Play pursues an elusive place called home

It’s the guy who hates sleeping on a mattress.

A different thing will stick with every person who sees Home is a Beautiful Word.

For me, it was the mattress guy (Kelt Eccleston). He’s so used to sleeping on the street that he can’t stand a mattress — it’s too squishy, like sleeping on mud. He’s not speaking hypothetically; he spent the winter sleeping on mud — managed to keep dry, but on the mud. There’s just something about that image.

In his program message, director Michael Shamata talks about finding the universal in the specific. That’s the genius in Joel Bernbaum’s play, which uses the exact words taken from some 500 interviews with homeless people and those affected by homelessness (and a few who aren’t affected at all).

A cast of five speaks the words in what amounts to a journalistic exercise as much as a theatrical one. There’s no plot as such, but there are stories. The risk here is repetition. The stories and the speakers vary, but the play could be 10 minutes long or 90. By intermission, you wonder if there’s anything more that needs to be said.

The research was done in Victoria, so the play contains references to neighbourhoods and streets that we might not be familiar with. It would certainly resonate better if these were Saskatoon place names, but the issue, as Shamata points out, is universal.

Oh, and the dumpster guy! Thomas (Kayvon Khoshkam) has a story that’s funny and gross. He seems to be in jail and the food there is garbage. He, too, knows of what he speaks because when he was on the street, he ate well thanks to dumpsters. If you got to Swiss Chalet after lunch and before the truck came, you’d find plenty of food in the bin out back — thoughtfully bagged by the staff to keep it separate from the real garbage. You can’t forget these details.

So there’s much to be learned from this unique stage event by Sum Theatre and Belfry Theatre as part of Persephone Theatre’s Deep End Series. It accomplishes its goal of making you see the humanity in street people and leaves you with a rather chilling realization that it’s not an “us and them” social disaster as much as a kind of virus that no one is immune to. There are many people in the play who demolish the stereotype of a “typical” homeless person. It can happen to anyone, which is just one reason to work against it.