thirsty: Cast deftly handles masterful work .
Andrew Moodie, playing Alan, with Audrey Dwyer, left, and Carol Cece Anderson.
Photograph by: Julie Oliver , Ottawa Citizen
Andrew Moodie wasn’t smiling during the rousing applause that greeted curtain call on opening night of thirsty. How could he? He’d just played Alan in the world premiere of the play, and Alan never found the only thing he desperately wanted: “a calming, loving spot,” in the words of his mother, the very thing we “all want.”
In other words thirsty, adapted by Toronto writer Dionne Brand from her book of poetry by the same name, does not end well. Again, how could it?
It’s the story — a gripping, compassionate, alternately rich and stark story — of a disturbed Jamaican immigrant who can’t adapt to his new home of Toronto. He’s come a long way to be with his wife Julia (Audrey Dwyer) and believes he’s finally on the right track. “There&’s a light in me now, Julia,” he says early in the play, “I have a plan.”
He brings his daughter Girl (Carol Cece Anderson) and his mother Chloe (Jackie Richardson, a magisterial presence on stage) from Jamaica. He takes a job, finds religion — not a good thing in his case — tries to adapt.
Both mentally ill and with a heightened attunement to his surroundings, he has something of the poet in him: “I can hear languages in the lush smog,” he says at one point. But he doesn’t fit and, after being the victim of racial profiling multiple times, is killed by police at his home when he’s committed no crime…..