How to Disappear Completely

The Cultch Historic Theatre to March 22, 2025

Tickets from $29 at 604-251-1363 or www.thecultch.com

Posted March 16, 2025

I saw the first production of Itai Erdal’s How to Disappear Completely at the 2011 Chutzpah! Festival and I was curious about how the show might have changed over time. After all, in 2011 Erdal was not in a relationship, admittedly lonely and childless and that was a big part of his story and the story of his mother’s death back in 2001.

Now he is a different man: happily married and father of a beautiful little boy. Plus, his career as a lighting designer has taken off and the well-deserved awards keep rolling in; at last count, he has lit more than 350 shows.

Of course, How to Disappear Completely is still about his Paraguayan mother Mery – whom we feel we know because of Erdal’s theatrical tribute to her – but his perspective has changed entirely. “Every person should have a child”, she told him sometime in the last nine months of her life. At that point in his life, it didn’t seem likely. But now he has a child, and it has made all the difference. And he is much more comfortable on stage now although he still says, “I’m not an actor”. But he’s a gifted storyteller, balancing humour, poignancy and a “tell-it-like-it-is” honesty: she was 57; she died in his arms. She did not live long enough to see him as a loving husband and father.

In 2000, when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Erdal dropped everything, put his life on hold and went home to Jerusalem to be her caregiver. An aspiring documentary filmmaker at that time, he began filming her, photographing her, questioning her – sometimes relentlessly. While his sister was a reluctant subject, his mother was mostly willing, sometimes impatiently, and she teasingly turned the camera on him on occasion, too. It was his mother’s suggestion that he had the material for a documentary film.

Erdal subsequently decided he was not destined to become a documentary filmmaker but How to Disappear Completely, in collaboration with James Long, Anita Rochon and Emelia Symington-Fedy, took shape eleven years later. It has been performed more than two dozen times pre-pandemic; this Cultch mounting, in collaboration with The Chop Theatre and The Elbow Theatre, is the first post-pandemic production. Rather than dredging up grief over and over again, Erdal says performing his one-man show night after night about his mother’s passing is “a joyous experience”.

It’s such an interesting hybrid: mixed in with all the film clips and still photos, Erdal shares his continuing fascination with lights and lighting design. How, by mixing blue and amber, he gets certain effects. How he can manipulate audience response to certain characters by lighting them in a square, in a spot, from below, or from the side. The gels. His favourite lamp: PAR can. Favourite equipment: the shin-buster.  As he plays with the lights, he explains what he is doing and why. Lighting 101.

And somehow it all comes together. A kind of gently funny, thoughtful meditation on lighting, love, death and the power of memory.  How, with a lighting designer’s tools, a dark night can turn into a sunny morning, or winter into summer, and how, viewed from a different perspective, the sad passing of a loved one can be the genesis of a joy-filled celebration of a full and vibrant life.

Fourteen years after How to Disappear Completely first graced the stage, Itai Erdal’s mother has still not disappeared completely and Erdal’s young son will know his grandmother through the words and images created by his father. Maybe it’s not the same as Grandma making favourite cookies for her little grandson or reading a bedtime story to him, but it’s definitely a very close, very intimate next best thing.