Dark comedy addresses awkward aspects of teen’s disability

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This article was published 31/03/2017 (3140 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The premise of Canadian playwright Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now could easily be the stuff of movie-of-the-week melodrama: A widower father who has spent his life caring for his severely disabled teenage son himself faces an unexpected medical condition that puts even more stress on an already burdened family.

Fraser doesn’t go the melodrama route. A playwright with a prickly disposition towards brutal honesty, Fraser fashions the story in the vein of a dark comedy with the father Jake Sturdy (Cory Wojcik) suffering the trials of Job, but without back-up comfort of a God. (At one point, Jake’s sister Twyla, played by Andrea del Campo, expressly wishes they did believe in God, just to have a bit of psychological relief from the extraordinary challenges of their day-to-day lives.)

Director Sarah Garton Stanley plunges you into the awkward intimacy of the Sturdy family right at the start. Jake is bathing his 17-year-old son Joey (Myles A. Taylor) and discussing his day in school. On the cusp of turning 18, Joey is starting to experience delayed sexual feelings, encompassing the issue of the unexpected erection. Since Joey’s hands are permanently curled into fists, there is little he can do to personally resolve his sexual excitement. 

This subject later comes up as uncommon pillow talk after Jake’s weekly sexual liaison with his married lover Robyn (Sharon Bajer), who suggests Jake may himself have to do something to relieve his son’s tensions, reasoning that it would be OK as long as Jake himself took no pleasure in the act.

So, yes, we’re in Brad Fraser territory: The play doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of sexual themes, in the vein of past works such as Poor Super Man and Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love.

But notwithstanding its occasionally raw content, this doesn’t have the scent of deliberate provocation that may have touched Fraser’s past work.

Indeed, if Kill Me Now isn’t likely to be celebrated as an exemplar of traditional family values, it really is a profound testament to the value of a family, unconventional as it may be. In that capacity, a pivotal character is Joey’s best friend, the aptly-named Rowdy Akers (Braiden Houle), a student at Joey’s special needs school diagnosed with diminished intelligence as a result of fetal alcohol syndrome.

With a lust for life, Rowdy compensates for his presumed slowness with an instinctive emotional intelligence that, in some situations, makes him the smartest person in the room.

Performance-wise, director Stanley manages to pull off a surprising holistic harmony given an unruly range of characters, all seen in stark relief in front of a spare, strangely elegant set design by Amy Keith. Houle’s performance may seem outsized, for example, but it does actually reflect a facet of FAS, and it also serves as a balance to del Campo’s sardonic, inwardly-directed, unlucky-in-love Twyla. 

Wojcik brings a kind of working-class-hero sensibility to the role of Jake until the role morphs into something more technically demanding, a challenge Wojcik meets with sensitivity. As a dissatisfied wife-mother seeking extra-marital self-worth, Bajer skilfully negotiates her character’s reactive range, at sensual ease with Jake, and squirmingly uncomfortable with Joey.

Taking his first stage role as Joey, Myles A. Taylor offers up an extraordinary piece of work. Like his character, Taylor lives with cerebral palsy. But unlike his character, he speaks offstage with articulate ease. If you talked on the phone with him, you wouldn’t know you were speaking with someone with a disability.

That’s worth mentioning because there should be no misconception that Taylor isn’t performing a role, and performing it with a sharp sense of comic timing and a wellspring of emotion.

He proves every bit the actor as everyone else on the stage. Such is his power that by the play’s moving conclusion, the word “disability” as applied to Taylor proves not just inappropriate but joyfully irrelevant.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter: @FreepKing