Half Life: OLT Faces a Challenge with Half Life
John Mighton’s award-winning play, Half Life, is a delicate piece — a meditation on memory in all its potency and uncertainty and unreliability. We never really know whether Patrick and Clara, these two aging residents in a nursing home, actually knew and loved each other in an earlier time. They themselves may think so, even though their grasp of the past seems problematic. But Mighton’s script suggests that this doesn’t really matter. What counts is that a relationship is now happening; it may seem precarious because Clara’s mind in particular is clouded; it may — as Patrick especially insists — be a renewal of an old love, or it may well be a late-flowering attraction between two people who have in fact never met before.
Director Daniel Brooks, who staged the premiere production of Half Life at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, suggested in 2005 that the play is as much about forgetting as it is about memory — that it is driven by the thesis that we are ultimately defined as much by what we forget as what we can remember, and that time as we normally understand it can be capricious, even irrelevant when it comes to understanding our identity.
Yet, for all his metaphysical preoccupations, Mighton also recognizes that personal relationships are perhaps the most important things he can write about. Director Jim McNabb understands this, and at its best his production of Half Life for Ottawa Little Theatre is infused with a quiet, reflective glow of humanity.
Dan Baran captures the anger and volatility of Patrick, once a brilliant wartime code breaker, now a troublesome octogenarian raging against the night. But there’s also vulnerability here and a capacity for feeling. His growing attachment to Clara is not sentimentalized; rather, the rough honesty of his emotional commitment strikes a more truthful and affecting chord
Marjory Bryce, facing a more challenging assignment as Clara, frequently speaks haltingly, as though it’s an effort for this woman to conjure up a connection to what is happening around her. That she largely exists in a world of shadows, a world in which time is inconsequential, is evident; that she can still connect with someone like Patrick is also evident. That her son, Donald, an academic and a psychologist, is incapable of empathizing with her needs is palpable. So when she’s challenged by him to show that she remembers his phone number, you want to cheer when she responds correctly.
Bryan Morris, baffled and caring, catches the conflicted nature of Donald. Linda Webster is outstanding as Anna, the loving but worried daughter of Patrick. She’s aware that he is capable of uncontrollable behaviour, but as an imaginative artist she’s more open than Donald to the possibilities of a meaningful relationship between these two aging parents.
Barry Daley’s portrayal of the nursing home chaplain is problematic. The character is irritating enough as written, but Daley’s performance makes him even more so, turning him into a posturing spiritual ninny who goes beyond caricature.
Daley’s performance offers the most extreme evidence of a production which doesn’t always mesh. Mighton is offering vignettes here — some mere snapshots, some neatly rounded dramatic scenes, some which prove to be interrupted moments in time. The kaleidoscope keeps shifting, yet the production lacks the necessary fluidity. Indeed, given that Half Life lasts only 90 minutes, it’s surprising how sluggish it sometimes seems.
The minimalism of Paul Gardner’s set design works to a degree — but the elevated panels with their shifting projections fail to convey whatever symbolic statements were intended. Barry Sims’s lighting is effective.
In brief, an honourable production of a tricky play — but still one in which the reach sometimes exceeds the grasp.
Half Life by John Mighton
Ottawa Little Theatre to March 8, 2014
Director: Jim McNabb
Set: Paul Gardner
Lighting: Barry Sims
Sound: Bradford MacKinlay
Costumes: Peggy Laverty
Cast:
Donald……………………………..Bryan Morris
Anna……………………………….Linda Webster
Tammy…………………………….Susan Monaghan
Stanley/Young Patrick…………….Thom Nyhuus
Rev. Hill/Second Scientist…………Barry Daley
Agnes………………………………Cheryl Jackson
Clara……………………………….Marjory Bryce
Patrick……………………………..Dan Baran
First Scientist/Diana/Young Clara.. Sasha Gilchrist