Sunday, February 27, 2011

The Beauty Queen of Leenane











Taking a break from an incredibly busy month, after putting in some over time at the office last Wednesday I headed across town to catch the evening performance of The Beauty Queen of Leenane at Neptune Theatre.











Because this is Halifax, my cross-town jaunt was a twenty-minute walk, which brought me past the open-air concert by The Stanfields at the Parade Grounds.












Part of the Canada Games mega event which has been taking place here in Halifax since Feb. 11th, and which concluded on the 27th, the open-air concert series has pulled in some big names from the East Coast music scene, including:

Great Big Sea
Joel Plaskett
Sloan
Hawksley Workman
Grand Derangement
Buck 65
Matt Mays
Rawlins Cross





But I had a theatre seat waiting for me over on Argyle Street. Leaving the happy revellers behind, I made my way to the theatre and settled in for a Fargo-like black comedy set in the West of Ireland.













The audience I was a part of laughed uproariously even while gasping in shock at some of the things the characters said to one another. There's a warning in the program about strong language and adult situations, and there are plenty of both.











Photo courtesy of Sean Mulcahy

As with the best sorts of stories, the very particular nature of the setting - a simple cottage in an economically depressed though visually breathtaking part of Ireland - in fact serves to deliver a universal experience.


Laura de Carteret plays 40-year-old Maureen, forced by a process of elimination to care for her aging mother, as her two sisters have flatly refused to do so. As we get to know her mother, it's not hard to imagine why Maureen's sisters fled, though why Maureen stayed to act as primary caregiver is a riddle.


Mary-Colin Chisholm plays Mag, whose fussy demands for the Ensure-like supplement called Complan, for tea, for porridge, for soup, stand in for several decades of leeching all spirit away from her daughter.

Many women in the audience laughed with recognition at the manipulative phrases used by Mag, as no doubt many people in the audience - like myself - have cared for an elderly family member at some point or another.

Even caring for my gram, who was in no way a difficult personality, could get trying at times when the old person wants her toast a certain way, her television program on at a certain time, and is too frail to do it for herself.

But in this relationship between Maureen and Mag, there is none of the laughter and love that made it all worthwhile for my mom and me as we cared for Gram together. These two women may as well be shackled in irons, their cozy cottage a prison where everyday items take on new and diabolical uses.


A highlight of the evening for me was Ryan Bondy's performance as Ray, younger brother of Maureen's potential love interest. As with the seemingly innocuous household items that become clues, that reveal themselves to be accomplices and mirrors to the truth, Ray begins the play as an apparent go-between but ends the play as a bigger figure than even he suspects.



Providing a welcome breath of hope to Maureen, Hugh Thompson's Pato shakes the women from their ritualized half-life when he returns to Leenane from a job in England. His no-frills working man takes us by surprise when he turns out to have more heart and vulnerability than anyone in this multilayered story.



My hat goes off to Sean Mulcahy for his design of the women's cottage. He very kindly provided the photo of the set, shown above.

I was attracted to it from the first moment the painted scrim with its scene of a soggy Irish road raised to reveal the well-worn interior. What I didn't realize was how integral to the story each ordinary kitchen piece would become: the sink, the cooking stove, the cast iron heating stove, the radio, the rocking chair. Not since Robert LePage's staging of Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung for the Canadian Opera Company have I seen a set that was such an active ingredient of the whole production.

If you are in the Halifax area, the play runs until March 20th.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Share Your Love Story Linky Party











Karen at My Desert Cottage is hosting a romantic Valentine's Day event over at her blog today.












If you'd like to take part, just post the story of how you and your sweetie came to be, and link it to her blog. Then dive into the sea of romantic tales.

Here's mine:

Once upon a time, I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a small eastern Canadian city perched on the Atlantic coast.

When I reached my early 20's, I headed for The Big City. I settled in Toronto, Ontario, where I worked as a live-in nanny for an incredibly cool family.

I also took an evening-and-weekends job as a way of meeting people and indulging in one of my great passions - film. In fact, on the day I was filling out applications at a few cinemas in the west end of the city, where I lived, I decided to take a short break and went to a psychic whose sign was on the sidewalk as I was passing by.

She told me: "your soul mate is very near. He's wearing a uniform."

As I was still very, very new to the city, I couldn't imagine anyone in my life that fit that description, especially as I was not seeing anyone at that time. However, the rest of her reading was very accurate, so I simply stored it away in the old noggin.

I kept walking along Bloor Street until I reached a cinema I hadn't come across before - the Runnymede Theatre, run by Famous Players.

I went in, filled out the application, got a call a few days later and started working there at the candy counter and in the box office.











One of the ushers was really cute. He was a student at The New School of Drama, and we hit it off immediately. We became very close friends for several years.












At the time, I wasn't looking to be involved with anyone, and neither was he. I had a history of having male friends, and he had a history of having female friends, so we just assumed we were going down that road and left it at that.

We spent most of our time together, and I often stayed over at his parents' place in the guest room on the weekends, as we would watch crazy cult films on TV till the wee hours of the morning.

Then one night, as I turned to head up the stairs, he stepped in front of me and kissed me.

Strangely enough, when I started telling my family and friends, "You'll never guess who I'm going out with!" everyone said, "Brad?" without hesitation.

Apparently the entire world knew we were in love with one another before we did.
















Fast forward a few years, and this next shot was taken in our bridal suite at the hotel.












By that time, I was already working towards my Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Film Studies at Ryerson.

Brad's acting chops came in handy throughout those four years, especially during my fourth year final project.

That's him in the doorway, and me operating the camera. It's also my dad at left operating the sound boom, and my main actor at right acting as sound recording technician (a job he had at Citytv.)











It doesn't matter that Brad and I have been a couple since 1989. Every time I see him, I get the same thrill, and the same smile lights up my face. The smile that is only for him.














Because my husband has bipolar disorder - and in particular experiences rapid cycling - we can never count on what he'll be going through on any given day. We have a sit-tight-and-hold-on-for-the-ride attitude when it comes to his condition. No elephants in the room for us - we feed ours peanuts.

What Brad's chronic illness has given us is the live-every-day-as-if-it's-your-last immediacy. When you never know if your husband is about to go on a months-long downward spiral, or when you hug your husband and feel him shaking like a leaf because he's got agoraphobia and has to go to work, you cherish each moment as if a bomb is about to take you and everything else with it.

It's impossible to take anything for granted, which for us has meant a marriage filled with "I love you"s.















Brad and I moved back to my hometown of Halifax in order to help out with my gram. We all lived together with my mom until Gram passed away in December, 2007.

Now it's Brad, myself, my mom and our dog Xena. The wild bunch!
















On this Valentine's Day, I'd like to wish all of you the same joy I have found with my soul mate, the one who was truly very near that day when the psychic told me so. Even if the uniform in question was a blue polyester Famous Players usher's uniform.