OTHER PEOPLE written and performed by Daniel Brooks (Canadian Stage). Runs to April 3. $29-$84. Berkeley Street Theatre (26 Berkeley). canadianstage.com. Rating: NNNN
It’s hard to imagine the Canadian theatre scene without Daniel Brooks, a titanic figure whose collaborations – as director, writer and less frequently performer – have included works as diverse and iconic as The Noam Chomsky Lectures, Possible Worlds, Bigger Than Jesus, many monologues co-created with performer Daniel MacIvor and even an early iteration of the Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone.
But as he suggests in his show Other People, his death is inevitable. In August of 2018, he was diagnosed with terminal stage 4 lung cancer – which is not, he says with typical shrewdness, “the same kind as from smoking.”
The 105-minute show, as moving as it is profound, chronicles a 10-day meditation retreat he took in April of the following year in Montebello, Quebec. The retreat has many rules, including no talking to others (which Brooks respects) or writing (he’s snuck in a pen).
One of the things he spends his time doing, as the mostly uneventful days pass by (marked by a gong and a projection behind the mostly bare set), is write about the other people around him. All of them are annoying as hell (hence the Sartrean title), and he’s assigned them nicknames: Jason the Handsome, Red Crocs, Tony Small, the latter his assigned roommate until he, as he puts it, “played the cancer card” and got a single room.
Meditation requires he clear his mind of all thoughts, but of course he can’t. Among the things that flit through his brain are: the aches in his body; Robert Lepage; his two daughters (one of the benefits of having cancer, he jokes early on, is that his daughters now return his calls); Claude Monet’s water lilies; and literary depictions of death by Imre Kertész, Primo Levi and Leo Tolstoy.
He also dispenses advice about cancer etiquette, such as what not to do or say around people living with the illness. He can tell just in the way people say the words “How are you?” if they know about his diagnosis.
And interspersed throughout his almost stream-of-conscious ramblings are thoughts about his exes – including his wife and an unnamed partner with whom he went to India. He also reflects on his mostly unhappy childhood; there’s a powerful recurring scene in which he remembers being a neglected seven-year-old filled with rage. It’s to Brooks and director Brendan Healy’s credit that he doesn’t overstate the significance of this scene later on; the psychological implications of the moment – and the way they have affected his life – are clear.
While Brooks has directed many monologues with frequent collaborator MacIvor (who acted as a dramaturge on this show), this is his first solo performance. It’s interesting comparing the two artists’ performing styles. There are similar nervous asides and sidebars, and the occasional meta-theatrical moment when he acknowledges, with house lights suddenly turned up, that we’re at a play. But there’s a more brooding, almost misanthropic feel to the way he carries himself, and his occasional shrugs and Yiddish inflections connect him to his ancestors, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust.
Healy’s presentation of the work is much like a Brooks/MacIvor production. Kimberly Purtell’s lighting marks out moments with quiet intensity; Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design is suggestive without being intrusive. A nice addition is having Adam Lazarus as a movement coach, which allows Brooks to do everything from dance joyously, sit cross-legged on the floor or lie down, recreating a dead body.
The title works on many levels. Early on, Brooks imagines multiple universes, including one in which he doesn’t have cancer. That in turn makes us wonder whether what we’re watching is autobiography or fiction about another person named Daniel Brooks. There’s a moment late in the show when the retreat participants are finally allowed to talk to one another. It’s full of surprises. Hell might be other people, but other people can also be a source of love, joy, fascination and wonder.
The title also applies to the theatre itself. Brooks has spent his long career working in the theatre, an art form that requires collaborating with other people. And then there are those other people sitting in the audience, eager and grateful to see how one of our boldest, bravest artists reflects the world back to us.
