Zach Brown as Daniel Waugh and Steven Koutsomitopoulos as Glenn Waugh.
How Exile Melts opens with a lone actress meddling about in her kitchen, humming to herself while settling down at the table to drink her morning cup of earl grey. You wonder who she is and what she’ll do next, but mid-thought, a screen pulls down from the ceiling displaying an airport gate. You hear a boarding call for the next flight to Halifax. This is not the last time the director will cleverly shift the scene this way. Spotlights then appear, revealing three people preparing to board planes leaving three different cities– Montreal, Toronto, and Boston, yet all are headed for the same destination. You have now met the entire cast; a mere group of four that will draw you into a story of a dysfunctional family, a story that every audience member will find all too real and all too relatable.
The first to board her flight is the elder sister, Julia. Julia is as stressed out and uptight as lawyers come. Piled with work, she relies on wine and cigarettes to get her through her long days working as a lawyer in Toronto. The next sibling, the elder brother, Glenn, hops on a plane leaving from Montreal. Glenn is your stereotypical, over-the-top, flamboyantly gay starving artist. From his paisley ascot to his tight orange pants, he isn’t afraid to show all of Halifax which team he plays for. Last but not least, the youngest brother Daniel boards his flight departing from Boston. Daniel is the typical scatterbrained professor who appears to be quite oblivious to anything outside the academic world. His look says it all: shirt untucked, dress pants wrinkled, and shoes that haven’t been polished in years. They are all on their way to visit Anna, the youngest and most innocent of the bunch. Soft-spoken and kind-hearted, she cares for her ill father in their family home on the East Coast.
As the play progresses, you learn more and more about each individual character: who they are, what their past was like, and how they got to where they are now. Every so often, the setting departs from the set of the worn-out living room with a shabby couch and tattered rug that has seen better days. The only thing indicative of the set change is the monitor, which depicts scenes from Montreal’s Gay Village to P.E.I.’s Cavendish Beach, telling each character’s story. When asked how he thought of the scene changes, McGill English professor and director Patrick Neilson explained, “The screen images are there to support the speeches because many audience members would not be familiar with the places that are mentioned in the script— the maritime provinces are beautiful!”
Since this play is a family affair, you can expect to hear a few arguments. Innocent nitpicking turns into climactic fights between the siblings with no room for politeness or diplomacy. The actors do justice to every line of the script, often dealing with very sensitive issues. They hurl their lines across the stage with such emotion and conviction, sounding as though they mean every single one of them.
When it came to these heated arguments, the actors weren’t acting anymore. They were the characters. Neilson explained how these were the most challenging scenes for the actors: “…they are the ones that touch their own lives most closely; the play deals with some very intimate subjects so we had to laugh a lot in rehearsal to relieve tension.”
Cara Krisman as Julia Waugh and Hannah Siden as Anna Waugh.
One character that elicits constant laughter is Glenn, the twenty-nine year-old artist trying to make a name for himself in the Montreal queer scene. His snide remarks aimed at his goofy brother Daniel come one after another as he spins around in his ill father’s wheelchair. When asked how he thought of Glenn’s persona, playwright and McGill student Dane Stewart replied, “One of the ideas behind his character is that just because he is very stereotypical it shouldn’t devalue his identity. In my experience with the LGBTQ community, I think that stereotypical traits are often heightened as a sort of defensive mechanism, and Glenn’s character is that idea taken to its extreme.”
This is the first time the McGill Drama and Theatre Program has run a full-length production written by a McGill student. Stewart’s work caught Neilson’s eye in his Canadian drama and theatre class. It is not only the first time Stewart’s writing has made it to the stage, it is the first play he has ever written. Jaw-dropping, I know. When asked what it was like seeing his words turn into reality Stewart explained, “It’s very encouraging to see how much meaning a talented group of people can give to a text. Though the script is mine, the actualization of that script onstage has taken many of my ideas to places I couldn’t have imagined on my own.”
The final scene leaves you hanging in both good ways and bad. If you’re someone who loves closure, it leaves you begging for more. When speaking with Stewart, the first thing I wanted to ask was, “So what happens in the end?”
“The final scene was the hardest to write,” Stewart explained. “It was very difficult for me to decide how much of the story I wanted to resolve. If it ended too positively I was worried it would defeat a lot of the messages in the show, but too negative an ending would eliminate all feelings of hope, and I do want the play to retain at least some hope.”
With a heart-wrenching story that still manages to elicit laughter, and an immensely talented cast and crew, How Exile Melts is a must-see. In fact, I want to see it again just to see those heated arguments again and again, and then maybe again once more. Whether you come from a family of two or a family of twenty-two, you’ll be sure to take away something from this production.
For more information, check out the Facebook event page. For tickets contact 514-398-6070 or email publicity.english@mcgill.ca.
Location: Moyse Theatre Hall, McGill University Arts Building. 853 Sherbrooke St. W.
Showtimes: November 21st-22nd, and 27th-29th, 7:30pm.
Photos by Owen Egan.