Creating theatre with disabled people can be tricky. It’s all about striking the right balance.
In strictly artistic terms, one wants to avoid condescension, overt sentimentality or self-pity. Certainly, themes such as inclusion, validation and self-expression are favoured — the potential danger is didacticism and church-lady preachiness.
Great Big Show, a new Victoria production a year in the making, manages to find a sweet spot between cheekiness and heart while dropping in a few kernels of substance.
Armed with a $120,000 Canada Council grant, local company Delusional Productions started work a year ago on a daunting task. They have created a variety-show style romp, Great Big Show, featuring 25 developmentally disabled people. It’s a daunting prospect — imagine the challenges faced by those with Down syndrome, epilepsy, autism or cerebral palsy. Take a young man called Raven Romaniuk. Wes Borg, the show’s artistic director and MC, led him on the McPherson Playhouse’s stage Wednesday night to explain why Romaniuk was wearing a shiny black helmet. It was because he occasionally suffers convulsions and seizures. This alone gives a wee sense of what these performers are grappling with (on this night, Romaniuk seemed fine).
Another example is James Leonardo, a performer who wasn’t able to make it due to illness. Leonardo has had 59 brain surgeries as the result of hydrocephalus.
There are 18 songs in Great Big Show. The music is played by a professional band that includes Borg (himself a local comic of note) and alt-music queen Carolyn Mark. The lyrics were written by the performers, all of whom were paid $23 a hour for rehearsals, workshops and performance. For some, it was the first paycheque they’d ever received.
Wednesday’s performance offered a few pleasant surprises. A young man called Morgan Benty, self-effacingly standing off to one side in a blue golf shirt, is a good singer with an appealing timbre and a natural knack for phrasing. He sang the song Donna, with romantic lyrics by Dennis Monchamp featuring such appealing lines as: “You are my shining star / You are my favourite world.”
Another notable is musician Nick Foly — sporting rocker sunglasses and a leather jacket — who added melodic lead lines on electric guitar.
Curran Dobbs, a bushy-bearded comic who has autism, is already a notable in Victoria’s standup scene. He opened the show, accompanying himself on guitar, with Everybody Dies, a black-humour number about death containing the deadpan line: “If you’re not cremated, then your body will decay.” Dobbs has a clever, whimsical sense of humour — later in the show, he pretended to have a phone conversation with an imaginary girlfriend, during which he said: “To be honest, I’ve started imagining someone else.”
Perhaps the most memorable (and certainly the most dramatic) contribution came from Mairi Chester, who sang My Brain Is a Bully. Chester, singing with a flattish alt-rock affect, wrote the lyrics to the song, about someone who endures horrifying dreams each night.
“When I wake up I feel so much pain from my dreams / There’s a girl who wants to murder me,” said Chester, standing in front of a microphone in her Great Big Show T-shirt. A fellow in black tights offered a short, lyrical dance solo in the middle of My Brain Is a Bully. The song ends with the words: “I just want to be OK.”
Overall, the tone of Great Big Show is one of whimsy and innocent humour. Performer Kathy Henshaw, as the self-appointed “queen of Canada,” waved at the audience from an upper balcony and advised us to avoid burping. In the song B.C. Transit, a city bus is peopled by various eccentrics. Act II focuses on affairs of the heart: A strongman executed one-armed push-ups during Bachelor Man; a winsome dentist was admired in Orthodontist and Romantic Dinner Song.
With Great Big Show we are reminded these people harbour the same ambitions, hopes and desires as the rest of us. In other words, they are us and we are them — everyone is part of society; no one is to be excluded. The final performance of Great Big Show is at 2 p.m. today at the McPherson Playhouse.
CHORUS LINES
• Pacific Opera Victoria’s season has so far included such adventuresome offerings as Tobin Stokes’ Rattenbury and Missing, the latter inspired by Canada’s missing First Nations women. The POV returns to more traditional territory with Puccini’s La Bohème, opening Feb. 15 at the Royal Theatre.
• Also of note: Theatre Inconnu’s upcoming production of Neva by Guillermo Calderon (Feb. 15 opening), about the slaughter of Russian demonstrators in 1905, and a new Phoenix Theatre production of Crimes of the Heart, Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about three sisters raised in a dysfunctional family, also opening Feb. 15.
