B is for “balloon,” “birthday,” “basketball,” “band-aid.” And also “bitch.” It’s also the third letter in “Rebecca,” the shared name of the two characters in playwright/performer Sara Farb’s one-woman play R-E-B-E-C-C-A, directed by Richard Greenblatt, which opened at the Theatre Passe Muraille backspace last night.
The two Rebeccas are based on Farb’s younger sister Rebecca: one real (May, born prematurely and diagnosed as developmentally delayed when she was a small child) and one made up (July, based on Farb’s imaginings about what Rebecca would have been like if she weren’t developmentally delayed). Their lives and stories running parallel, both are celebrating their 18th birthdays – and both end up at the same summer camp (May as a camper and July as a counsellor), where these two Rebeccas connect in a fantastic and surprising way.
May Rebecca is a physically full-grown young woman, her mind frozen in time as a pre-schooler of three or four years old. The play opens with her birthday party, projected silently onscreen upstage, as she blows out her birthday candles and receives a piece of cake with a blue flower on it. The celebration is interrupted as she becomes clearly angry and stomps off camera. She enters and takes up a spot on the stairs – she’s in a time out. She wanted a second piece of cake with the pink flower and became enraged when she was denied. This is where we start to see the world through her eyes and hear her story, told in her own words.
Opposite the stairs in May Rebecca’s world is a step-like rock formation by the water at a summer camp, where July Rebecca broods about her approaching 18th birthday, recording her thoughts and feelings on a video camera. A darkly moody and sardonically funny young woman, this Rebecca takes morbid delight in her own sense of apocalypse. She is convinced that the moment she turns 18 – at exactly 4:14 p.m. – will be her last. Her impending sense of personal doom is clarified by the emerging revelation of her severe depression diagnosis.
Farb does an excellent job winding the story in and out and around the two women, the characters sharply defined and transitions smoothly executed (with movement consultation from Viv Moore). May Rebecca is playful and endearing, bright and present; a lover of Disney princesses, Sesame Street, elephants and basketball – and camp counsellor Dave. Her responses to the world are immediate, deep, largely positive and always dead honest. And her smile glows big and bright. As July Rebecca, Farb is darkly funny and Holden Caulfield-like, her biting sense of humour conjuring up mocking nicknames for the phonies who inhabit her world – except for the developmentally delayed kids, where the monikers become playfully descriptive. Drawing much of her imagery from World of Warcraft characters and themes, she compares them to Troggs – but not in a cruel way, even though she refers to them as “tards.” Like the Troggs, she sees the developmentally delayed kids as doing what they want, when they want – with no apologies and no regrets. She sees beauty in their genuine responses and individuality – and wishes she could be more like them.
As Farb notes, and July Rebecca realizes, “All it takes is something on a microscopic level to define a person’s entire existence.” And when the two Rebeccas see each other, wordlessly connecting across the space between them, there is bright light and love and beauty.
R-E-B-E-C-C-A is a magical, funny and moving piece of storytelling, allowing the audience to see and experience the world from a perspective that is rarely presented onstage – or anywhere. Get yourself out to the TPM backstage space to see this remarkable play.
R-E-B-E-C-C-A runs in the TPM backspace until March 1. You can book tickets online here.
life with more cowbell 