Mapping the frontier of empathy: Bea at Shadow Theatre, a review, Theater News

By Liz Nicholls,

The Varscona stage is dominated by a bed. And in the opening moments of Bea, we see a young girl using it the time-honoured kid way — bouncing on and off it, dancing, singing along with Pink. “I think I’ll get outta here, where I can run, just as fast as I can….”

That’s Bea (Karen Unruh), or more specifically Bea’s younger self, playful, high-spirited, joyful. In reality, that bed is a prison, a trap. The former Bea has been lost, in eight punishing years (and counting) of immobility with an unnamed degenerative illness. And the catalyst of the long and challenging 2010 play by the Northern Irish writer Mick Gordon, currently onstage at the Varscona in a Shadow Theatre production, is Bea’s decision to call quits on her life (“there are worse things than death”). God is out, for obvious reasons; “the only thing I can believe in is release.”

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What if freedom, that worthiest of goals in theory, is freedom from the body?

The play isn’t so much about Bea’s resolve to die, in itself, as the challenge to her litigator mother and her care-giver Ray that her request — “no, demand!” — for assistance sets in motion. Is there a frontier to compassion, to the human capacity for empathetic connection, before “mind-blindness,” as caregiver Ray puts it, kicks in?

Bea wonders about that, and so does its title character, as she sets forth her case and encounters understandable resistance. “Maybe empathy has a limit,” Bea muses, “a geography.” When you say you’d do anything for someone you love, is it just a figure of speech?

What Bea is asking, an assisted release from a punishing existence, is a dilemma for parental love, for friendship, for the kindness of strangers (hold that thought), for professional responsibility. Bea’s rather self-possessed mother (Kate Newby) is not only a parent but a lawyer, after all, and the act of assisting your child to die is — at least in 2010 in the U.K. when Bea was born — illegal. Ray (Michael Watt) is nutty, voluble, and naturally insubordinate, which makes him pal material for Bea, but he is a contract care-giver.

Karen Unruh, Michael Watt, Kate Newby in Bea, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Death, dying, and assisted suicide are meaty human issues, to be sure, and like suffering come with all kinds of emotional strings attached. But the play and the production directed by Amanda Goldberg spend most of their time (pushing two hours) and energy in making sure comedy is in the forefront.

The actors are up for it, even if the characters (deliberately?) don’t mesh. Bea, in Unruh’s performance, is devoted to non-stop physical motion, presumably to demonstrate the self the character has lost. The lighting by Whittyn Jason does assist in differentiating past and present, imaginary and real, Bea. But for much of the play, Bea, flirtatious and girlish, flings herself in and out of bed so continually you might be forgiven for wondering at any moment if she’s remembering her young self or being her bedridden current self on an improbably good day. In either case, this does wear thin, perhaps because the physical limitations of the character in her current state, eight years’ worth, aren’t defined very persuasively.

Karen Unruh and Michael Watt in Bea, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As the nervous, free-associative chatterbox Ray, who seems to have arrived fully formed from some other play, Michael Watt barely stops to take a breath in long comic free-standing monologues that could easily be lifted out of Bea and inserted elsewhere. The question of whether or not Ray is gay, put teasingly to him by Bea over and over and denied in shocked shrieks, seems a little dated, in truth, even for the high-dose playfulness on display here. But Ray’s account of A Streetcar Named Desire for Bea’s benefit (he has a soft spot for Stanley) is a showstopper. And his elucidation of the appeal of theatre — “I do like a good intermission” — is amusing too. Watt, an appealing actor (and a playwright himself), does his best with the bits and pieces of a character who doesn’t seem to quite exist except as an authorial creation.

Kate Newby and Karen Unruh in Bea, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

As the formidable lawyer mom, Newby takes charge of a wry, sardonic tone in a performance of crisp confidence that gradually disintegrates in the course of the dilemma put before the character. It’s all charted thoughtfully by Newby, who exudes smart-ness as Mrs. James. And the way mother and daughter come together, in an alliance of laughter, turns out to be one of the most affecting developments of the evening, unlikely as it is. Empathy, we see, takes many unexpected forms.

The glittering back wall of Ximena Pinilla’s striking set design is composed of panels of hundreds and hundreds of earrings, agonizingly made one at a time by Bea in her eight-year imprisonment. Despite a weightily symbolic ending that seems like one scene too many, the earrings that will never be worn are the image you take away with you.

There are many big human issues at play in Bea, which has ambitions and an embrace beyond its characters. Loss, the irreversible loss of the joyful self, is its most compelling focus.

REVIEW

Bea

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Mick Gordon

Directed by: Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Karen Unruh, Michael Watt, Kate Newby

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 9

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org