Super Seniors

 

 

PAL Studio Theatre to June 23, 2024
Tickets from $33 at www.westerngoldtheatre.org

Posted June 8, 2024

You can call Elizabeth a “super senior” at well over a hundred years old, but fergawdsake, don’t call her Lizzie or Liz or worst of all “dear”. Elizabeth, played by Super Senior playwright Kathryn Shaw, will turn her caustic wit on you and verbally flay you if you do.

Elizabeth has landed back at the Fairfield Seniors’ Residence after a failed attempt at ending it all by going AWOL to the beach in her wheelchair and swimming alone out into deep water. She always loved swimming. “But”, she reports, some “do-gooder” hauled her out of the water (“Dammit”) and she finds herself once again in the company of Hildy (Annabel Kershaw) and Mildred (Patti Allan). Mildred is 105 or 106 and Hildy is approaching 110 (and hoping to set a record). All three are at the mercy of Twyla (Alisha Davidson), the facility’s patronizing nurse, and Cameron (Matheus Severo), the annoyingly perky therapist who, for example, thinks an outing to the mall would be fun. “You’ve got to be kidding”, snorts Elizabeth.

Kathryn Shaw knows a thing or two about theatre. She recently retired as the artistic director of Studio 58 where she mentored hundreds – probably thousands – of students from 1985-2020. A recipient of the Sam Payne Award and the Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance (VPTA) Career Achievement Award, she has also been elected to the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame.  In short, she has cred up the ying yang.

Who but Shaw, a first-time playwright after all – would score the amazing set designer Pam Johnson, the fabulous lighting designer Itai Erdal, the celebrated costume designer Sheila White and percussionist extraordinaire June Mirochnick on the first time out of the gate? The show, directed by Studio 58 graduate and award-winning theatre maker Anita Rochon, looks fantastic: white on white, classy paintings on the walls, good furniture; not a dumping ground for seniors, this is a high end retirement home.

It’s such a hoot for Vancouver theatre-goers to see Shaw, Kershaw and Allan together. Forever-young Kershaw makes a sexy centenarian, busting moves and flirting with their food server (Severo). Hildy, like Elizabeth is definitely all there; she eats dessert first because, well, you never know. Mildred, on the other hand, keeps repeating, “Who am I? I don’t know who I am” and yet when asked who she is, she replies – as if by rote – her first, middle and last name without hesitation. Allan does this thing with her fingers, sort of like raking the air distractedly. When Mildred hears certain words, she breaks into song – Wooly Bully, Like a Rolling Stone, The Lion Sleeps Tonight and The Party’s Over, for example. If Allan weren’t so funny, she would be sad.

Shaw’s Elizabeth is always looking for a way out; does anyone have a gun or a big bottle of pills? Can she hold her breath long enough to kill herself? Can she starve herself? But it is Shaw’s eyes – like pee holes in the snow – that just break you up. Elizabeth – and Shaw – are mordantly funny.

Act 2 opens with an excitedly beaming Elizabeth who claims, “It’s a red letter day. I have high blood pressure.” Hoping for an alternative to a field trip to the mall, Elizabeth suggests, “a little visit to the crematorium”. When told she has good genes, she says “If I had good genes, I’d be dead.” That’s the kind of humour that keeps Super Seniors moving funnybone- tickling along.

A really novel and very cool addition to this Western Gold Theatre production is June Mirochnick on percussion. As each scene changes, Mirochnick – well-lit and off to stage right – performs a little riff to pass the time it takes to moves the wheelchairs around. Sometimes it feels a little  like percussive punctuation to the scene just past; and sometimes it feels a little  like a prelude to what’s to come. It’s smart, it’s entertaining and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done just this way before. Mirochnick has great instincts.

Super Seniors is super entertaining. It’s hard to say how much pleasure derives from knowing these actors so well over the years. Oh, lord, look at what Patti Allan is doing now. Or, OMG, Kershaw is still foxy even when she’s playing a character one hundred and nine years old. And it’s also difficult to assess how funny it would be to, say, those under, I dunno, sixty?

But for those of us of a certain age, it’s hilarious. Opening night was packed with theatre folk who, if they were open heart surgeons or test pilots would have had to retire years ago. But theatre makers keep on making theatre and I’m grateful for that. In a culture that celebrates all things youthful, it’s good to know that, at least in the theatre, age can be an advantage – especially if you’re really, really funny.  Kathryn Shaw is that. And more.