THEATRE REVIEW

May 2025 | Volume 251

 

Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go is only 55 minutes long. But Churchill says more about death and dying in less than an hour than most other playwrights could say in a trilogy of full-length plays.

Here We Go unfolds in a trilogy of scenes. A group of people attends a funeral. A man who has just died speaks to us from wherever he is. A caregiver helps an elderly woman in and out of her wheelchair.

Western Gold Theatre’s mandate is to showcase older actors, and here, director Kathryn Bracht works with some of the best in the city. And the cast rotates roles, so on alternate nights the characters in the second and third scenes are played by different actors.

The night I saw it the actors in the first scene were Bernard Cuffling, Rosy Frier-Dryden, Richard Newman, Kate Robbins, and Peihwen J. Tai, the only one not a senior. Part of Western Gold’s mandate is also to help kick-start the careers of younger performers.

Their talk in fragmented, unfinished sentences concerns the deceased, his tics and foibles. All that’s left of a life are bits and scraps of other people’s memories. But what really registers is the shock of each character breaking the fourth wall to tell us when and in what circumstances each of them would go on to die. Just a quiet reminder that none of us gets out of here alive.

The second section’s monologue was performed by David Bloom the night I attended, this dyspeptic dead man kvetching about the awfulness of life, how unfair it is, wondering if he’s in hell or purgatory. Bloom is very funny. And then the Churchillian turnabout: his recognition that “you’re just a thing that happens, for a short time”—and how precious that thing and time are.

The final section is a coup de théâtre, more than worthy of Beckett. For about fifteen minutes, without a word of dialogue, we watch a caregiver (Bernard Cuffling) assist an elderly woman (Rosy Frier-Dryden) toget in and out of her wheelchair. He meticulously helps put on her cardigan and slippers, puts each of her feet on the wheelchair footrest, then he reverses the action, the woman helping him help her as much as she can. Every so often the caregiver takes a beat to catch his breath, moving to a chair where he sits for a moment. In those moments we see only his face thanks to John Webber’s subtle lighting, Cuffling’s care and exhaustion and recognition playing beautifully in his every expression.

I couldn’t help thinking about LapuLapu, all those dedicated Filipina caregivers, all those deaths. It’s an extraordinarily resonant scene, a delicious taste of Caryl Churchill’s genius.

 

 

 

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