‘Unbearably moving’
No true story can have a happy ending, but The Boy in the Moon follows a persuasive path to a point of equilibrium
David Storch and Lisa Repo- Martell give remarkable, in- themoment performances in The Boy in the Moon. They play Ian Brown and Johanna Schneller, real- life Toronto journalists and parents of a severely disabled son named Walker. Emil Sher’s play is an adaptation of Brown’s memoir of their experiences. Walker has never been able to walk; nor can he talk, eat normally, or communicate in any conventional way. His and his parents’ story is one of heartbreak tinged with hope, cer- tainly graced with love.
Transferred to the stage, it could be unbearably moving, or just unbearable. In Chris Abraham’s production for Crow’s Theatre, the best thing to happen so far in this company’s new East End home, it’s the former. Imaginatively presented on a bare open stage, it draws us into a world.
It begins with Storch’s deadpan recitation of his nightly ritual of feeding Walker when he was 11, through an IV, interrupted invariably by the changing of his diaper. All this occurs in the dark; he tries not to wake the rest of the house, while coping with the boy’s now considerable weight. Storch here is about as natural and unmannered and seemingly spontaneous as acting gets; you feel as if the man himself, alight with humorous intelligence, is talking to you. And in a sense he is. The speech is taken directly from Brown’s book. He has, you might say, the author on his side, and this impression persists throughout the rest of the play.
His partner doesn’t quite have that advantage. Schnell er is a character in the book, not its co- writer. Sher interviewed her, so hers is a verbatim role as well, but there are times when Repo-Martell sounds, ironically, as if she’s standing outside her character, delivering lines. Most of the time, though, she’s searingly good. The play naturally concerns the tensions that arise between decent, well-meaning people in conditions of impossible stress. They say what would otherwise be unforgivable things, knowing that they’re unforgivable. Storch tends to be play defence in these scenes, Repo- Martell is the aggressor, and her rage and pain are incendiary.
Both actors are funny; Storch in a fated, downbeat kind of way while Repo-Martell is more of a wisecracker, as in her heartfelt recollections of the movie stars she’s interviewed. (“Julia Roberts is mean,” but apparently, Annette Bening is okay.) She’s also the more willing to confess to unthinkable thoughts, as when she says that, had she known in advance what Walker’s life was going to be like, she would have had an abortion. Now she dreads what may happen if he outlives her and she is no longer around to help him. Her husband’s more quizzical equivalent to this is his musing, during that first speech, of how he will cope with Walker’s needs when the boy is 20 and he himself is 60.
In fact Walker is twenty now, or at least he is by the end of the play, and his parents seem to have come to terms with this. We have seen them desperately seeking for help and, in scenes both heartening and amusing, resisting anything that smacks of mysticism; Schneller is especially contemptuous of the idea that Walker’s suffering is justified by the compassion he arouses in others.
There is a third actor, Kelly McNamee, who plays a variety of walk-on roles, medics and such, but is mainly employed as Hayley, Walker’s older sister. She is aware that some of her childhood has been usurped by her brother’s needs, but she remains supportive. Some of her role is gracefully danced ( choreography by Monica Dottor and the director) in what I took to be a yearning but unsentimental lament for the things that Walker has never been allowed. The movement and the precise placing of Abraham’s direction are en- hanced by the echoing void of Shannon Lea Doyle’s set; the lighting (by Andre du Toit and Kimberly Purtell) acts as an infallible barometer of mood and emphasis.
The only comparable play I know is A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which in the 1960s launched the career of the British dramatist Peter Nichols. That too was autobiographical: the story of the author, his wife and their similarly disabled daughter. It was more obviously artful; the names were changed, the supporting characters were obvious foils and the play zeroed in on the parents’ survival-strategy of treating their predicament as a comedy act. “Isn’t there a point,” one of their friends asked, “at which the jokes start using you?” Indeed there was, and the play never quite recovered from it, forcing its way to a conventional resolution of an ending.
The Boy in the Moon avoids this, and though Joe Egg was too long ago for me to make confident comparisons, I think the newer play hits closer to home – at times devastatingly so. All parents must look at their babies and wonder what they might be thinking; The Boy in the Moon, named for the man in the moon beyond whose face we can never see, presents this question going on for a lifetime. But it does suggest – Storch as Brown certainly suggests – that some kind of unspoken connection may exist. No true story can have a happy ending, but this one follows a persuasive path to a point of equilibrium.