Alberta Theatre Projects wraps up its season this year with John Mighton’s Half Life. With a PhD in mathematics, Mighton may seem an unlikely playwright, but he doesn’t see it that way. In a 2006 interview for CBC he scoffed, “That’s another instance of our cultural stupidity. It shouldn’t be strange that people like me are doing both things. [The idea that the two are mutually exclusive] is simply another product of our education system. It’s an illusion.”
Education is a passion for Mighton. In addition to teaching math through the University of Toronto, he’s the founder of the Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies program (JUMP). It helps teach kids who are struggling with the subject to “discover their love of mathematics.”
In his other career as a playwright, Mighton’s success is obvious. He has won a Governor General’s Award not once, but twice. One of his plays, Possible Worlds, was made into a feature film.
Half Life is based upon Mighton’s experiences visiting his mother in a nursing home over five years. The play takes place in a care home for veterans. “On the surface, it seems like it’s going to be a dreary play, dealing with people who are, essentially, in God’s waiting room,” says director Bob White. “It’s really about the glass being half-full or half-empty. It’s a play that affirms that life doesn’t stop at 30 or 40. As long as you’re open to possibilities, anything can happen, at any age — even romance.”
In Half Life, romance blooms between two characters in the nursing home, Patrick (Grant Reddick) and Clara (Shirley Broderick), who is suffering dementia. Patrick and Clara believe they are actually rekindling an affair that first began during the war. The audience is left to wonder whether they’re making up the memory, or remembering correctly. And, as White says, “Does it really matter?”
Rounding out the cast are Kira Bradley, Christopher Hunt, Kathryn Kerbes, Valerie Planche and Kevin Rothery. “One of the arguments in the play is about how we define ourselves,” says White. “Do we define ourselves only by what we can remember? What if you can’t remember? What if you wake up every morning and there’s a blank slate?”
The play also examines what Clara’s and Patrick’s move to a care home does to their children. “This is a crisis many baby boomers are dealing with right now — that stage when the parent becomes the child. All the things you define yourself as come from your parents. [When a move to a care home happens] you start asking questions like, ‘Who am I?’ ‘What are my responsibilities?’
“There are some pretty big issues here,” he adds. “But the play is really very funny. It deals with them in a way that isn’t sentimental at all — there’s no Hallmark gloss.”
The rhythm of the script mimics the mind of someone suffering Alzheimer’s, who flashes in and out of the present moment. “The script has taken that dream-like structure,” says White. “Characters can move laterally in time and thought.”
White also points to the constant interruptions in care homes, with nurses appearing regularly to take their charges to meals, for baths and for doctor checkups. “What we think is this sedate world where people just sit around drooling, is actually a hive of activity,” he says, something Mighton has also tried to reflect in the rhythm of the script.
Half Life is a heady mix of philosophy, pathos and humour wrapped into one. White says the line that best distills the theatrical concoction for him is, “Maybe the purpose of life is not ultimately to be happy or to suffer, but to do both at the same time.”
