>>REVIEW
WHILE MY MOTHER LAY DREAMING
Runs until February 15
Ghost River Theatre and Shadow Theatre
(Calgary Opera Centre)
I am a child of the bust. From the day I was born, my parents struggled to recover from the phenomenal damage visited on Calgary during the National Energy Program (NEP) as my father returned home every night exhausted, moving from job to job trying to stay ahead of the continuing damage. So I do speak from experience when I marvel at Doug Curtis’s While My Mother Lay Dreaming, a chronicle of pre-bust Calgary circa 1980. His ability to render Calgary’s own eerily familiar past is simply exceptional.
In one fell swoop, Doug Curtis has captured the last 25 years of Calgary’s experience, melding the euphoria of the boom and the malaise of the bust into a single uncanny portrait. Adolescent wandering in the teenage wasteland, the weighty concerns of adults forced to contend with the seeming futility of their dreams and the realities of raising a family – both are realized with quiet emotional intensity by Curtis’s text, the fine work of Ghost River Theatre’s uniformly excellent cast and a remarkable staging in the cavernous downtown rehearsal space of the Calgary Opera.
Underlain by a classic rock score compiled by sound designer Chris Wynters, While My Mother Lay Dreaming begins by explicitly drawing parallels to the current boom and familiar Calgary features, like the election of a frightening neo-con president and the bizarre seasonal quirks of chinooks. Confronted by the shock of Calgary’s increasing population and the attendant growing pains of a city swamped by affluence, Bill (Richard Meen) quits his job at Phil’s Pancake House and spends his time smoking weed and listening to Rush with his misanthropic friends, Darcy (Rick Duthie) and Harold (Dan Perry). Cursed, respectively, by cystic acne, an abrasive personality and an eye ruined by an explosive Molson beer bottle, the three while their time pining for a blond pinball prodigy, Jennifer (Lynley Hall) and trying to sell enough dope to buy tickets to the upcoming Rush concert. While Bill tries to reconcile his teenaged life, his mother Peggy (Karen Johnson-Diamond) mourns after the suicide of her best friend, finding no support from her workaholic husband Vic (Kevin Rothery).
With family dynamics playing against the separate and secretive world of teenaged life, While My Mother Lay Dreaming might otherwise seem like a relatively straightforward coming-of-age story were it not for its artful dashes of local colour and unforgettable images. In one particularly agonizing episode, a visit to McLeod Trail’s Smuggler’s Inn plays the disintegrating situation of Bill’s family against the affected, cheery demeanor of their waitress, Jennifer, with Vic falling asleep at the table and Peggy trying to convince Jennifer that Bill’s acne shouldn’t make him any less attractive. In this moment, Meen as the disenchanted son, Johnson-Diamond as the well-meaning but harping mother, and Rothery as the world-weary father, Curtis captures a moment of hilarious and all-too-true adolescent awkwardness.
Even with seven cast members, it would be a shame to single out only a few. From Meen’s unifying performance to the quiet, almost bashful likeability of Perry’s Harold, not one of the production’s cast fails to live up to the considerable demands on their ability to engage Calgary audiences on their own terms. Even as the relatively minor Duane, a drug dealer with a narcissistic hair obsession, Frank Zotter is able to pull more than a few laughs from a ridiculously flowing blond wig, matching the mania of Duthie’s equally hair-obsessed Darcy.
Complementing its talented cast, the production’s staging makes much of the expansive space available to it, filling the Opera Centre with Carla Ritchie’s set and lighting design. Across the simple wooden platforms and skeletal Volkswagen Beetle lying at stage right, director John Hudson is able to imbue a paradoxical dynamism to a play based on lives largely concerned with circling the same territory, trying to find meaning in their own home. Costumer Heather Moore may alone be responsible for a hefty chunk of the play’s credibility, furnishing a variety of flowing wigs whose feathered locks sell its ’80s setting with nearly the same conviction of the actors wearing them.
Running well over two hours, the play’s considerable length leads to inevitable, but thankfully brief instances where its deceptively low-key energy wanes. And while its final act sees an almost mechanical succession of efficient resolutions to every subplot, the accumulated weight of the play’s emotional throughline is more than strong enough to overcome any shortcomings.
As refreshing as a well-timed Chinook, Doug Curtis’s While My Mother Lay Dreaming is a rare offering whose locality is uniquely Calgary, providing a timely reminder of our own past. For those of us born in the shadow of the bust, the threat of that same disaster is never far behind. In Ghost River’s latest unique offering, the reminder is delivered with power, subtlety and, of course, giant hair. |
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