Scratch
By Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman
Directed by adhri zhina mandiela
Featuring Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman, Kevin Bundy, Monica Dottor, Catherine Fitch, Ryan Hollyman, Mary Ann McDonald
Runs October 4th – November 2nd @ Factory Theatre Mainspace
By Matt McGeachy
The summer after my first year of university, my favourite high school teacher died of a rare form of cancer. She had battled for a year and received the most advanced medical treatment available, but in the end there was nothing the doctors could do for her. I visited her several times in the hospital — once when it seemed she was in remission and getting better, and then one last time while she was in palliative care. It was the first time I had ever seen someone I cared about dying. When I heard the news that she had finally died, I was devastated but, as her former student, there was a proscribed amount of grief allotted to me by society. I was not, after all, her child or a member of her family. It was not my story of grief. Yet the loss touched me deeply, and I still think of her often.
I thought of her in the Factory Theatre Mainspace while watching Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman’s new play. Scratch is an autobiographical play about the death of her mother, writer Carole Corbeil. Corbeil-Coleman, who wrote and starred in the play, has created a beautiful, if youthfully flawed, new work that bridges many individual stories of grief.
Anna (Corbeil-Coleman) is engaged throughout the play in a battle with lice, which her artist-parents decline to treat with chemical shampoos. Anna’s emotional journey throughout the play is very honestly written; unfortunately, Corbeil-Coleman acts the character in too vacuous a manner to convey her full potential. This distancing of character from the powerful script dampened what was, ultimately, her story.
Monica Dottor as Anna’s best friend Madelyn, who idolizes Anna’s mother, delivers a masterful performance as a mourner excluded from the officially proscribed family circle when she breaks down from the news of the death. Her performance brought me to tears, and provided the most satisfying catharsis in the show.
Anna’s aunt, played by Catherine Fitch, is an equally heart-wrenching character; unable to emotionally grasp what is happening around her, she defaults to a position of order and authority. Fitch portrays the aunt in a way that evokes pity from the audience — she wants to feel and to understand, but anytime her emotions rise too close to the surface, she pushes them back down again. Fitch’s ability to show this struggle, through her physical demeanor and her voice, was a pleasure to watch.
Anna’s father (Kevin Bundy) is a conventionally-written grieving husband, but as a father figure he is curiously absent from the story. The mother (Mary Ann McDonald, with angelic white hair and blue eyes) is the least-developed character, and though she shows beautiful dignity in death, it was as though Corbeil-Coleman was afraid to truly develop the character’s own point of view: her fear, acceptance, pain.
The poet (Ryan Hollyman), who began as a hired caretaker for Anna’s mother, becomes Anna’s infatuation. In one of the most psychologically interesting parts of the play, Anna learns of her mother’s death while performing oral sex on the poet, who is obsessed with the tragic beauty of death and dying. The poet is an accurate metaphor for tragic drama as a whole: romanticizing death and defeat, and through catharsis, creating art.
This play presented a very honest depiction of a young woman’s grief, and it is through this honesty that it succeeds. Grief is not easy to deal with, least of all as a young adult or teenager, and Corbeil-Coleman poetically shows its face. For the many young people who can identify with any of the three young characters (Anna, Madelyn, the Poet), this show will stir deeply felt emotions.
Whatever its youthful faults, this is a wonderfully rare example of how drama and therapy can coalesce and, in Corbeil-Coleman’s own words, help “us all be less lonely for a short while.”
