself best though movement and dance rather than her often hesitant speech.
The specificity of the subject matter of The Boy in the Moon always brings the danger that the play will appear to be merely a documentary. Luckily, Abraham’s direction and the invention of the design team help to lend the play a theatricality it might otherwise lack and to help us see that Brown’s story raises fundamental philosophical questions in a world where nature eventually will take its course no matter how much technology may seem to separate us from it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) David Storch, Kelly McNamee and Liisa Repo-Martell; David Storch as Ian Brown; Liisa Repo-Martell as Johanna Schneller. ©2017 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit http://crowstheatre.com.
2017-05-16
The Boy in the Moon