Play delves into young caregivers’ difficult lives

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This article was published 07/11/2019 (2503 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The play Tiny Treasures, which opens Friday, Nov. 8, at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP), asks a pointed question:

What happens in some households when it’s the kids caring for the grown-ups?

The drama by U.K. playwright Kevin Dyer focuses on one such character, 13-year-old James, who burns a candle at both ends trying to fit in his schooling while caring for his sick mother and his younger sister.

That may seem like a Dickensian premise, but it turns out to be shockingly common, says director Stephen Colella, the associate artistic director of Young People’s Theatre in Toronto. Colella helms the MTYP show, the North American première of the work, which is a two-hander with Nathaniel Hanula-James as the juvenile caregiver James and Gwendolyn Collins as his mother, Susan.

Colella says it’s been estimated that in Canada, more than 1.25 million Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 provide some form of unpaid caregiving for their families. Because kids younger than 15 aren’t factored in, that number is likely much higher.

“One of the estimations they had was that only one in a thousand young carers in Canada are getting support,” Colella says. “In the U.K., they’ve been a little bit ahead of the curve, one in 14.

“I think Canada has what is considered the lowest rate of support for caregivers to population.”

Colella’s connection to the piece is through Dyer.

“We had actually met at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., where there’s a New Play Festival every other year,” Colella says. “We had taken one of our works that we’re developing in Toronto and he had come over from the U.K. with the play he was doing called Monster Under the Bed, with Polka Theatre.

“It was hilarious,” Colella recalls. “But it was also, as I found with all his work, incredibly insightful.

“He has a real gift for listening and reflecting that in his work, especially in his work with young people,” Colella says of Dyer’s penchant for exhaustively workshopping his shows, as he did with Tiny Treasures at a British company called Theatre Hullabaloo.

“The way the development process worked was that he had gone and worked and spoken with a group of young caregivers in the U.K.,” Colella says. “I think he really understood how truly fantastic they were, how much capacity they had to be able to do these things for their family members and to keep the family going.

“I think the pat and easy response to these young people is to say: ‘That’s so sad. They shouldn’t have to do that.’

“But a lot of what he heard back from them was: ‘We can do this. We’re very capable,’” Colella says. “‘What we need is support. We need ways that we can be seen and understood.”’

“One of the classic problems we see is the stigma of being able to talk about what they do,” he says. “They can’t say to their teacher: ‘I didn’t get my homework done. I had to do this for my mom last night.’

“There’s shame around it… the feeling is that parents should be taking care and if parents aren’t taking care, there’s a failure, which might have a cascading effect, leading to a separation of family. So the answer is to keep everything quiet.”

The MTYP production runs until Nov. 17.

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