Throwing light on loss

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This article was published 23/03/2017 (3150 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In his capacity as a lighting designer, Vancouver-based Ital Erdal has worked at all the major Winnipeg theatres, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange and Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

Erdal is technically the lighting designer of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre production How to Disappear Completely. But he is also the writer and the star, although he shares the stage with video-projected images of his late mother, Mery, a professor of Latin-American literature who died of cancer in 2001.

Erdal also shot the footage, not long after he graduated from Vancouver Film School.

For anyone, that’s one long hyphenate. But Erdal says the show was a labour of love that compelled him to take to the stage, although the transition wasn’t particularly intimidating for him.

“I’m a very comfortable storyteller,” he says on the phone from Vancouver. “I’m comfortable speaking in public and I love telling stories, so it just made perfect sense.”

This particular story began in September 2000 when Erdal got the call from his mother’s home in Jerusalem informing him that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and given just nine months to live. He promptly packed up and flew home, where he subsequently shot hundreds of photographs and hours of film documenting the end of his mother’s life.

Such a pursuit had the potential to be uncomfortable for other family members, given the understandable familial instinct to circle the wagons and protect the privacy of the dying in their most vulnerable days.

That feeling was there, Erdal says.

“But my family had to respect it because it was my mother’s wishes,” he says. “The whole thing was my mother’s idea.

“So when it’s a dying person’s wish, you do whatever they want,” he says. “My sister was very uncomfortable with it, and there’s an argument in the show, because my sister was objecting to the filming.

“But she’s come around because she really loves the show now,” he says. “Now, I think she really appreciates the opportunity to look back at her mother and everything she did before she died. But at the time, it was definitely a challenge.”

It was almost 10 years after his mother’s death that Erdal finally was able to put the show together and he has been performing it for the past six years, although he estimates his lighting jobs constitute three-quarters of his theatre work.

A play in which Erdal effectively interacts with his dead mother has the potential to be harrowing, he acknowledges.

“But it’s more joyous than anything else,” he says.

“When I was a teenager, I always knew I had a cool mom,” he says. “When I brought my friends home, they always thought she was so cool. And now my mom is dead and I still show her to my friends and they still think she’s cool.

“I feel like I get to hang out with her for an hour. She was so great and she said such smart things and her personality really shines through in the show.

“I’m so proud of her… and that’s all I’ve got left.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing