Hir

At The Annex (823 Seymour Street) until December 8, 2018
Tickets from $28 at pitheatre.com/hir

Posted November 25, 2018

How can a play about a broken family be so bloody funny? That’s the genius of playwright Taylor Mac.

Hir (a transgender pronoun replacement for ‘him’ or ‘her’ and pronounced ‘here’) makes all the rest of the dysfunctional families in all the other dysfunctional family plays look well-oiled, running smoothly and blissfully happy.

Playwright Mac calls Hir “Absurd Realism” which he defines as “absurdity that comes from a heightened but realistic point of view. . . realistic characters in a realistic circumstance that is so extreme it is absurd”. Take Hir and cast Deb Williams in it, as Richard Wolfe, artistic director of Pi Theatre, does and you might get emotional whiplash trying to decide when to stop laughing and perhaps to begin weeping.

Williams is one of the original Mom’s The Word moms and once again she’s a mom in Hir. We’ve seen Williams be funny before but this is her Personal Funniest with Jessie award written all over it. She’s fearless. She’s outrageous. She can wring laughs out of a line or even a simple “oh” or “aaargh” like no one else. And the playwright gives her such caustic, twisted lines that on opening night it seemed the actors were caught offguard not knowing just how long the audience would keep laughing. The packed opening night house at The Annex was jonesing for something really black and really funny; Pi Theatre sure delivered the goods.

In the play, Paige’s son Isaac has been off in the war for three years. Assigned to Mortuary Affairs, he has been picking up body parts; “I pick up guts. Exploded guts,” he tells his mother. He pukes a lot in the kitchen sink. Although no one talks about PTSD, it’s pretty obvious that’s his problem. He comes home to mom, dad and sister Maxine.

But everything has changed. The place is a mess with piles of clothes everywhere and dirty dishes in the sink. Arnold, his father, has had a stroke. He’s in a nightgown and a fuzzy multi-coloured clown wig; his face is covered in garish makeup and he’s wearing a sagging diaper. He’s only capable of grunting and spitting out the occasional word. If you’ve ever wanted to see actor Andrew Wheeler in what appears to be a soggy Huggie, now’s your chance.

Isaac’s sister Maxine is now transgendering into Max with what ‘ze’ (his preferred pronoun for himself) calls “mones” – hormones. He dreams of leaving home and joining a group of anarchist queers, a “radical fairy commune where they have gender queers who have actual discourse and ideas and where they grow their own food and recycle and have heart circles and sexual freedom.” Jordan Fowlie makes a sweet and bewildered Max, a little lost and confused in the midst of the family breakdown and his own sexual transformation.

Paige is struggling to go with the flow; she’s giddy with the various “paradigm shifts” (as she calls them) the family is going through: “We don’t do cooking”, “We don’t do laundry”, “We don’t do TV”, “We don’t do houses”, “We don’t do alcohol”. “We don’t do chicken.” “We don’t do things”. She’s trying hard to be tolerant of the expanding gender possibilities: LGBTTSQQIAA and counting.

With Arnold, we are caught coming and going; he’s brutalized by Paige who treats him worse than a dog, consigning him to a cardboard box to sleep in. Then we hear what kind of husband and father he was prior to the stroke. Suddenly we’re not so sure about him. Andrew Wheeler brings Arnold alive  with few words.

As Isaac, Victor Dolhai plays more for realism than for absurdity but eventually the tragedy – and it really feels like it – is his: “I would tell you to kill yourself here but I don’t want to clean the mess”, his mother tells  him. How’s that for a mother’s unconditional love?

Director Wolfe keeps it all just this side of absurdism, letting Hir be uproariously funny and eventually not funny at all. In the world of Hir, the American Dream is long gone and the middle class is going down the toilet. This was a family. The USA was a nation. All that’s left are body parts.