With Love And A Major Organ At Here For Now Theatre
Have you ever given your heart to someone? Most of us have been in love at least once in our lives, but no one gives their heart quite like the heroine of With Love and a Major Organ by Julia Lederer, the surreal, witty, and wise new comedy now at Here For Now Theatre.
Anabel (Loretta Yu) gets to know George (Nicholas Santillo) while commuting on the Toronto subway. Well, perhaps “know” is too strong a word. They exchange only a few words and Anabel doesn’t even know his name. Yet she falls madly, passionately in love with him.
Unable to bring herself to speak to George directly, Anabel pours her heart out onto a cassette tape which she slips into his bag on the subway. George is pretty much at a loss as to how to respond.
You see, when he was a wee child, his mother Mona (Kate Lynch) told him a story about a mother who had such a horrible experience with love that she replaced her son’s heart with one made out of paper so he would never be hurt as she had been. It had a profound effect on George, which no doubt explains his reticence.
His response, a cassette tape containing two words – “I” on one side and “can’t” on the other – confuses Anabel no end. Did he mean “I Can’t” or “Can’t I?” So she does the logical thing.
Reaching under her jacket, she rips her heart from her chest and sends it to him in a bloody envelope marked “with love and a major organ.” Did I mention that the play is kinda surreal?
With Love and a Major Organ charts the course of this star-crossed love as George disappears and Annabel and Mona desperately try to find him.
You’ll get no spoilers from me except for the information that Lederer has a gift for whacky similes and that With Love and a Major Organ is consistently funny. Along the way, it has some rather profound things to say about loneliness and the human need for connection.
Director Marie Farsi has given With Love and a Major Organ, in her own words, a “pared-down staging.” I don’t think I could have enjoyed it any more in a more elaborate presentation. Three chairs that constantly get shifted about is all the piece needs. When characters dine together, Farsi has them sit side by side, facing out, and scraping knife and fork together between bites; it works beautifully.
Farsi has also assembled a great cast. Kate Lynch is deliciously droll as Mona. Her timing is impeccable as she turns to Google Shrink (is that really a thing?) for free online psychotherapy and tries her hand, not too successfully, at online speed dating. You hear a lot of complaints that there are no good roles for older women. Well Lederer has written a humdinger and Lynch makes the most of it.
Loretta Yu is the picture of total commitment as the love-struck Anabel. She stalks the stage making eye contact with audience members as she describes her emotional struggles. When she is trying to get her heart back, she passes out “Have You Seen This Heart” flyers with an anatomically correct drawing of that major organ.
Nicholas Santillo has studied classical acting at LAMDA in London, Chinese martial-dance in Beijing, and stage combat in Canada, yet he has the face and demeanor of an utter innocent, which serves him well as the awkward and often befuddled George.
Dhanish Qumar Chinniah handled the sound that design made Mona’s invisible computer come to vivid life.
After the gut punch that was The Saviour, Here For Now has turned back to comedy with a brisk 90-minute show that is almost certain to lighten your heart no matter to whom you may have given it.
With Love and a Major Organ continues at Here For Now Theatre in their intimate tent behind the Stratford-Perth Museum through September 7, 2024. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Here For Now Theatre website.
[image: Here For Now Theatre; artwork by Mark Uhre]
For a complete index of reviews CLICK HERE.
Don’t miss another review or blog post! SUBSCRIBE HERE.
