By Christopher Hoile | Stage Door
July 18, 2025
Miles: “If you don’t make a purchase then you won’t really be my first customer, will you? You’ll be my first lost sale. My first dismal failure at my new job”
People who think they know what a Norm Foster play is like will be surprised by the double bill titled Hidden Treasures current being presented by the Lighthouse Festival. Neither the first play My Narrator (2006) nor the second play The Death of Me (2007) are realistic plays in familiar settings examining common human foibles. Both plays, published together as One-Actmanship in 2008, are fantasies. My Narrator is a highly metatheatrical look at human behaviour while The Death of Me is an inquiry into the nature of fate. Both are well-acted, well-directed and beautifully designed, though, of the two, My Narrator is by far the more successful play. Together the two demonstrate that Foster’s output is more varied than is commonly believed.
As Foster says of My Narrator, “ Imagine what would happen if that little voice inside your head – the one that tells you how to behave and what choices to make – suddenly took on a life of its own?” That is what happens in the play and more. Foster’s conception of a person’s narrator is not just their inner voice but a voice that represents their character to the public in the theatre. The play begins with Barb, Lacy’s Narrator, describing the action in direct address to the audience. This situation creates a humour that only increases since the Narrator constantly makes public their character’s most private thoughts.
The play’s other human character is Miles, who sorely lacks a Narrator at the start but acquires one named Bob when he tries to pull himself together to make a good impression on Lacy. The fact that Miles and Lacy’s banal interactions are constantly being mediated by two Narrators who also try to influence the action they describe means that Foster makes us constantly aware that we are in the theatre. Of the 26 plays by Foster that I’ve seen so far, My Narrator is both the funniest and the most theatre-conscious. You might think the metatheatricality would wipe out the comedy, but Foster’s play is so well written the former only heightens the latter.
The question that propels the action is how Miles, who is hopelessly awkward socially and a failure at all he does, can possibly win over Lacy, a sensible, strong-minded woman who is so clearly out of his league. The action is funny enough when the couple’s two Narrators advise their charges on what to do. It becomes even more comic when the two Narrators begin to interact on their own. Foster has amazingly taken us to a psychic realm that can only exist in the theatre.
David Leyshon is hilarious as Miles. He shows not only how Miles makes one social blunder after another but how his self-consciousness about making these blunders only leads him to make more blunders. We cringe when Leyshon’s Miles thinks he knows better than his Narrator and proceeds to do the wrong thing. Most importantly, however, is that Leyshon manages to convey clearly that despite all his missteps, Miles has a good heart. Leyshon also shows how in trying to make himself worthy of Lacy, he actually does begin to improve. Leyshon is an expert at verbal and physical comedy whose presence on stage I have been missing for some time.
As Lacy, Jennifer Dzialoszynski, who presence I have also been missing, well plays the plucky, down-to-earth Lacy. What Dzialoszynski does so well is to show how Lacy’s opinion of Miles gradually changes from one of contempt to amusement to sympathy. Without portraying this change of emotion so clearly it would be impossible for us to believe that someone like Lacy could ever fall for someone like Miles.
Melanie Janson as Barb and Stephen Sparks as Bob are both masters of comedy. Much of the show’s humour derives from the dryly ironic view that both Narrators take of their human characters. Both Narrators are sceptical that Miles and Lacy will ever form a romantic relationship and Barb in particular tries to steer lacy away from Miles. Nevertheless, when the two Narrators see what is developing despite their advice they try to steer the story to as happy an ending as they can manage. I don’t think such super-self-awareness has ever been portrayed so delightfully on stage.
While My Narrator truly is a gem of Canadian comedy, The Death of Me is never able to reach that level. It begins with a very strong scene between the recently deceased John and the Angel of Death. The notion that the afterlife is as plagued with bureaucracy as is life on earth is a familiar one seen in such films as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) in heaven and Heaven Can Wait (1943) in hell. In The Death of Me, John, an unfailingly polite and considerate young man, is unhappy that he has died so soon and thinks it must me a mistake. Yet, he is even more unhappy that it will likely be his mother who will discover his body when she visits after a three-day weekend.
The Angel of Death at first is cold and unmoved by John’s concerns and is anxious that he fill out the voluminous forms required for entry to heaven. Yet, John is so obviously a good person whose entry to heaven is certain that the Angel decides to give John a chance to return to earth sort out the few things that need sorting before he returns to her desk.
The main question John wants answered is why his fiancée Cassie jilted him at the altar on their wedding day four years ago never to be heard from again. What did he do that was so wrong? It happens that John discovers that Cassie is working at the licence renewal office and never went to university as she claimed she was going to do. What is worse is that Cassie seems to be suffering from paranoia. Once we realize that Cassie’s strange behaviour is a symptom of a psychological condition, there is nothing Foster can do to make the interactions between John and Cassie at all funny.
We start to wonder whether Cassie showed signs of paranoia before the wedding, whether the wedding preparations somehow triggered her paranoia and, if so, why her paranoia has lasted for four years after what would have been her wedding day. Unfortunately, Foster gives us no answers to these questions. It seems that Foster wants to show us that John has actually had a lucky escape by not marrying Cassie. Yet, John’s leaving Cassie without suggesting she get help leaves us unsatisfied.
John’s next meeting is with the Doctor who failed to notice the aortic aneurysm that killed John. John finds that the Doctor is callous, self-centred and hates seeing patients so much he tries to get them to leave his office as soon as he can.
The Death of Me ends with a surprise revelation back in the office of the Angel of Death which I will not relate. Foster assumes we can fill in the various steps that lead to this conclusion, but it is certainly not as clear as it should be.
David Leyshon plays John as a kind-hearted man who is genuinely perplexed why he should have died so young and is more concerned for the grief those left behind will feel than he is for his own death. In contrast to Leyshon’s moving portrayal of human sorrow is Melanie Jansen’s comic officiousness and unconcern for John, the latest in an infinite number of clients waiting to see her. What Jansen does so well is to show that underneath the Angel’s attitude of deep boredom dimly gleams the recognition that John has been hard done by. The Angel will not admit there could ever have been a mistake, but her ability to send John back makes us think rules governing the afterlife are not as strict as the Angel claims they are.
As Cassie, Dzialoszynski gives such a finely detailed depiction of paranoia that our worry for Cassie silences any humour that could be attached to the condition. Similarly, Sparks’s portrayal of the obnoxiously flippant Doctor tends to make us dislike the characters rather to laugh at him. In both cases these are flaws in the play rather than flaws in acting.
Not requiring the realism in design that most Foster plays require has allowed set designer Beckie Morris’s imagination free rein. The result is spectacular. Morris has given the stage at the Lighthouse Theatre an angular off-kilter proscenium inside the theatre’s regular proscenium that signals as soon as we see it that the world of these plays will be quite unusual. The off-kilter proscenium contains lights that change colour to reflect the changing mood of the action.
My Narrator features moveable set pieces in dazzlingly bright colours that can cleverly be shifted and recombined to represent different locations. Alex Amini’s costumes for Miles and Lacy follow the same bright colours. The Narrators, however, she clothes in lavender from head to toe. In The Death of Me Morris imagines the afterlife all in white with touches of grey associated only with John. The Angel, clad in white, sits on a white chair at a white desk. Only the blade of her scythe, amusingly hung on a hook of the wall, is silver. When the Angel takes on her role as the Grim Reaper, she dons the expected long hooded cloak of black. When we travel back to earth for the scenes with Cassie and the Doctor, we return to the vivid colours of My Narrator.
Hidden Treasures is worth seeing if only to experience the My Narrator, surely one of the best Canadian comedies ever written. This is a play and a production that no lover of theatre should miss. If The Death of Me fails to equal My Narrator as a play, it is still made enjoyable by the fine acting of the cast and witty design. Few artistic directors programme double-bills even though there are innumerable one-act plays out there that never get staged. Kudos to Jane Spence for having the insight to programme Hidden Treasures and to stage it with so much zest.
Christopher Hoile
