Moving day blues in GLT comedy
It’s a brand new show that feels like it could have been written decades ago.
For director Derek Joynes, a show like Katherine DiSavino’s Things My Mother Taught Me perfectly fits the Garrison Little Theatre template. Like a comfortable pair of comedy slippers.
“To me, the play is beautifully constructed,” he says. “It does all the right things with the story, and it moves from sentiment to humour and back again.”
The second play by highly-touted Los Angeles writer Katherine DiSavino (Nana’s Naughty Knickers), it follows a young couple (Alex Pedersen and Eric Jeddry) as they move into their first apartment in Chicago. If the stress of moving wasn’t enough, they then get both sets of parents showing up to help, turning the two-bedroom apartment into a cocoon of family issues.
Opening Feb. 9, the show also stars Garrison Little Theatre regulars Darka
Makarec, Bruce Davenport, Catherine Kitchen, Jim Kitchen and Zdenka Cole.
It’s the second show of Garrison’s 31st season, which started with D.D. Brooke’s Rehearsal for Murder in October.
While still in the GLT wheelhouse, Cole says the show isn’t from the well-trod Norm Foster/Neil Simon mold.
“It’s neither,” he says. “It’s more of a sentimental, romantic comedy. A little old-fashioned in its way, and perhaps better constructed than a lot of modern plays.
“Things My Mother Taught Me could almost be any period you like. You could say it’s a reaction of one generation to some of the things done by a different generation.”
The season concludes in April with Ed’s