Theatre review: Authentic performances bring The Boy in the Moon to brutally honest life
Meghan Gardiner and Marcus Youssef create nuanced, lived-in chemistry in story of raising a child with severe disabilities
Marcus Youssef and Meghan Gardiner play a couple raising a child who lives with a severe and rare disability in The Boy in the Moon, at the Cultch. Photo by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Productions
Neworld Theatre and the Cultch present The Boy in the Moon via livestream until May 9
NEWORLD THEATRE’S engrossing new production of The Boy in the Moon is almost startling in its directness and brutal honesty.
Emil Sher’s play, based on Ian Brown’s 2009 memoir about raising a child with a severe disability, often feels more like a documentary than theatre in this new live-filmed rendition. In many ways the work is well-suited to the pandemic-world format. Even though we're watching through a livestream from the Cultch, there's an instant intimacy seeing actors Marcus Youssef and Meghan Gardiner address you, and each other, from their kitchen table, while you sit at home.
Showing a beautiful restraint that works well for the camera closeups, the actors have a conversational delivery and natural chemistry that comes from a long relationship. The production has been years in the making, postponed from last pandemic-altered spring, when it was supposed to have been performed live. The extra year has perhaps allowed the central pair of actors to live with the material—and to allow it to live within them. The fact that parts of the script are taken from verbatim interviews conducted by Sher gives it an extra layer of authenticity.
The effect is a little bit like spending an evening with your likable, dryly funny, and entertainingly articulate friends—who just happen to care for a child living with a severe disability. The kind that prevented them from having more than two nights in a row of sleep for his first eight years. The kind that turned their lives into an endless nightmare of feeding tubes, hospital waiting rooms, and drug cocktails.
The Boy in the Moon is the true story of Brown and journalist wife Johanna Schneller raising their son Walker, whose extremely rare condition from birth has rendered him nonverbal and unable to feed himself for life. By two, he starts bashing himself in the head with his own fists.
In what they eventually come to see as a gift, Walker has given them a perspective on life that few of us will ever have. Gardiner’s Johanna recalls, at one point, a day when her dishwasher and car both blew up: “They didn’t matter. Those were fixable problems.”
Walker only appears here in real photographs, projected on Drew Facey’s sleek and striking geometric set, with its dark grids and hospital-white screens. Simple but effective lighting techniques suggest certain memories—say, the rippling water of a bath.
The unending questions that drive the play and torment the parents surround how much Walker can understand or enjoy. “Can you love someone for who they are?” “He makes people feel things, but what does he feel?”
Sher never shies away from the parents’ darkest moments. Johanna admits she would have aborted the child had there been a genetic test available during pregnancy. And in one of the play’s most emotionally raw moments, she confesses she wants to outlive her son.
Synthia Yusuf, Marcus Youssef, and Meghan Gardiner in The Boy in the Moon. Photo by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Productions
Staged with subtlety and intimacy by director Chelsea Haberlin, the production’s biggest strength becomes the way it plays Ian’s memories and coping strategies off those of Johanna. It feels real that they remember crucial moments, such as the cryptic comment of a pediatrician early on—“This child cannot live without extraordinary measures”—in completely different ways. The slightly cynical Ian sees it as a hint to let the child go, while the more calmly optimistic Schneller hears it as a rally to fight onward.
The characters respect each other’s point of view, while feistily holding their ground. And it’s frankly refreshing to watch two strong adults sparring, negotiating, and remoulding their history together, without histrionics, shouting, or martyrdom. Watch the maturity with which they recount the endless bickering they’ve had over the draining middle-of-the-night duties.
Sher’s writing is taut, darkly funny, and cuttingly insightful, in the way that Brown’s own voice is. Seeing Walker at birth, Ian remarks the tiny infant, slumped in the doctor’s hands, has a “strange, defeated look, as if he knows something is wrong.” The house becomes a “well-organized nightmare”.
Actor Synthia Yusuf, as the couple's older daughter Hayley, inserts herself into this conversation as a kind of afterthought. This is not necessarily a bad thing: appearing intermittently in a spotlight at the side of the stage, she’s almost reminding her parents of her presence—a situation, one can only imagine, that captures a bit of the real experience of being a sibling of a child with a severe developmental disorder. And Yusuf brings youthful energy to the role. However, this device, where she also plays other characters such as case workers and sings or dances in a separate area, would work better if we were watching it in an actual theatre.
The Boy in the Moon is ultimately most arresting as a conversation between two parents wrestling with their son’s place in the universe, the meaning of his existence, and whether unconditional love has bounds. These are questions any parents or caregivers will be able to relate deeply to.
The Boy in the Moon provides some of the most emotionally engaging and thought-provoking streamed theatre Vancouverites have seen over this year of lockdown. At a time when we feel like we’re trapped and have a lot to complain about, Walker helps us all put everything in perspective.
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