Getting to Normal
Photo by Marianne Sawchuk
World on Fire Theatre Collective/Getting to Normal, written and directed by George Walker, Red Sandcastle Theatre, closes Sept. 18.
The World on Fire Theatre Collective is a company devoted to the works of George F. Walker, one of Canada’s preeminent and most prolific playwrights. This time, they have brought us a new play called Getting to Normal, which has to be one of the most ironic titles Walker has come up with, because the situations in this play are anything but normal. Once again, Walker presents the mean streets of Toronto and the marginalized people who have always populated his plays.
The structure is an interesting one because there are four actors, but only three characters. Let me explain. We have the older Michael (David Cairns) in conversation with his psychiatrist Rita (Elizabeth Friesen) while a younger version of Michael (Louis Akins) appears in scenes from his past with Amber (Kierin Clarke) his girlfriend and later his first wife. Thus, as Michael tells the psychiatrist about his past, we actually see that past being played out before us. What we see, however, sometimes collides with what Michael is telling his psychiatrist. Sometimes he is telling the truth, and sometimes not necessarily the whole truth. As they say, recollections may vary.
Walker does not seem to take kindly to mental health professionals, because the psychiatrists who populate his plays tend to be decidedly tough characters. Rita is extraordinarily so, although she justifies her approach by insisting that Michael needs someone who will push him and refuse to put up with his garbage. We gather from their conversations that Michael has recently been through a serious mental health crisis, and that his family — whom we later discover are his children from a second marriage — are so concerned about him that they have forced him into therapy. Rita, it seems, has been chosen precisely because nothing else has worked.
Michael is, in many ways, a victim of himself. Walker even asks in his program notes, how do you help a man who cannot help himself? As Michael gradually tells his story, and the play moves back and forth through time, we discover a man who cannot keep a job and who has hurt a great many people, including his first wife, Amber, and his daughter Evie.
Yet Michael is not fancy-free or uncaring about the damage he has caused. Quite the opposite. He is wracked with guilt. He has walked out on people and failed to look after them, and terrible things have happened to people he loved because he could not live up to his responsibilities. Michael has loved desperately; he simply has not known how to turn that love into responsibility, and he is wracked with pain because of it.
Getting to Normal
Photo by Marianne Sawchuk
The younger Michael, who is called Mickie, is particularly interesting because we see him failing badly. We see him at his most irresponsible when he is supposed to be looking after Evie, his young daughter. We see the frustration building in Amber, and while we also see the love between them, we understand her growing impatience with a husband who cannot keep a job, cannot come up with the rent money, and cannot properly look after Evie when Amber herself goes out to work. We understand why the marriage breaks down.
On the other hand, we also see something in Mickey that the practically minded Amber does not. Mickey is a dreamer and a thinker, and he has a gift for writing. He writes poetry and prose, something the psychiatrist discovers quite late in her relationship with Michael. Perhaps there were untapped abilities in Mickey that might have saved him, or at least taken his life in a different direction. This is what I mean by the layers Walker builds into his characters. There were things in Mickey that no one saw, things that remained dormant, so that the real Michael was never allowed to emerge. Perhaps that is why he never found his place in society.
Amber, meanwhile, is beautifully written in her own right, a woman struggling with an impossible situation. She has a young child to look after and a seemingly feckless young husband, while she is desperately trying to make a life for herself and Evie. She is also worn down by a no-good father, a mother in crisis and a sister in crisis. Which brings us back to that ironic title: how is anyone supposed to get to normal when everyone’s family seems rotten to the core?
Michael, however, sees things. During the period when he works as a cab driver, he observes the people who get into his cab and tells stories about them. He is not merely a driver; he is an observer. The mean streets Walker presents are filled with people who deserve to be noticed, and Michael notices them.
Perhaps the least layered character is Rita, the psychiatrist, who is wrapped in foul language and relentlessly pushes Michael around, although we do finally glimpse some humanity in her toward the end.
Getting to Normal is a flawed play. There is repetition. There are leaps of understanding and dots that are never quite connected. I would almost go so far as to call it sloppily written. Yet one has to be careful with Walker, because no matter how rough and ready the writing may appear, the characters are always interesting, and there are many layers beneath the surface that demand to be unpacked. That is where the fascination of a Walker play lies, and Getting to Normal is no exception.
Getting to Normal
Photo by Marianne Sawchuk
There are some outstanding performances in Getting to Normal, particularly Clarke, and the structure itself is intriguing. The writing may be flawed, but a George F. Walker play is always worth visiting, and Getting to Normal is no exception.
Walker himself directed the play, and the company probably had a budget of two dollars and 27 cents. In fact, Walker came out before the performance — something he admitted he never does — to explain that Getting to Normal had been mounted with practically no budget at all. The more established companies, he said, had received the lion’s share of council funding, leaving small independent companies with very little, and he paid tribute to his cast and the handful of crew for working for less than peanuts.
Thus, there is no set designer in the usual sense. The physical production consists essentially of two chairs, a bench and a pram, while what lighting there is has been designed by Robyn Shepherd who is also the stage manager and sound technician. Everything has been scaled down to almost nothing.
World on Fire Theatre Collective is clearly a labour of love, but the company is also performing a genuine service by continuing to bring us the work of George F. Walker and for that, we should be grateful.