I’ve often railed against the inevitable standing ovations given these days to most productions, however indifferent. For once the one following THE SECRET MASK by Rick Chafe at GCTC was well deserved and I joined in enthusiastically. This delicate play is a rare combination of heartbreak and humor and the first rate cast and production do it justice.

THE SECRET MASK tells the story of forty-year-old George who gets a call out of the blue to come help his father Ernie, who left the family when George was only two. Ernie is recovering from a stroke as well as aphasia, substituting odd words in his struggle to be understood with often laugh-out-loud results. As he says, “I fell down and when I got up I was an idiot.” In the process of getting to know each other they both begin to deal with the pieces that remain, not the ones missing.

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Reviewed Thurs., Sept. 13. Posted September 17.

Photo: Wayne Cuddington for the Citizen. Paul Rainville and Kate Hurman.

OTTAWA — It’s not exactly breaking news to say that communication often has little to do with words. But playwright Rick Chafe and the Great Canadian Theatre Company say it so eloquently in this alternately hilarious and touching show which opens the new GCTS season that their message bears almost endless repeating.
Chafe’s story, which he based partly on his experience with his own father, is richly textured emotionally but has a simple enough storyline.
An aging man named Ernie (Paul Rainville) has had a stroke, leaving him with yawning holes in his memory along with aphasia, a speech impairment. He can converse readily but balls up some words, calling his apartment a “square” thing for example.

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Photo: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa, Citizen. Paul Rainville, Michael Mancini, Kate Hurman.

At one point in the play someone asks: “Is it possible for a stroke to change a whole personality?” The question seems naïve for anyone who has dealt with the situation first hand! For playwright Rick Chafe however, the answer becomes the premise which propels his play as the author sets up his encounter between Ernie (Paul Rainville) the absent father who has suffered a seriously debilitating stroke, and his angry, stressed out son George (Michael Mancini) who hasn’t seen his father for 40 years and who needs some answers . George only comes into Ernie’s life due to the insistence of the speech therapist Mae (Kate Hurman), a warm optimistic and ever smiling person who works with Ernie, who keeps telling him how wonderful he is and how much progress he is making. She is the intermediary who opens the dialogue, who keeps the communication between the two men flowing, who brings warmth and generosity into Ernie’s life, of which we know almost nothing. At least at the beginning. The play sets about to fill in the gaps.

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Richard Gélinas (Jake), Zach Counsil (Charlie). Photo: Andrew Alexander

The award winning Stones in His Pockets by Belfast-based playwright Sarah Marie Jones is set in County Kerry looking over Blasket Sound towards the beautiful Blasket Islands. Artist Merike Olo, has painted them on a flowing canvass, stretched out on a long mural along the back of an otherwise near empty stage. The romantic attraction of those islands is what brings in the Hollywood film crew. Local Irish “extras” with real accents, have been contracted as purely decorative elements, to give another “romantic” touch of authenticity to a passionate irish love story which rings false because all the principals are Americans, trying to master the local speak.

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For the  Ottawa Citizen. Photo: Andrew Alexander  “I am Sean Harkin and I am someone!” declares a young and seriously troubled character at an early point in Marie Jones’ tragicomedy Stones in His Pockets.

It’s a brave declaration of selfhood by this youth who, in that moment, speaks for so many of his fellow countrymen in contemporary Ireland. And, like other attempts by those countrymen to drag themselves from the mire of economic dislocation, cultural appropriation and defeatism, Harkin’s proclamation is doomed to be little more than words.

All of which makes Jones’ play, shrewd and frequently very funny, ultimately a dark meditation on her native Ireland. That juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy demands subtle intensity and focus in a production if the play is to strike its intended sparks. That doesn’t always happen in this show, which opens The Gladstone’s new season.

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