Stick Around At Here For Now Theatre – A Review
Here For Now Theatre describes its season opener, the world premiere of Stick Around by Rebecca Northan, as a comedy. “Comedy” is apparently Canadian patois for “it’ll rip your heart out.”
While it has a few laughs, Stick Around is the “mildly fictionalized” and decidedly downbeat story of how the playwright’s mother died from a brutal onset of melanoma that had metastasized to her liver, lungs, and brain. If you have recently lost a loved one to cancer, you have been warned.
Northan’s artistic horizons have broadened tremendously since I first saw her in Blind Date, her hilarious improvised cabaret act, in 2019. She is a co-creator of Goblin: Macbeth, which I have not seen and Goblin: Oedipus, which I hope to see at the Stratford Festival in October. She has also appeared onstage at the Shaw Festival in The Apple Cart. Her participatory mystery show Murder-on-the-Lake debuts at Shaw later this season.
With Stick Around, she reveals herself as an assured creator of dramatic theatre.
Stick Around is narrated by Rachel (Chantelle Han) on the eve of her 46th birthday, an event will special significance since her mother Marge (Daniela Vlaskalic) died at 45.
Han gives a beautifully modulated performance that coaxed tears from me more than once. My only quibble was that she doesn’t look a day over 30.
Vlaskalic finds subtle humour and great sympathy in the prickly Marge, a self-made single mother who has risen to be the CEO of Calgary’s Roto-Rooter franchise.
Eric Craig, listed in the programme as “the guy with the nice tush,” does a nice job with a variety of roles, most prominently as Dr. Arlington, the no-nonsense but compassionate oncologist who shepherds Marge and Rachel through the ravages of melanoma.
Stick Around is deadly accurate, as anyone who has experienced cancer in their family will recognize. It is also educational. I learned, for example, that in Canada it is illegal to scatter human cremains anywhere except on Crown Lands, private property, or in certain cemeteries. Now they tell me!
Kevin Kruchkywich has directed with the light touch the material demands and the sensitive lighting by Louise Guinand is virtually a fourth cast member.
Stick Around is an impressive opener for Here For Now’s 2025 season. I quite liked it, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer in the last – oh, I don’t know – ten or twenty years.
Footnote: This is Here For Now’s first season in their new home, the renovated registry office next to the Perth County Courthouse. The black box space maintains the small-scale intimacy of the tents they have used in seasons past, minus the soggy ground and mosquitos.
Stick Around continues at Here For Now Theatre through June 8, 2025. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit the Here For Now website.
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image: Art work by Mark Uhre, Here For Now Theatre
