Shame-full One-woman show vulnerable, humorous examination of emotions after blowing up life By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:51 PM CDT Friday, Apr. 5, 2024

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Diane Flacks had it all. She had a wife and two boys, a “Grey Gardens-gorgeous” life they’d built together, brick by brick, wall by wall.

And then, she blew it all up. She wasn’t just in the middle of the bomb — she was the bomb, ending a 20-year relationship after falling in love with a younger woman, her “racehorse.”

It could be a promise of a new life, a new chapter in middle age, if not for the consuming, whipsawing guilt, which she describes as a raccoon trapped in a cage in her chest that she walks around with at all times.

Guilt, to borrow a TikTok phrase, is Flacks’ Roman Empire: she thinks about it all the time.

Guilt: A Love Story, the veteran playwright/actor’s fifth solo show now on at the Tom Hendry Warehouse, is a one-woman journey through a feeling she says she comes by honestly as a nice Jewish girl.

In the wreckage of her life — made legible by Jung-Hye Kim’s small, sand-piled set, which can evoke an explosion site, a beach or the deserts of the Holy Land as needed — Flacks dances, flails, crawls and swims her way through her relationship with guilt, particularly as a mother.

In fact, she’s almost never still. Under the direction of Alisa Palmer and movement coach Rebecca Harper, Flacks, 58, proves an incredibly agile and deft physical comedian who can oscillate easily from portraying her wide-eyed youngest son to a pipe-puffing Freud to Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and yes, even the raccoon in her chest.

Her impression of a Wine Mommy TikToker and a very physical scene as the instructor of a post-natal yoga class are laugh-out-loud highlights, as is her portrayal of her beloved Bubbe, who is basically a professional when it comes to guilt.

So yes, Guilt: A Love Story is a comedy, and Flacks is a very funny woman, but both play and performer are at their very best when they get serious.

Flacks does not make herself the hero of her own story. What makes Guilt work is her vulnerability, her willingness to serve up the most easily bruised and unflattering parts of herself — the parts that a comment section on, say, a momfluencer Instagram account would have an absolute field day with — to a point. There are some moments in which it feels like she might be holding back, just a bit.

And then she knocks you out.

The climax of the show — the climax of her guilt, even — doesn’t actually take place during the dissolution of her marriage. It takes place years before in the NICU, where one of her sons spent the harrowing first weeks of his life.

The scene is about how bad thoughts can make you feel like a bad person and, no spoilers here, it’s a jaw-dropping moment of theatre. This reviewer even let slip an audible “oooooof.”

Some of the jokes fall flat; the opening sequence about her drinking habits post-breakup feels hackneyed — i.e. “It’s not a cry for help, it’s a cry for sangria” — especially compared to the quality of the humour writing in the rest of the show.

But Guilt is certainly a testament to Flacks’ skills as a writer; it’s a smart show, braiding together humour, cultural and religious analysis, and pathos in an economical 85-minute runtime.

In Flacks’ hands, we are reminded that guilt is so many things — a cudgel and a moral compass and a raccoon in a cage — and it animates people in so many ways. But in this funny, moving show, Flacks reminds us that it’s also the cost of caring.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com