Here For Now Festival review: Ghosts of My House offers a bleak look at grief and moving on
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By: Galen Simmons
How can a family move on when grief seems to be tearing apart its very foundation piece by piece?
Playwright Susanna Fournier and director Leora Morris ask that question in their world-premiere production of Ghosts of My House this season at Here For Now Theatre in Stratford.
Centering on a family reeling from the not so recent death of B (Sarah Wilson), the eldest daughter of Mum (Laura de Carteret) and sister to L (Siobhan O’Mally), the youngest sibling, and M (Kelly Van der Burg), the middle sibling, the story told on stage follows the four women as they try to cope with their grief after such a devastating loss.
But it isn’t just the loss that’s weighing them down. A brother who never appears onstage is losing himself to mental illness and becoming increasingly unstable and dangerous, refusing to take his medication.
Mum is locked in a seemingly never-ending argument with the ghost (or maybe the memory) of her dead daughter, isolating herself from the rest of the world, drinking heavily and contemplating suicide.
L and M, meanwhile, are doing their best to hold the family together even though they, themselves, are struggling with grief. M is burning herself out by working too hard and spending every moment she has to herself trying to take care of her mother and preparing the house to go up for sale to solve Mum’s money problems; and L is dealing with the guilt she feels for leaving her crumbling family to go off and find a life for herself while also trying to reconnect with her estranged father – a point of contention between her, L and their mother.
And B, whether she is in fact a ghost or something even less tangible, is struggling to come to terms with her own death, the result of anorexia-induced heart failure. Though she wants to move on to whatever comes next, she finds herself still mired in her mother’s darkness, trying and failing to set her on a path back towards the light.
Like many of Here For Now Theatre’s plays, this production doesn’t rely on an elaborate set or fancy props. Minus the two prop guns stored in the family’s safe, the only props used on stage could be found in the back of a family minivan after a Saturday of shopping – two bags of dirt, two dozen small, potted flowers, a bottle of gin, a family size bag of chips, about a dozen empty mason jars and a few other inconsequential items.
Instead, the production relies almost entirely on the raw emotion and chemistry between each member of the cast, heightened and enhanced by sudden changes in lighting. The play’s excitement lives in the desperate arguments between mother and daughter, sister and sister as they hold on desperately to the systems and social expectations that have only served to tear them further apart.
As they each approach their breaking point, on the verge of the family fracturing in ways it may not be able to come back from, their love for one another allows them to open up about how their feeling, ask for the help they need and work towards letting go of the grief that has kept them trapped for too long.
B, meanwhile, learns she needs to look after herself and let go of her perceived responsibility for her mother to find eternal rest.
Though this play ends on a positive note with the symbolic planting of flowers in the dirt, which earlier in the story was said to represent grief, this play is an emotional roller coaster with more downs than ups. Yet through it all, it’s the women’s strength and love for each other that allow them to see a path forward, let go and move on.
Ghosts of My House plays at Here For Now Theatre until July 19.
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