Gripping story falters on stage
The Boy in the Moon
Written by Emil Sher, based on the book by Ian Brown. Directed by Chris Abraham. Until May 27 at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. CrowsTheatre.com or 647-341-7390.
Emil Sher’s play begins the same way as Ian Brown’s book — with a detailed account of Brown’s nightly routine with his 11-year-old son Walker, in which Brown must feed the boy via IV through a permanent valve in his stomach, change his diaper with one hand while keeping Walker’s self-harming impulses under control, and then carry the 45pound boy down the stairs for a calming bottle, all in the dark so as not to wake up his wife Johanna or his daughter Hayley.
Walker was born with Cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC), and is non-verbal, physically disabled and intellectually delayed.
Brown first wrote about his family’s life with Walker as a columnist in The Globe and Mail, which eventually turned into the book The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for his Disabled Son.
Sher’s play draws from that text as well as verbatim responses from interviews with Brown, Johanna Schneller (a film critic) and older sister Hayley, telling the family’s story directly to the audience.
In director Chris Abraham’s production, Brown even places a third cup of coffee in front of an empty chair at the kitchen table he shares with Johanna, inviting the unseen audience member into their home, which he describes as “an organized nightmare.”
As you would imagine, the impact of a child like Walker on the lives of his family members is immense and sprawling, so the reflections of Brown, Schneller and Hayley are reflectively vast.
Woven throughout the text are questions the characters rhetorically pose to one another, questions they wish Walker could answer if he could answer just one, desperate for a peak into his inner life.
This is part of the intriguing tension in Brown and Schneller as parental figures — they are passionately in love with their son and don’t accept that he exists only to enrich the lives of those around him, but they also don’t hold any romantic notions about his condition, as do some who, for instance, find divine presence in their children with disabilities.
There is not only tragedy in this family’s story — it’s funny and moving and hopeful as well — but the tragedy that’s there doesn’t come from Walker’s diagnosis, it comes from watching two loving parents attempting the impossible task of plugging into their child’s brain to know how he’s doing and, by extension, how they’re doing as parents. And watching them grapple with the dark thoughts and frustrations that arise out of that impossible task.
David Storch and Liisa Repo-Martell are equally affecting as Brown and Schneller, showing off their dry wit as well as their darkest moments of despair. Some of the most exciting moments come simply from their banter during the small arguments that pop up when a couple is interviewed together (and captured verbatim).
Unfortunately Hayley’s character feels a bit forgotten, as passages from the script suggest she may be in real life. Abraham addresses this by keeping Kelly McNamee, playing Hayley and several other roles, onstage throughout the play.
Walker, of course, is absent from the play, but Abraham exercises several elements to make his presence known: A circular outline of light that floats about the stage, blown-up photos projected on the back wall and a room full of trees and plant growth that extends behind the theatre wall — mysterious, symbolic and frustratingly (appropriately) impossible for the audience to explore and discover its purpose.
Despite all of these images and powerful performances, Abraham never exactly solves why Brown’s book needed to be turned into a play, and in such a format that tends to beg for a beginning, middle and end that a nonfiction book doesn’t.
There is no ending to Sher’s play, because there is no end to Walker’s life with his parents and sister. Lives continue, and the moon will always rise night after night.