“Other People” is a curious title for a one-man show.
The one man in question is the show’s star and author: multi-award-winning Canadian playwright and director Daniel Brooks. Almost immediately after taking the stage, he displays an image of a pair of lungs, and explains how he was diagnosed in 2018 with Stage 4 lung cancer (“not the kind you get from smoking”). The urgency of this diagnosis has prompted him, Director Brendan Healey and Dramaturge Daniel MacIvor to bring the world premiere of Other People to Canadian Stage.
The show is a meditation on the prospective dissolution of self. And as it happens, the act of meditation is one part of its subject matter. As Brooks – by turns purposeful, pensive and playful – stalks the stage, he narrates his experience at a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Montebello, Quebec. At the retreat, which he attended when the cancer diagnosis was still fresh, there was to be no eye contact and no communication.
Just “focus on the body” and “focus on the breath”.
In opposition to these remembered edicts, Brooks recounts this experience in chattery, stream-of consciousness detail. Other People alternates between lecture-like narration – with the house lights up for urgent, one-sided conversation with the audience – and stream-of-consciousness introspection, when the light hugs the stage, and the hero goes inside.
Always, there are words. Lots of words.
At the best of times, the act of meditation creates conflict between the aspiration to achieve stillness and the inevitable mental chatter that disrupts it. But commands to focus on the body and the breath gain urgency and poignancy when that body is cancer-ridden and that breath is growing short.
Enter “other people” . . . to amuse, obsess and focus our hero.
The first kind are his fellow participants in the meditation retreat – to whom he assigns nicknames like Tony Small, Red Crocs, the Regurgitator and Handsome Jason. They distract and engage him, getting in the way of his meditation. He observes them, creates narratives for them, even fancies himself in comic competition with them . . . before finally speaking with them, once the retreat is complete.
Next are family and friends: “her” who burrows up into his mind repeatedly; his daughters who (thanks to cancer) will now return his calls; and his broader family, whose impacts from the Holocaust he reflects upon.
The final other people are us, the audience – without whom this meditation upon the meditation retreat would have no meaning or shape.
The net effect is fascinating and difficult to encapsulate. Other People is a disorienting liminal exercise in being both inside the self and with other people, and inside the past, present and future at one time (like the brushstrokes on Monet’s The Water Lillies, one of many touchstone works Brooks references in his monologue).
During the show, the loquacious Brooks is at pains to explain that his ‘real’ self is not the same as the self he is depicting on stage. The “real” Brooks has stage 4 cancer, yes . . . but this performance is not, strictly speaking, true. Other People is playback: like a studio-recorded song, it has been edited, re-mixed with attempted “equanimity” (a touchstone concept) in the studio of the mind.
The best way to describe the experience of Other People may be through analogy.
When astronomers use their high-powered telescopes to locate new exoplanets far out in space, they don’t actually see these planets. They detect the planets indirectly: as absences, or plausible explanations for changes in the light and gravitation exerted on the bodies around them.
So, too, do we develop our sense of the ‘real’ Brooks from the unspooling account of our on-stage narrator’s impact on – and by – those “other people” being remembered, conjured, and directly spoken to. From his animated riffing, recollecting, reflecting and reinventing, which test and deconstruct the boundaries of the self.
In the end, Other People is a theatrical exoplanet of tightly compacted language refracted by relationships. Like a mysterious distant astronomical find, it is satisfying to detect its shape and probe its depths, even if it is ultimately best defined by what it is not.
It is not sad, though empathy nudges us towards pathos.
It is not joyous, though there is much laughter here.
It is not sobering – despite flashes of realization and the pressing weight of mortality.
And it’s not uplifting – though at moments, it gorgeously slips the bonds of self, time and space.
Other People runs at the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre until April 3, 2022. Reserve tickets here.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022
