>>REVIEW
THE ALAN PARKINSON’S PROJECT
Ghost River Theatre
Runs until June 24
Easterbrook Theatre
Community Arts Centre
(Currie Barracks)
The Alan Parkinson’s Project, though created with Ghost River Theatre’s ensemble cast, is principally the creation of its artistic director, Doug Curtis. Himself diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s, the play is largely an exploration of his own experience with the disease.
Where Curtis is a playwright and director who has placed his personal experiences onstage, Alan Parkinson (Doug McKeag), the play’s titular protagonist, is a film director who eventually compiles his experiences with the disease on film. And yet, despite the fact that Curtis has laid such explicit parallels between his own very real story and his fictional play, The Alan Parkinson’s Project is dragged down repeatedly by tropes so well worn that, although delivered earnestly, are too familiar to carry a unique, personal story.
Offering occasional nods to the surrealism of the disease, in fitful dreams and allegorical songs, the play is primarily a by-the-numbers redemption story whose arc begins in diagnosis and ends in a firm resolve to keep fighting. Along the way, Curtis has littered educational seminars with characters like the lurking, villainous "Parky," whose presence undermines the immediate, obvious suffering of Alan Parkinson. Being told that the disease is a thief by a menacing caricature simply doesn’t carry the weight that McKeag’s shaking hand does.
Certainly, the play is not intended only as a drama – as a musical, it wears its sensibilities on its sleeves. It would be hard not to laugh as Danny Dorosh bounces onstage as the flamboyant "El Dopa" (a play on "L-Dopa," a Parkinson’s drug that reduces the disease’s tremors). Despite that, filled with unremarkable songs like "Did You Hear About Alan," Cameron Falkenhagen’s score is not even enjoyable as indulgence, pounded out by the tinny sound of the production’s keyboard. Even when a sensitive song finds its way in, as Onalea Gilbertson cradles a broken McKeag and assures him "it’s OK," the play can’t seem to help itself from dropping another, seemingly redundant song of consolation in the form of Parkinson’s dog, played endearingly (if unnecessarily) by Adrienne Smook.
The production’s cast does its best with the material at hand, playing multiple roles beneath set designer Terry Gunvohrdal’s illuminated plastic substantia nigra (the location of the brain stem most affected by Parkinson’s). Musical theatre mainstays McKeag and Glibertson lend their considerable vocal talents to the play’s otherwise lacklustre score, even if McKeag’s indelicacy may remove the building anger that precedes his character’s "firing" of his neurologist. And despite the overwrought character of Parky, U of C professor Brian Smith is unmistakably an energizing stage presence.
Only when Curtis allows his own story to bleed through does the truth of his experience resonate with powerful effect. In one scene, McKeag claws underneath a disquietingly skin-like sheet, finally screaming in terror as he wakes up from a fitful, irrational dream. "This is what the bad ones are like," he says to his assistant (Smook), a line Curtis himself wrote in the throes of a particularly violent seizure. It is at moments like these, when the play removes its didactic tone and tried-and-true musical structure, that we see a personal story rather than a lesson wrapped in theatre. Unfortunately, in the play’s final acts, where this humanity is most needed, these moments are few and far between.
There is no doubt that, in placing his own experience on the stage, personal humiliations and all, Curtis has taken a great risk. For that, and for bringing the issues of his disease to the stage, he deserves to be congratulated. But, without the personal truth that truly makes his story compelling, buried as it is beneath layers of familiar themes and heavy-handed textbook education, his story has not been given the chance to be heard.
In an interview last week, Curtis suggested that his story was not over. Hopefully, it will still have a chance to be told. |
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