Answering the angel of death
Lois Brown explores trauma and hospitalization through dark humour with new play
While staying in Montreal five years ago, Lois Brown noticed a stack of police magazines, presumably left behind by the person who had stayed in the apartment before her. Having never seen that type of magazine before, she began flipping through them and came across an article on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Reading the PTSD symptom checklist, Brown came to a realization: she was, beyond a doubt, suffering from the condition.
An anxiety condition, those suffering from PTSD have lived through either a single dangerous, shocking or terrifying event, or a succession of them. In Brown’s case, it was a serious accident she had as a pedestrian in Vancouver in 2008 that was the trigger.
The local director/performer/ writer had been on the country’s west coast for the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, where she was directing Andy Jones’s “An Evening With Uncle Val.” Crossing on a crosswalk according to the light, Brown was struck by an SUV, which also ran over her right foot.
She spent close to a month in hospital in Vancouver before being transferred to the Health Sciences Centre at home in St. John’s for another two weeks. All told, she has had half a dozen surgeries as a result of the accident, and still deals with mobility issues and chronic pain.
Brown has turned her condition into art: last year she sparked discussion with the “Injury Illness Pain Sadness Grief and Performance” performance series, which she curated. Next week, she’ll open a run of “When the Angel of Death says ? How Are You,” a project two years in the making.
Told from the perspective of a hospital patient (named Patience) as she struggles to cope with her injuries and the results of them, the play is based on Brown’s own experiences in hospital, both traumatic and hilarious.
“In the play, I explore the fact that Patience won’t phone her daughter, who’s back in Newfoundland,” Brown says, recalling an experience she had where she wondered if her own thinking could change the outcome of certain things happening — typical of an anxiety disorder. “(Patience) remembers an earlier accident with her daughter and she’s afraid it will happen again and she should do nothing to affect time, in case her daughter gets run over this time. There’s an underlying theme that, really, the story is almost about her calming down enough and being able to call the daughter and resolve that imaginary issue where she thinks if she calls or does anything, this accident will occur.”
The play is also an examination of the relationship between nurses and patients, and between patients and visitors: at times Patience wonders if she may already be dead and in limbo, or whether the nurses, so helpful, may actually be vampires.
Brown technically began writing the play while in hospital, writing down nurses’ names and funny things that happened. She and her roommate played a game where they tried to endear themselves to their nurses, she said, chuckling.
Another time, a nurse noticed the many flowers and gifts Brown was getting delivered to her room and wondered if she was taking things meant for another patient with the same name who had just had a baby.
As she got deeper into the creative process, Brown realized the play was more about trauma than hospital life. Had she known the process would be so hard, she says, she may not have written the piece as a play.
She often finds herself triggered by the production.
“I do, very much so. But I’m figuring it out a bit better,” she says. “It’s hard directing it because I’m always thinking about it. I still do things like if I’m walking across the street I freeze in the middle, or if there’s a loud noise in rehearsal or if someone raises their voice to say something really loud I’ll just start to panic.
“That kind of panic can trigger a whole bunch of old habits, too. You know how you build confidence with experience? Maybe at one time in my life I felt like maybe I was failing at something or not very good at it, and I’ll get back into that earlier experience. It’s very misleading to have this condition for me, and maybe not for everyone, but I’m sure there are others like me.”
Award-winning novelist, actor and clown Sara Tilley plays the lead role in “When the Angel of Death Says ? How Are You,” alongside Lauren Patten and Emmajane Donnan, two nine-year-olds who play angels. Part of Patience’s imagination, the girls sometimes guide her, and sometimes tell her off.
When Brown’s accident happened, she remembers two little girls in school uniforms being there, watching and crying as she was being tended to by paramedics.
“They had been let out of a car and there was a crowd around, but no one was paying attention to them and they were just staring at my foot while the EMT was taking the sock off,” Brown recalls. “Their dad has his back to them and none of the adults noticed that they shouldn’t have been looking. I was trying to say, ‘Little girls, little girls, look away, you don’t have to look at this,’ and then I think I might have passed out for a minute or lost my ability to speak or something and I don’t really remember what happened. I took that image, because it was something that really deeply affected me, and I thought, what’s going to happen to those girls and what will it mean to them later? Would they think about it?”
The play also stars Courtney Brown, Monica Walsh and Ruth Lawrence.
Last spring, Brown staged a workshop production of the play at the Centre for Nursing Studies, which gave the audience the chance to experience it in a real hospital setting.
On Aug. 4, it will open at the LSPU Hall for a four-night run at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 (discounted for those who attended in the spring and were given a wristband), and tickets are available online at www.rca. nf.ca, at the LSPU Hall box office and by calling 753-4531.
Brown will read from the play next week during a PTSD conference taking place at MUN, where she will also speak. She has plans to publish the play, and would like to see another director take it on in another part of the country.
Creating the show was intense on many levels, Brown says, and very reflective.
What do you say when the angel of death says how are you?
“The answer is, ‘I’m OK,’” Brown says.