Powerful drama onstage and behind the scenes
Play about right- to- die debate is inspiring and heartbreaking
The drama behind the scenes of the Vancouver staging of Whose Life is it Anyway? at the Cultch is inspiring and heartbreaking.
After the curtain call on opening night Wednesday, Realwheels Productions founding artistic director James Sanders wheeled onstage to thank supporters and the audience and talk a bit about his 25- year quest to produce the internationally acclaimed play about the right to die, a story he fell in love with in 1981 when he saw Richard Dreyfuss in the film version.
A quadriplegic — just like the play’s main character — Sanders delayed his dream until he was old enough for the role, and convinced playwright Brian Clark to allow changes that would update his Olivier Award- winning script to make it more topical and relocate the play to Canada.
Clark was so intrigued by the prospect of his work being produced by a company with a mandate to “deepen the audience’s understanding of the disability experience” that the writer waived his royalties.
Then, just as everything was in motion, Sanders became too ill to perform and his friend Bob Frazer took over the role.
The drama onstage isn’t as powerful as the story behind the staging, but this is a production guaranteed to get audiences talking and arguing.
Most of the action takes place in a sterile hospital room and Frazer is on the stage, in bed and immobile from the neck down, from the moment the doors open until he finally leaves the bed for his curtain call.
Frazer owns the stage as Ken Harrison — a sculptor with a severed spinal cord, a sharp mind and sharper wit. His joking acceptance of his condition puts both the hospital staff and the audience at ease. Laughs come early and easily.
But accepting his condition doesn’t mean he’s prepared to live with it and he gets to argue against the treatments keeping him alive with assorted representatives from the medical system — which he calls “the optimism industry” — the legal system and a social worker.
His arguments in favour of ending his life are cogent and convincing but they’re also never really challenged in a compelling way. His opponents are straw men, designed to have the stuffing knocked out of them by Ken’s clever rhetoric. They’re well- meaning straw- men — which helps — and most are conflicted or confused, but they tend to argue like members of a university debating club. The characters are all hyper- articulate and formal to the point where not only doesn’t anyone but the funky funny orderly ( Marc Senior) slip into slang, I’m not sure any of them ever even use contractions.
To stack the deck in favour of suicide, anyone who ever loved Ken or even knew him before his accident only exist offstage.
So there’s never anyone who gets to present a truly passionate, visceral argument based on his actual life as opposed to his case file.
There are some powerful performances besides Frazer’s — such as Patti Allan’s wonderfully deep no- nonsense nun- nurse, and Jennifer Lines as a doctor questioning the meaning of “do no harm” — but on opening night the jargon and formality tripped up a few cast members, though some of the slips added a bit of humanity.
The script has a cinematic feel to it and director John Cooper’s smooth staging and Pam Johnson’s cleverly sterile set — which pops open to reveal the lead doctor’s office a. k. a. “Mount Olympus” — keep the story flowing at an entertaining clip.
The point of the production is crystal clear: People should have the right to make their own decisions about how they live or die.
But that’s an issue Canadians are still going to jail over, and while the script still feels a bit dated despite references to the Internet, Christopher Reeve and Canada’s Mental Health Act, the story at the heart of it certainly isn’t.
Since the issues at the heart of the play aren’t likely to be resolved anytime soon, maybe one day Realwheels will get the chance to remount this with Sanders in the lead. The March 13 and 18 shows will feature question- and- answer sessions with the show’s creative team, alongside representatives from the Farewell Foundation for the Right to Die and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B. C.