Lights Review: Day by day into the unknown

When I first stepped into the Firehall Theatre 30 minutes before the start of Lights, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d read the synopsis, and from the promo photos, I’d thought that I’d walk in to see a minimalistic set. Instead, I was greeted with a loving recreation of a quaint two-storey Newfoundland home with its outer walls removed, complete with a Christmas tree, front doorway and Christmas music playing in the background. The ground was covered in white paint and sprinkled with little flakes of what looked like styrofoam. It wasn’t until later that I realized the paint was supposed to represent snow, piled up in a thick layer on the ground (it is Newfoundland, after all). My friend and I sat down in our seats, generously provided by the publicist for Lights, and as we waited for the show to start, I opened the e-brochure for the play. That’s when I first discovered how long the show was. A full 95 minutes, no intermission. I was hesitant, perhaps even a bit apprehensive. Ninety-five minutes was quite a long time, especially with no intermission, was this going to drag on?

Thankfully, I was wrong. Do you know that feeling when something, be it a show, a movie or a board game night with friends, seems to warp time? When it’s so engrossing that time just seems to slip away? For me, that is one of the highest praises that I can give; it’s one of the ways that I can tell if a show truly engaged me. And Lights did engage me. It enthralled me with its atmosphere, its powerful performances and its genuine heart.

But let’s take a step back a bit. Lights is a play written by and starring UBC Masters student Adam Grant Warren, following a Vancouver school teacher with cerebral palsy, Evan Chaulk, as he goes back home to Newfoundland to visit his mother, Nancy, who is in the midst of the progression of Alzheimer’s.

There’s a lot of personal connection in the play; Adam himself has cerebral palsy, and is from Newfoundland, and both he and the director Roy Surette have had a relative with Alzheimer’s (Adam’s grandmother and Roy’s mother). That connection really shows in the care that the play takes in depicting the accurate lived experience of those with Alzheimer’s, and also in the way that the play depicts the life of the characters themselves.

“When you’re in the middle of the strife of some of the things the play deals with, it is messy and it is kind of ugly … Everybody’s got somebody in their life, or knows someone in their life, that’s been touched by dementia and Alzheimer's. And it is painful, but it also can be kind of beautiful, and I think the play captures that as well,” said Surette in an interview with The Ubyssey.

I’ve never been to Newfoundland, but I could really feel the Newfoundland atmosphere coming from every inch of the set. The small town aesthetic, the continuous talk about having a real Christmas tree (even though they, unfortunately, had to use a plastic one, probably for production practicality purposes), the accents. The Newfoundland atmosphere was so strong that when the third and final character of the play, Evan’s wife Sarah, flies in from Vancouver for the holidays, I was shocked to hear a non-Newfoundland accent.

I could also see parts of my own family dynamics when Evan bickered with his mom, and, on a darker note, many of the… incidents that happened as a result of Nancy's dementia were things that I had seen in my own family. The sudden outbursts, the accusations of hiding things to “test” her, the aura of constant uncertainty, where you never knew whether they would be fine, or they would scream and rage, I experienced all of that with my own grandfather when he was earlier in his condition.

The sound design also helped immensely with the immersion. The Christmas music really sets the tone, and it plays during a fantastic extended opening sequence where Nancy is setting up the tree, obliviously singing along as Evan rolls into the scene, shovelling snow off the front steps before opening the door, the music warping as if frozen by the cold as he slowly and arduously pulling himself and his wheelchair over the front steps and inside. The judicious use of (what I think) is a Shepard tone during Nancy’s outbursts only adds to the tension, and silence is chosen and used with brutal efficacy when appropriate.

And, speaking of Nancy’s outburst, I have to commend Susinn McFarlen for her performance as Nancy. The range that she has, switching from happiness, to anger, to fear as the script called for it; the subtle, existential fear hidden behind a mask of wit and profanity, it was absolutely engrossing, managing to fully pull me into the play.

The other performers are no slouches themselves. Adam Grant Warren’s portrayal of Evan is exceedingly genuine, exuding both charm and vulnerability that plasters over the deep pain of watching the slow, inevitable loss of his mother and the prospect of not being able to care for her because of his condition. And Leslie Dos Remedios’ portrayal of Sarah, Evan’s wife, is bright as the sun, coming in towards the end of the play to provide an outsider’s perspective to the whole situation.

That’s not to say that there weren’t things that I didn’t like. Some of the jokes didn’t land for me, and occasionally the comedic sequences just felt a beat too long. But, what I really want to talk about is the ending. Initially, I thought that it felt a bit abrupt, with there seeming to be no resolution to the problems that the characters faced. However, after talking with Grant Warren a few days ago, all of that changed.

“Especially in the representation … of physically atypicality like wheelchair use, or Alzheimer's or any of those things in representations of illness, I think the hero's journey, and the narrative arc, is actually kind of dangerous as a storytelling engine because it implies that there is a point where you can get over something, and you can beat something, or you can best something, or you can get beyond something,” said Grant Warren.

“And speaking as a wheelchair user, who I am, my condition is congenital. I have cerebral palsy, so I've always had it. It is what it is. It's not going to get any better. It's not going to get any worse either … It's just what it is. And it's a day to day. And I think that that reflects in Lights, too, is this the notion of the day to day. This isn't about tomorrow, I won't have Alzheimer's, right? It isn't about tomorrow, I'll be gone. It's about tomorrow, we'll see. Tomorrow, we don't know.”

And, at that moment, everything made sense. There is no resolution because that is the entire point of the play. There is no resolution to living with chronic, incurable conditions like Alzheimer’s and Cerebral Palsy. That the only thing you can do is to just take it day by day, dealing with both the good days and the bad days as you walk forward into the uncertain future. And that’s why I genuinely recommend this play, even to the lucky people who have been fortunate enough to have not had dementia touch their lives, because what I described in the last sentence, that’s just life. Stepping forward into the unknown one day at a time, taking the good along with the bad. And I think that Lights has captured that beautifully.

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