Lighting designer Itai Erdal honours his late mother's legacy in How to Disappear Completely
Through projected footage and photographs, Erdal chronicles the last nine months of his mother’s life following a terminal cancer diagnosis
Itai Erdal stands before footage of his mother in How to Disappear Completely. Photo by The Chop Theatre
The Cultch presents The Chop Theatre’s How to Disappear Completely in collaboration with The Elbow Theatre at the Historic Theatre from March 15 to 22
WHEN LIGHTING DESIGNER Itai Erdal was young, his Paraguayan mother, who was an avid cook, would make dulce de leche from scratch.
Erdal remembers it being a long process. His mother would use an old trick of dropping glass marbles into the caramelized milk-and-sugar mixture to keep it from sticking to the pot while it was simmering on the stovetop.
Speaking to Stir by phone, Erdal shares that he was extremely close with his mother, a wise woman who raised him and his sister on her own. She brought him to watch theatre shows, threw elaborate dinner parties for their friends and family, and took him to Madrid to see the artwork of Picasso and Goya. She showed him affection often by running her fingers through his hair and giving him hugs and kisses.
So when she called him in September 2000 to tell him she had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Erdal dropped everything to be by her side for the last nine months of her life. It’s now the memories of her doing what she loved that he cherishes most, he says.
“The smell of the dulce de leche in the house would just drive me crazy for hours,” Erdal recalls. “Then when it was ready, my job was to fish out the marbles and to lick the hot marbles, and I would always burn myself because I couldn’t wait long enough for the dulce de leche to cool down. So my fondest memories of her have to be around cooking. She was an amazing cook, and she taught me all her recipes before she died….I still cook all my mother’s food for my friends and for my family now.”
Mery Erdal’s final months are now the basis of her son’s one-man theatre show, How to Disappear Completely. Presented by The Chop Theatre in collaboration with The Elbow Theatre, the profound and sharply funny production premiered in Vancouver at the Chutzpah! Festival in 2011, and over the next eight years it was remounted more than 25 times in several cities around the world. The Cultch’s upcoming presentation of How to Disappear Completely at the Historic Theatre from March 15 to 22 marks the first time Erdal will perform it since the pandemic.
As a former nurse, his mother was very matter-of-fact about her diagnosis, Erdal says. She asked her son to be her main caregiver, as she was opposed to staying in a hospital, to which he immediately agreed. They spent a few wonderful months together watching movies, playing backgammon, and visiting with his mother’s old friends before things got hard. Throughout all of it, Erdal filmed hours of footage and took hundreds of photographs.
“I just wanted to capture her so that I could show my children one day who their grandmother was,” Erdal says. “And then when I was filming, it was her idea. She said, ‘Hey, why don’t you make a documentary and call it Towards My Mother’s Death? And then she started directing the documentary about her. She would say, ‘Hey, if you move the camera over there, you can capture this and this and this.’ And when she had enough, she would say, ‘Cut! I don’t want to talk anymore. Cut!’ So she was kind of directing her own movie. And so that was my goal—after she died, I tried to make a documentary about it.”
But as time passed, Erdal came to realize that documentary filmmaking was not his calling. Several years later when he showed the footage to his friend James Long (who was co-artistic director of Theatre Replacement with Maiko Yamamoto at the time), he encouraged Erdal to use it in a theatre project. From there, How to Disappear Completely was born. Soon thereafter, Erdal founded The Elbow Theatre, with which he has co-written and performed in Soldiers of Tomorrow, Hyperlink, This Is Not A Conversation, and A Very Narrow Bridge.
Itai Erdal.
Pivoting from film to theatre allowed Erdal to lean into his expertise as a lighting designer in the show’s creation. Having worked on more than 350 productions around North America and Europe, he has won six Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards, a Dora Mavor Moore Award in Toronto, and a Lustrum Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, among several other accolades.
“Lighting became a metaphor for so many things that we did not plan,” Erdal says. “It sort of happened organically. So for instance, my director [Long] asked me ‘What’s your favourite light?’ And I said a PAR can. He asked why, and I said, ‘Oh, because it’s durable and it spills all over the place. You could leave it out in the rain, but it produces the prettiest light of all theatrical instruments.’ And then word for word that made it into the show, and it became an ode to a PAR can. Then I wanted to show how a PAR can gets warmer and warmer as you dim it. And as I did it, people got super emotional because they thought about the life leaving my mother’s body, which I did not plan. So to a lot of people, that PAR can moment is the strongest thing in the entire show. But that just happened organically.”
How to Disappear Completely was created in collaboration with Long, sound designer Emelia Symington Fedy, and dramaturge Anita Rochon (the latter two artists are cofounders of The Chop Theatre). It features projections of Erdal’s footage and photographs, and he stands onstage as a storyteller, chronicling the last nine months of his mother’s life for audiences.
It has been 14 years now since the work premiered, and Erdal says he has become more relaxed in his dialogue delivery. There has also been a recent change to the plotline.
“I am a parent myself now,” Erdal says. “The big theme in the show is how I’m lonely and I really want children, and how my mother thinks that children are so important. And I had children late in life, so that was very relevant for many years. We had to adjust the show a little bit to say that I do have children. That’s also changed my relationship with my mother a little bit, because as a parent, I sort of understand even more the importance of having children.”
The lighting designer says his mother was a true hedonist with a love for people and the arts. She instilled in Erdal a passion for theatre that has since allowed his career to blossom in ways he could have never imagined. How to Disappear Completely has taken him around the world and allowed him to form meaningful connections with the people who see the show.
“This was the hardest thing that has ever happened to me,” Erdal says. “And you would think that it’s a daunting task to have to relive the toughest moment of your life onstage every day, but it’s actually a joyful experience. My mother was a really fun person. She pokes fun of me in the show. The show is funny because my mom is funny, and she’s also smart—and it feels like I’m introducing my mother to my friends or to people in general. People have gone as far as to say that by doing a show about my mother, I made sure that she does not disappear, because now all the people who’ve seen the show know my mom, and so her legacy continues.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he adds. “When I was a teenager, I always knew I had the coolest mom. Every time I would bring my friends over, they all thought she was so cool. And now she’s dead, and I still bring my friends, and they still think she’s cool. So for me, it’s a wonderful experience every night.” 
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