Ottawa Fringe 2012: Mabel’s Last performance. A performance of Substance by Kathi Langston

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.