HEAL THYSELF
Rating

Stage 1 (Westbury Theatre)

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"But I don't like experimental theatre."

I can't think how many times I've muttered that under my breath (two or three, at least), though I'm willing to admit it says more about me than it does about theatre.

Well ... I shall mutter no more, because I have seen the light, or at the very least I've had the pleasure of watching two smart and very talented people use a stage and a few simple props to lay open their hearts and share their secrets, their deepest fears, their most fervent hopes. I've seen them dance on crutches and writhe on the floor like snakes. I've listened to their stories, and learned something about my own.

I did not expect this.

What Jonathon Neville and Carlynn Reed have written is certainly experimental. It's a performance piece about their own lives, but it is really about all of us. The Toronto actors use dance and dialogue to tell two linked stories, alternating roles. In some scenes, she plays his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. In others, he plays her son, who has a strange pain disorder doctors have been unable to diagnose.

Will I forget my son? Will I come to hate my mother? What could I have done differently? Watching them work through these life-altering problems, watching them explore such raw emotions, is painful, heartbreaking and finally uplifting.

"Maybe if I'd let him have chocolate milk in Grade 3 at school," Reed says at one point, voicing a mother's regrets, her might-have-beens.

Such simple fears haunt us all.

In the final scene, the two afflicted patients meet, and find small ways to help each other.

The hope they discover allows the rest of us to think, yes, isn't that what we're all capable of?