The Secret Mask: An Alternately Hilarious and Touching Show.
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.
When we meet him, he’s hunched in a hospital wheelchair, his eyes baffled by the challenges his nurturing but iron-willed speech therapist Mae (Kate Hurman, in one of several roles) lobs his way as she helps him rebuild his facilities.
Into this fraught situation steps George (Michael Mancini), Ernie’s son. The two men have been estranged since Ernie walked out on his family 40 years previously. Ernie remembers nothing of this. George, who has serious issues with his own family, carries around the memory of his father’s abandonment like the laptop computer he lugs everywhere.
George wants nothing to do with this mess – or by extension the hornet’s nest of family history it promises to prod – but Mae won’t let him off the hook. “Without you, your father becomes a file in the public trustee’s office,” she tells him. If you’ve ever had a disabled parent, that line will skewer your heart.
The balance of the story finds Ernie and George slowly rebuilding the past they never had and coming to accept themselves and each other as they are. It’s played out on Karyn McCallum’s minimal set, under Jock Munro’s lighting and with Marc Desormeaux’s soundscape as backing; together, those design features underscore the play’s shifting emotional ground of confrontation, isolation and intimacy.
That rebuilding of the past includes George’s discovery that his father, often irascible but a born charmer when women show up, wrote a novel.
Ernie learns his son, who has a deep, untouched well of forgiveness and understanding beneath his initially unlikeable surface, also has a son, and that the two have their own wall between them.
There are times when this Ernie/George/fathers and sons parallel feels forced, and one wishes Chafe had deleted them or director Ann Hodges had found a way of soft-selling them.
Still, with women like Mae the therapist, a baby-voiced server and other women played by Hurman popping in and out of their slowly dovetailing lives, the men’s discovery of each other and themselves rings true.
Like the audience, the men make those discoveries in part by finding the keys to Ernie’s vocabulary. That vocabulary, it turns out, is no more or less mysterious than the private ones we all use and which variously confuse, amuse, and either distance others from us or draw others past our masks and into our lives.
Chafe peppers his story, which could have turned maudlin in lesser hands than those of this trio of actors, with laugh-out-loud moments. A stroke is no laughing matter, but its results can sometimes be if you’re Ernie and George.
Rainville, Mancini and Hurman also bring to fruition Chafe’s shifting and compassionate perspective that lets us see the intense, contained world of Ernie and George through the eyes of each of the characters. Like the gradual piecing together of Ernie’s scattered mind, the world turns out to be a bigger place than anything mere illness can constrict……..
Continues until Sept 30. 613-236-5196, gctc.ca.
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