Lost at sea, adrift on grief
Persephone Productions stages Cathy Ostlere’s play about a woman’s search for her missing brother
By Patrick Lejtenyi, Special to THE GAZETTE April 12, 2013
In 1995, Cathy Ostlere’s brother David and his fiancée Sarah set sail from Ireland for Madeira, an island off the coast of Morocco. They were never heard from again, lost at sea somewhere in the deep Atlantic.
For Ostlere, a Calgary writer, wife and mother, her brother’s disappearance was both an ongoing mystery and a crushing weight. As she faced the reality that David and Sarah were gone forever, that their bodies would never be found, she did what writers do: she wrote. Out of a series of poems came LOST: A Memoir, in 2008. It was soon adapted into a one-woman play of the same name, and produced for the first time in Montreal by Persephone Productions.
The play is directed by 28-year-old Christopher Moore and stars Karine Dion as Cathy. At its centre is the story of Cathy’s searches: for her brother, for the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, for any meaning behind it and ultimately for closure.
It’s a deeply personal and achingly intimate story, says Dion, but Ostlere was honest enough in her writing that the actress didn’t have to struggle with any ambiguity.
“I was given everything I needed for that performance,” Dion says. “The text has everything there. The words flow right out.”
The writing reveals how Cathy, now settled down in suburbia, lived vicariously through her brother — that she used to be a traveller like him, until she started a family in safe, predictable Canada.
“Cathy holds David up on a pedestal,” Dion says. “She thought he was living his life for the both of them. But she finds some truths about him, and there is this unravelling of her brother that in her mind could do no wrong. There’s anger. She can’t move on without some answers, and that breaks her. She feels that there’s a betrayal in what she discovers.”
As Moore puts it, “When does living your life to the fullest become risking your life?”
That anger is compounded by not knowing the circumstances surrounding the mystery.
“There’s no closure for her,” Moore says. “She’s suffering from something called ambiguous grief. There are no answers, there was never an incident, there’s nothing to show for it, because she never found anything. And sometimes you don’t want to admit or accept it.”
The play covers a lot of emotional space, but both Moore and Dion say the text and the close, collaborative nature of a production like this gave them the ability to get the performance they demanded.
“Most of the rehearsals were Karine and I in a room,” he says. “I’m used to being with different casts, so there’s a different energy here. There’s a kind of tunnelling that happens to figure out this journey. I trust Karine, and that helps. We talked about our differences, and there was a give and take.”
Adds Dion: “It was pretty intense.
She says having worked with Moore before made everything easier.
“It was actually petrifying, but at the same time we found a good working relationship. We can say that this idea is terrible without hurting each other’s feelings. Creatively, it was a gold mine.”
The prospect of watching one woman talking by herself on stage for 90 minutes is also daunting to some viewers — something Dion is the first to admit. “I haven’t seen a lot of one-woman plays that I’ve loved,” she says, with a certain delicacy. “But there are so many different characters it doesn’t feel like a one-woman show. All of these characters come to life with background projections and sound and light.”
Dion had to learn how to portray 18 different characters, with different accents and dialects. She had to play Cathy’s mother and Cathy imitating her mother, she had to learn the difference between a lowland Scots and a Hampshire and a County Cork accent, and physically represent all the speakers. “It was exhausting,” she says with a laugh.
Still, the poetry of the original book is kept in the play, a key component that drew Moore to the material in the first place. And its universal themes of love, loss, betrayal and, ultimately, forgiveness will always have the power to resonate.
Cathy’s journey, he says, “reminds her of who she was. She questions what life is, what a meaningful life is, and what she wants out of life.”
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
By Patrick Lejtenyi, Special to THE GAZETTE April 12, 2013
In 1995, Cathy Ostlere’s brother David and his fiancée Sarah set sail from Ireland for Madeira, an island off the coast of Morocco. They were never heard from again, lost at sea somewhere in the deep Atlantic.
For Ostlere, a Calgary writer, wife and mother, her brother’s disappearance was both an ongoing mystery and a crushing weight. As she faced the reality that David and Sarah were gone forever, that their bodies would never be found, she did what writers do: she wrote. Out of a series of poems came LOST: A Memoir, in 2008. It was soon adapted into a one-woman play of the same name, and produced for the first time in Montreal by Persephone Productions.
The play is directed by 28-year-old Christopher Moore and stars Karine Dion as Cathy. At its centre is the story of Cathy’s searches: for her brother, for the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, for any meaning behind it and ultimately for closure.
It’s a deeply personal and achingly intimate story, says Dion, but Ostlere was honest enough in her writing that the actress didn’t have to struggle with any ambiguity.
“I was given everything I needed for that performance,” Dion says. “The text has everything there. The words flow right out.”
The writing reveals how Cathy, now settled down in suburbia, lived vicariously through her brother — that she used to be a traveller like him, until she started a family in safe, predictable Canada.
“Cathy holds David up on a pedestal,” Dion says. “She thought he was living his life for the both of them. But she finds some truths about him, and there is this unravelling of her brother that in her mind could do no wrong. There’s anger. She can’t move on without some answers, and that breaks her. She feels that there’s a betrayal in what she discovers.”
As Moore puts it, “When does living your life to the fullest become risking your life?”
That anger is compounded by not knowing the circumstances surrounding the mystery.
“There’s no closure for her,” Moore says. “She’s suffering from something called ambiguous grief. There are no answers, there was never an incident, there’s nothing to show for it, because she never found anything. And sometimes you don’t want to admit or accept it.”
The play covers a lot of emotional space, but both Moore and Dion say the text and the close, collaborative nature of a production like this gave them the ability to get the performance they demanded.
“Most of the rehearsals were Karine and I in a room,” he says. “I’m used to being with different casts, so there’s a different energy here. There’s a kind of tunnelling that happens to figure out this journey. I trust Karine, and that helps. We talked about our differences, and there was a give and take.”
Adds Dion: “It was pretty intense.
She says having worked with Moore before made everything easier.
“It was actually petrifying, but at the same time we found a good working relationship. We can say that this idea is terrible without hurting each other’s feelings. Creatively, it was a gold mine.”
The prospect of watching one woman talking by herself on stage for 90 minutes is also daunting to some viewers — something Dion is the first to admit. “I haven’t seen a lot of one-woman plays that I’ve loved,” she says, with a certain delicacy. “But there are so many different characters it doesn’t feel like a one-woman show. All of these characters come to life with background projections and sound and light.”
Dion had to learn how to portray 18 different characters, with different accents and dialects. She had to play Cathy’s mother and Cathy imitating her mother, she had to learn the difference between a lowland Scots and a Hampshire and a County Cork accent, and physically represent all the speakers. “It was exhausting,” she says with a laugh.
Still, the poetry of the original book is kept in the play, a key component that drew Moore to the material in the first place. And its universal themes of love, loss, betrayal and, ultimately, forgiveness will always have the power to resonate.
Cathy’s journey, he says, “reminds her of who she was. She questions what life is, what a meaningful life is, and what she wants out of life.”
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
