Here we have a performance of substance from Kathi Langston as an aging actress coping with the encroachment of Alzheimer’s and life in a nursing home. Megan Piercey Monafu’s script seems less a cohesive play than a series of snapshots — but perhaps, given the dramatic situation, this was the right route to pursue.

We see all that happens through Mabel’s clouded prism as she moves in and out of reality and struggles with her encroaching illness and the contained existence it has now imposed on her. Langston’s nuanced, unsentimentalized performance shows how important even the minutiae of that existence have become to someone like Mabel — the feel and texture of an old theatrical costume that she once wore in her days as an actress, the simple act of writing herself another note in order to bolster an increasingly unreliable memory, the fierceness with which she asserts what independence she has left against the busybody nursing home employee who has entered her room unbidden.

The staging of the play doesn’t always work. When Mabel places a heavy desk on her bed and then stands on top of it, maybe the intent was to depict an old woman committing a delusional act, but that seems questionable; the moment seems more like an unnecessary dramatic contrivance. And anyway, at this point we don’t need such a silly bit of business to convince us of the resilience of the human spirit. Kathi Langston has been doing that for us for nearly ah hour.

This is as gripping a piece of theatre as you are likely to encounter anywhere in Ottawa this year. It’s a solo piece, but there are times when you feel that the bare stage is occupied by the many ghosts who haunt its central character, a young woman tormented by the knowledge that she has sent the wrong person to prison for a brutal assault against her.

Katherine Glover’s play — provocative, unsettling and always dramatically arresting — raises important questions about the machinery of justice in our society and how it had grievously malfunctioned.  The theme is a familiar one these days, but here it’s more than just a retread. Glover, a Minnesota journalist, was inspired by actual events in writing a play which owes much of its impact to the unexpected but always dramatically valid turns it takes. Glover’s own performance as the victim — rueful, troubled, unsparing in her own self-knowledge — glistens with psychological truth.

A winner in every way.

Dead Wrong.

Written and performed by Katherine Glover

Directed by Nancy Donoval

At the Academic Hall

There’s a famous scene in the first act of Cyrano de Bergerac when the play’s long-nosed hero delivers an elegantly witty speech on the virtues of his proboscis. He then subjects an insolent young cadet to a duel in which he punctuates the humiliating cuts and thrusts of his blade with the composition of a ballad.

It should be a defining moment in Rostand’s play — a moment which seduces the audience into embracing not only its spirit of unfettered romanticism and unabashed theatrical excess, but also the tragic-comic figure of the poet Cyrano himself.

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Reviewed by Jamie Portman
Kenneth Lonergan’s 1996 play about disaffected, self-absorbed and rudderless young people created quite a stir 15 years ago and ushered its 34-year-old author into a major career. Today, it seems less of a landmark and somewhat redolent of warmed-over Mamet. Yet, it continues to strike a chord within the youth culture, and over the years its pungent naturalistic dialogue, garnished with profane humor and often merciless character analysis, has attracted such outstanding young actors as Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo.

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