Val Planche, who plays Leda, has struggled with her own attempts to connect with her mother.

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Communion presented by Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre
Tuesday, April 27 - Saturday, May 15

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Just two weeks before Christmas last year, Sgt. Dave Jones was diagnosed with colon cancer. The 49-year-old Canadian military veteran underwent surgery to remove 50 cm of his intestine. Due to his subsequent chemo treatment, he now has to wear gloves whenever he takes a can of pop from the fridge, as the cold burns his hands.

“He’s a strong, proud man. He doesn’t like to talk about it, doesn’t like to think about it,” says Ronda Borneman, Alberta Theatre Projects’ head of wardrobe and, along with her fiancé , one of Jones’s best friends.

“When we go out to visit Dave, I don’t want to feel sorry for him. I don’t want to cry around him,” Borneman explains. Instead, Borneman is participating in the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer, a fundraiser that benefits the Alberta Cancer Foundation.

While she has cycled all her life, Borneman says she has never entered a race of any sort. “I’ve always wanted to do something like this, but you never think you have the time,” she says. However, witnessing Jones’s illness, and after seeing an interview on television promoting the Ride, she decided this was the year to take the proverbial leap and sign up.

Borneman will be biking in Jones’s name, as well as that of her mother’s, who overcame ovarian cancer 20 years ago.

To participate in the two-day, 200-kilometre ride through the Rockies in late June, Borneman has to raise $2,500. And that’s where ATP’s final show of the season, Daniel MacIvor’s Communion, comes in.

The show, which premièred at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre earlier this year, deals with former alcoholic Leda (Valerie Planche), who is dying of an unnamed cancer, and her struggle to tell her somewhat-estranged, 20-year-old daughter, Ann (Ava Jane Markus).

For the production’s opening night, ATP staff has decided to add a relevant touch to the production by having Borneman ride a stationary bike in the Martha Cohen Theatre lobby.

Audience members are invited to donate whatever money they can spare to assist Borneman in raising her $2,500 to participate in The Ride to Conquer Cancer. It’s an exercise in creating personal connection that has definite relevance to the play itself.

“[Ann and Leda] cannot connect, they cannot look each other in the eye and say they love each other,” explains Markus. It’s a symptom of what she sees as a general “epidemic” of disconnection in our society.

According to Planche, Leda’s hesitation to disclose her illness comes from her fear of rejection. “I don’t think she feels she has been the best mother,” she says. “She fears that connection will be rebuked, and that she will ultimately be alone. That’s the biggest fear, I think, when we face our own mortality.”

In exploring her role, Planche drew on her own life to engage with Leda. Several years ago, she nursed her own mother while she was dying of lung cancer.

“I do feel I’m walking in my mother’s footsteps, because I know it was very difficult for my mother to express how much she loved me,” she says.

While Planche says that her relationship with her mother was “great,” an educational gap between them often made things difficult. Her mother, a Cree-French woman from Saskatchewan who raised several children, had only finished Grade 8, compared to Planche’s university education.

“In those final days, there was much discussion around that,” says Planche, “and some real honest sharing and looking at each other and how we both dismissed each other because of our own fears of rejection.” As she speaks, her eyes mist over.

For Markus, the character of Ann is no less conflicted. A member of a far-right Christian movement her mother disapproves of, she struggles to find a place to belong.

“She doesn’t feel like she’s ever had a family,” says Markus. “She’s on the hunt and leaps into whatever community will give her a sense of belonging.”

A play about finding connection with an opening framed by Borneman’s attempt to draw on ATP’s community to support a friend, Communion provides some sense of that belonging. And with Borneman’s fundraising directed toward conquering cancer, there’s an additional message: “[It will] help create survivors,” she says.