Getting to Room Temperature and Mouthpiece at the undercurrents festival
Getting to Room Temperature
A Room Temperature Collective Production (Ottawa)
What do we do now? That’s playwright Arthur Milner’s thorny question in Getting to Room Temperature which asks whether we have the right to die – and explores the roles and responsibilities of others in that death – when we’re not terminally ill but, being old, have simply reached the end of life as we choose to live it.
The provocative one-man show, told in storytelling/lecture fashion, is a world premiere. Directed by Milner, it features Robert Bockstael telling what is, essentially, the playwright’s own story.
Some time ago, Milner’s 93-year-old mother Rose, who was not gravely ill, asked her doctor to help her die. He refused. That got Milner exploring the murky politics of old age and dying in contemporary society. He asks us to consider a lot. Some of it, including the financial burden on families and societies of a growing number of lingering elders kept alive by incessant medical intervention, targets our sense of right and wrong.
Milner, through the accessible voice of Bockstael, wraps his questions in warm anecdotes about his family, sprinkles the show with humour, and lovingly depicts his vital, opinionated mother whose life is slowly limited by aging even as her son’s inquiry into dying expands to take in ever-larger ethical and personal territory.
The inquiry, says Milner/Bockstael, is “a conversation I’m having with myself. I’m trying to figure it out.” …