A review of Sargent & Victor & Me

(This review contains spoilers)

This week, I attended a performance of Sargent & Victor & Me at the Asper Centre for Theatre and Film as a class assignment.

The play is a one-woman show featuring Debbie Patterson playing a character representing herself, as well as a variety of characters representing real people living in Winnipeg’s troubled West End.

The main character of the play is Gillian May Fonda, who like Patterson lives with multiple sclerosis (MS). Other characters include a 7-year-old child, a woman in her late 70s, and a 15-year-old member of the Gangster Crips named Theresa.

Patterson’s portrayal of Gillian is honest and powerful. At times during the play, Gillian talks about urinating herself, her reduced life expectancy, the degeneration of her body, and her own sometimes racist perceptions. The fact that Patterson shares so many personal details of living with MS was emotionally provocative, and to me, the strongest part of the play.

Since I have never seen a one-person play before, my expectation was that I would find it difficult to differentiate between characters. While at times this was the case, the lighting and music was really well done, and often tailored to particular characters. The music featured an out of tune piano, which matched the setting of a church basement and worked well with the dark themes of the play.

Given that Patterson is an outsider portraying characters living in a troubled area, my expectation was that she would have problems representing these characters in a way that was true to real-life. In my opinion, this concern was at least partially well-founded.

I have changed my mind a couple of times on this.

While I was aware that the characters of this play were based on real people, I did not know the extent of this while I watched the play. Often, I felt the characters came off as caricatures. This included the tough talking gangster Theresa, an elderly person with racist worldviews and a helpful, naive little girl.

The climax of the play helped change my mind. After storming out of the church, Gillian collapses on the sidewalk. She is helpless to get up, full of anger, and urinates on herself. Theresa sees Gillian on the ground, ignores the blood and helps Gillian get up. The scene is beautifully written, powerful and provides redemption for Theresa and the West End.

After the play there was a talkback session where Patterson answered questions about the performance. She mentioned that most of the dialogue for characters, other than Gillian, came directly from interviews. She described the content of the play as coming 90 per cent from interviews and 10 per cent as fictionalized. At this point I was impressed at how Patterson incorporated journalistic interviews into a piece of theatre.

After thinking about the play for a couple of days, the way the play represents real people makes me uncomfortable.

First, while the climax was beautiful, I believe it must have been fictional. In the talkback, Patterson said she interviewed the person Theresa was based on while that person was in jail. To me, this means Theresa could not have actually helped Patterson as she did in the climax of the play.

This scene was the most important part of the story, and helped put the rest of the play into context. If this scene didn’t happen, then the author created the primary takeaway of the play, and so it is not reflective of real life.

Also, the voice of Gillian was much stronger than the voices of the other characters. While characters like Theresa share personal and often disturbing details of their lives, only Gillian really elaborates on how she feels as she talks emotionally and often poetically about living with MS. While this is presumably because Patterson wrote her own part, it makes the character of Gillian more relatable than the other characters.

Despite the problems I have with the play, I recommend people to see it. The character of Gillian and her struggles living with MS is powerful. Characters telling their own stories, such as Theresa, convey the hardships some people in Winnipeg live with.

The play made me think long and hard about MS, the societal problems depicted, and the portrayal of real people in different forms of media. My classmates discussed and debated these topics both in and out of class. For these reasons, I am glad I went.