One-woman show wrestles with complicated emotion

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This article was published 04/04/2024 (911 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s an old equation: comedy is tragedy plus time.

How much time, however, depends on the comedian.

“The truth is, I’m one of those perverse creatures — it doesn’t take very long,” says Diane Flacks with a laugh. “I’m one of those people that, literally in the midst of tragedy, I see it.”

Flacks, 58, is a Emmy, Gemini and Dora-nominated playwright/performer/TV writer (Kids in the Hall, Workin’ Moms and Baroness Von Sketch Show) whose new one-woman comedy, Guilt: A Love Story, was born out of a personal tragedy: a divorce that blew up her family. Except Flacks was the one to end things.

She was, as she puts it, both the bomb and in the middle of the bomb.

And then she was left to wrestle with her guilt — an all-consuming, ever-present guilt.

In writing Guilt: A Love Story, Flacks began with a central question: what is guilt, anyway?

“This is the fundamental, literally fundamental, question of the play,” Flacks says. “For some of us, it’s a moral construct. Being brought up in a Jewish family, and sort of my particular kind of Jewish family, guilt really formed the basis of our moral code, in a way. And it was a feeling you wanted to avoid, so you did what you could to behave in a way that wouldn’t cause you to feel it.”

Through her research, Flacks encountered different perspectives. Is guilt a state of being? Does it even exist or is it something we’ve created?

“As I did more deep diving into it, I realized it’s so complicated that it can only be a multiple sort of fractal of things. It has to be both good and bad. It has to be a feeling and a morality. It has to be all those things because it becomes pretty unshakable; you’re in the grip of it.”

And Flacks was certainly in the grip of it. After she ended things with her ex, she felt, as she wrote in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, like she was “walking around with a raccoon in a cage, inside my chest, at all times” (can you tell she’s from Toronto?). Guilt was something she had to feel; she could not escape and avoid it.

Trouble was, Flacks began thinking guilt was something she deserved to feel, “to the point where not only is this not helping, it’s making everything worse for everyone,” she says.

“My inability to not act at a place of guilt was making me not being myself at all. And then I realized that it was a state of being that I couldn’t just logically or even with some emotional maturity, let go of. It was something that I had to allow to pass.”

Guilt: A Love Story is Flacks’ fifth one woman show; her past works — including Bear With Me, based on her book of the same name about pregnancy and motherhood — have also used the personal to explore the universal.

Guilt is fertile ground to mine for both humour and relatability; it’s felt keenly by women, and especially by mothers.

“I’m using myself as the sieve through which the material flows. I’m willing to focus on my own faults and my own problems and magnify those as a way for an audience to go, ‘Oh, OK. That’s a funhouse mirror. If she’s that bad, and she can get through it. Oh, my God, I felt exactly that,’” she says.

The subtitle for the play — which runs 80 minutes with no intermission — is “a love story,” which is, in part, to help the audience out a bit. “My friend Bruce (McCulloch, of Kids in the Hall) always says, ‘Tell them it’s a comedy!’ because it’s funny,” she says.

“But also, you know, it isn’t about self flagellation, or excusing yourself, or all the terrible things that we should all feel bad about. It’s about love.

“If you don’t love, you’re not going to feel guilt. If you don’t let yourself love and really care, then you won’t have anything to feel guilty about.

“And I guess part of the redemption or the way through is to love again. Keep loving.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com