In Some Assembly Theatre's The Wait List Experiment, youths find imaginative way forward in uncertain times
Masks, movement, and a stage-filling eye bring to life story about tapping real optimism
Some Assembly Theatre’s The Wait List Experiment.
Some Assembly Theatre presents The Wait List Experiment at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre from April 29 to May 3
A NEW PLAY called The Wait List Experiment has allowed local youths to vividly imagine a way through uncertainty—at a time when it’s sometimes hard to see a future at all.
Moving through teen years toward adulthood is a struggle at the best of times, and now COVID constraints have made things worse.
“The pandemic is really difficult on everyone, but in particular youth, because it's a time when socializing is incredibly important,” observes Valerie Methot, Some Assembly Theatre’s playwright and director, who’s devoted her work to young people after once being an at-risk teen herself. “On top of that, these youth are trying to figure out what to do with their life. Not only is that a big question in their life, but talking to youth right now, they’re really wondering ‘Why bother?’
“A lot are saying it’s a struggle to just get through the day,” she adds. “Youth are really struggling, and it’s important to listen to them and not write them off—to not say they're being dramatic or wanting attention.”
Through workshops over the past year, the group has used art to find their way through, by collaborating on The Wait List Experiment—complete with masks, movement, video, music, and a giant stylized eye that allows them to look inward, and then outward again.
In the play, eight youths who are on wait lists to see therapists have been put into an experimental pandemic peer-support program that takes them on a journey to face and work through their fears.
The seed for the idea came when the youth started talking about the difficulty of accessing mental-health services, especially during the pandemic. Alongside those discussions, they tried to figure out how to find optimism again in a real way, not the kind that would fall into the trap of “toxic positivity”—the tendency of people, and social media, to tell them to just be happy without acknowledging the real struggles going on.
“Youth just found that to be rather dismissive and degrading, actually, and wanted the play to really dive in and really access optimism,” Methot relates. “They really dove into what is keeping us from being optimistic. We discovered fears could be stuck inside of us.”
Helped by workshop time with theatre mask expert Melody Anderson, the group started to design masks that would give physical form to their individual fears—eventually created for the show by Nik McLaren and Susan Bertoia. In The Wait List Experiment, the characters, at first reticent about the peer program, learn to work to acknowledge and then escape those fears. “They don't want their fear to catch up with them,” Methot explains. “That's something very relatable.
“The idea is to give those fears the importance and attention they need—with support,” she adds. “That's why it’s so devastating these days that professional support is hard to come by. And that’s why I tell these youth, ‘If you can't find professional support, find someone you trust.’”
Methot and the team have kept the masks to black, white, and grey tones, set against against the set’s 36-foot-wide eye, a wild, stage-filling burst of colour that pulls them into a healing journey. (Check it out in the trailer below.)
Creating the play, the youth have been able to see a more brightly hued future. “If we have our emotions stuck inside, that's when mental health problems happen,” Methot reflects. “When we process our emotions and our thoughts, that's when the optimism can happen, and that's when joy can be released.
“We’ve witnessed a huge change in these young people and I can't wait to share it with the public,” she adds. “It’s very moving, it's very truthful, it’s inspiring, and it’s funny and entertaining.”
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