Monthly Archives: January 2025

Bea, by Mick Gordon

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Kristen Unruh, in Shadow Theatre’s Bea. Photo Marc Chalifoux. Costume Design Deanna Finnman, Set Design Ximena Pinilla. Lighting Design Whittyn Jason.

Publicity for the Shadow Theatre show Bea had enough warnings that I knew it would be about a young person who wants to die with dignity or on her own terms. That topic’s not for everyone, so I was glad to know that much. Bea was written by Northern Irish playwright Mick Gordon, in 2010. This production was directed by Amanda Goldberg, a recent Artistic Director Fellowship holder at Shadow Theatre.

I was intrigued to see recent BFA grads Michael Watt and Kristen Unruh on a professional stage, along with Kate Newby (she played Dorothy Parker in Fresh Hell at Shadow a couple of years ago).

The other thing I knew about the production beforehand was that the set was partially crowdsourced. I saw an appeal from set designer Ximena Pinilla for old costume jewellery, so I dropped off a bag of shiny things. The focus of the set was a bed. On one side were the trappings of medical care, with one of those wheeled over-bed tables that I’ve seen in hospitals and nursing homes. On the other side of the bed were a young woman’s personal belongings and a rack of fabulous outfits. And above — suspended above and behind the bed were big grid displays of earrings. Like a Claire’s to excess.

Kristen Unruh’s character Bea enters, dancing, singing, sprawling on the floor to read a magazine. She might be sixteen, or a decade older, but she’s clearly lively and joyful and this is her space. Then a young man in rumpled shirt and too-short tie enters nervously, holding a satchel and his CV. Ray (Michael Watt) is her new personal care assistant – or he’s interviewing for the job, it’s not quite clear. And as the other character enters, Bea gradually melts onto the bed. She’s still animated, mouthy, full of poetry and wordplay, sitting cross-legged on her bed and enjoying putting the awkward young man on the spot. They connect. And in this first meeting, she asks him to take dictation, as she speaks a letter to her mother, saying that she wishes to die and wants her mother to help her.

Bea’s mother Catherine (Kate Newby) then arrives to give Ray a sterner scrutiny and tell him the rules of employment – from “No prurience” (which he admits he needs to look up later) and “Kindness” to “No secrets” – awkward because he is already carrying one secret, the dictated letter. As Catherine, a lawyer in severe black suit, grills Ray, I become aware that Bea has collapsed immobile onto her stack of pillows. Is this how her body really is, in the time of the play? We see this contrast playing out over and over throughout the narrative – Bea dancing and active alone and sometimes with Ray, but also needing to be fed and bathed, speaking with difficulty, twitching in pain.

I found the character Bea likeable and funny and frank. I revised my age-estimate upwards when she tells an uncomfortable Ray that she hasn’t had sex for nine years and misses it. Ray is clearly on her side. He jumps into her stories and daydreams, reluctantly revealing bits of his own context.

One of the most enjoyable bits of the play, for me, is the part where Ray brings in a script for A Streetcar Named Desire, introduces the classic, and reads it / acts it out with Bea. Both Unruh and Watt are up to the physical, emotional, and vocal challenges of these roles, and I look forward to seeing each of them again.

Every time Ray is taking frivolous liberties, though, Catherine walks in and is horrified. The audience gets to expect this. It’s still funny in a rule-of-three way, but maybe it’s not all needed. I do love Kate Newby’s still body language and flat affect with horror underneath.

In a few Catherine-Bea scenes, we learn that the two of them have been on their own for several years. They love and respect each other – and Catherine does still see Bea as the playful clever girl of the solo scenes and memories, not just the patient.

So the stakes are very high, when Catherine learns of Bea’s “demand”. And in fact even higher, because they live in a place and time without MAiD (medical assistance in dying), where assisted suicide would be prosecuted as murder. So in one shocking change-of-mood scene without Bea present, Ray explains to Catherine how it should be done, if/when she chooses. Details about how to ensure that a first attempt is successful, but also details about how to present it afterwards to the police and legal authorities. Blunt, explicit, disturbing. How does young Ray know all of this and speak with authority? I can make up a backstory but it’s not in the text.

The actors were great, but the script left me with some questions. I wondered if it would have been stronger if shorter, or if the repeating cycle of visits from Ray, revelations and intimacies, judgement by Catherine, re-connection between Catherine and Bea … was all necessary to make us care about Bea and her people and to see the necessity and the anguish of her death. The illness is not named, and that was probably a better choice than giving us a specific diagnosis that we might know about. We learn that she won’t get better, but it wasn’t clear to me whether she was getting worse and whether it would eventually kill her. There were a few Canadian references sprinkled in – the story about Ray’s friend trying to hold up a CIBC and accidentally going to Kentucky Fried Chicken was not the only one, there was a reference that made me think Toronto – but there was other wording that felt natively British (Ray’s friend in that story having a nickname like Bazza or Jazzer, for example) so that distracted me.

I have not been intimately involved with a MAiD or assisted suicide situation myself, although pre-MAID I have helped to make a decision to remove life support. The practical awfulness of implementing Bea’s request, as shown on stage, definitely confirmed my belief that there are some situations in which offering MAiD would be more humane. But, as the director’s program note quotes disability dramaturg Miranda Allen, “When MAiD is available and supports for living are not, MAiD becomes problematic.” That’s not relevant to the characters on stage – for them, assisted suicide is illegal, and it seems that Catherine is financially able to support Bea in comfort and employ Ray as caregiver. But it’s an important thought for any audience member who might go away smugly distancing ourselves from the dilemma of the play. Death and life are even more messy and complicated, in real life and real death.

Bea is playing at the Varscona Theatre on 83 Avenue until February 9th. Lots to think about, and more fun than I expected. Tickets available here.

The world of Angry Alan

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Cody Porter in Northern Light Theatre’s Angry Alan. Photo by Brianne Jang of BB Collective Photography.

The posters for Angry Alan, the new production at Northern Light Theatre, portray an angry man. The character on the poster seems to be mid-rant, gesturing towards an audience with his laptop open and his mouth open. So I expected that. But when the actor in this solo show, Cody Porter, first appears frozen at the dark vom entrance to the theatre, looking at the audience apprehensively, and then walks cautiously towards the stage as an unfamiliar space, I didn’t see anger. Even as he starts to tell his story, his distracted demeanour and circumlocutions convey that he’s telling a story he doesn’t want to tell.

Roger, currently a junior manager at a Safeway store, starts with a self-deprecating anecdote he knows his listeners will relate to – checking his phone before going for a run and getting sucked into hours of clicking links and watching videos. In one of those links, he finds a video “about history”, by a man whose seductive analysis of society reassures him that life has not been fair to him, because he is a man.

I was drawn in despite myself, to Trevor Schmidt’s production of Penelope Skinner’s 2018 script Angry Alan. I expected to be frightened for myself and others, and enraged, and frustrated. But this naive guy talking about how the messages he found online were new to him and how they gave him comfort – I kind of liked him.

Roger tells us he keeps reading, and keeps watching, and signs up for mailing lists. He notices things in his own life that fit the patterns he’s told about by “Angry Alan.” At work, he’s expected to suppress his own feelings and let customers (female customers, it seems), not only express their feelings but manipulate the employees with them. This fits what Alan’s group is saying – that society expects men to pay attention to women’s feelings but not their own. Once he’s watching for this pattern, he observes that a male bagger gets fired because a female customer cries about broken eggs. Maybe he could intervene, and protest?

He tells us he has a son he doesn’t talk to often, because of divorce and custody arrangements. And, parroting the arguments of Angry Alan and other men’s-rights activists, he extrapolates that this shows a system biased in favour of women and mothers, and that feminism has “gone too far”.

In both cases, I was gripped by the apparently-logical steps from the character’s real problems to erroneous and dangerous conclusions. I found myself wanting to make noises and gestures of disgust, and I was disturbed that some in the opening-night audience were laughing. It was outrageous, but it was not ridiculous. Maybe it was a laughter of shock and discomfort.

By the time Roger is ready to talk about his discoveries to anyone else in his life, he has gone far enough into the us-vs-them world that nobody can talk him back. Roger uses the metaphor of having a Red Pill Moment, calling back to the film The Matrix where choosing to take a red pill means choosing uncomfortable revelation. He sees any challenges or disagreements as more evidence that men are oppressed. He texts his son a link to Angry Alan, sure that it will help them connect. His son responds LOL, which Roger misinterprets.

The production makes good use of projections (Amelia Chan) in showing some of the online interactions that influence Roger’s choices. We see text-message screens, emails, some real video clips of people in that culture, and the website where Roger decides to sign up for a Men’s Rights conference and then is presented with a request to donate to the cause, slickly presenting it as an opportunity to be an “insider” in the movement.

Partway through, I realized that nobody was laughing any more. The narrative was incredibly unsettling, and the portrayal was effective. Roger is so full of hope, believing that being part of this movement will bring him happiness – and the audience can see so much wrong that he’s not noticing.

After the play, over delicious snacks of the opening night reception, we talked about how people who do not feel included and understood are vulnerable to recruitment by gangs, by cults, by populist political movements, by radical extremists of all kinds. And how the groups and their recruiters use those tools intentionally. I suddenly remembered the offstage “mob” behind the doxxing and harassment of Kristin Johnston’s character in Workshop West’s production of Mob last year. It was easy to see how that lonely and struggling young man, portrayed by Graham Mothersill, would have grasped at the chance to impress other men by doing something mean.

Cody Porter, as Roger, is enraged by video clips. Photo by Brianne Jang of BB Collective Photography.

This production is a nuanced and disturbing exploration of some societal trends that I mostly try not to think about. I guess I’d like things to be black-and-white too, but they are not. Trevor Schmidt, Cody Porter, and the rest of the team have done some brilliant work to make me understand this character, and other men like him. And maybe I need to understand them, in order to help build a world that is better for everyone. I’m glad I saw it and I’m not done thinking about it.

Angry Alan is playing at the Studio in the Fringe Arts Barns, until January 23rd. Tickets are available here.