Mandy E. MacLean. Lighting design by Logan Raju Cracknell. Photo by Matt Carter.
The hiraeth collective’s hiraeth, created and performed by Mandy E. MacLean, and directed for this SummerWorks production by Leah Holder, takes the audience on an intimate solo show personal history tour of teenage memories, with a longing for identity and a sense of belonging at the heart of the storytelling. Nostalgic, wistful and endearing in its humour and poignancy, it’s a reminder that you can’t really go home again, but you can visit for a brief time and maybe even take away something new. hiraeth opened at the Media Arts Centre in the Gamma Gallery yesterday afternoon.
MacLean joins the audience in the round, bursting with nervous energy and apology. A soldier’s kid who grew up in a Canadian Forces PMQ (Private Military/Married Quarters), as an adult, she searches through the dark of the basement, shouting to her mother upstairs as she rummages through storage containers to find her packed away stuff in a garbage bag. This personal archeological dig through the past reveals cassette tapes of teen journaling and music favourites—taking her back to a younger self who overheard parental arguments and feared for her father’s safety.
An awkward, bespectacled middle schooler nicknamed “Dung Beetle” by a mean girl classmate, and experiencing those awkward, wonderful first crush feels for a boy named Michael, she’s also navigating the excitement and concerns about the upcoming Y2K New Year and the big changes she anticipates it will bring. A flashlight becomes a male friend—not her boyfriend—and her other hand, wearing her glasses, becomes herself as she re-enacts a first kiss and later dancing at the New Year’s Eve party. Her heart set on the ever-evasive Michael, that first kiss was merely a practice run for him, and she’s painfully aware and wary of advancing her already precarious social standing by any assumptions that she was with a “loser”.
It’s an intimate, immersive experience—where the audience becomes her confidantes, fellow party goers and even her mother—as MacLean includes and addresses us directly while mapping out the scary, awkward, confusing and marvelous moments from her life as a teen; in search of home and identity, and mourning what was and what could have been, in an endearingly funny, vulnerable and poignant performance.
“Hiraeth” is a Welsh term for a feeling of homesickness for a home you can’t go back to—or maybe never even existed. Part nostalgia, part grief experience, part interior journey, hiraeth lives up to its name. You can’t go home again—and the trip you take through memory and personal artifacts maybe only highlight what you took with you. But maybe the attempt can unearth something new.
hiraeth continues in the Toronto Media Arts Centre Gamma Gallery (second floor, hang a hard right when you get to the top of the stairs) until August 17; check the show page for exact dates/times. Tickets available online or in person at the box office; seating is limited, so consider booking ahead.
life with more cowbell 