Brett Dahl, Michael Peng, Michelle Todd, Sydney Williams in Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

I’m confused. I’m stuck. I’m torn. I’m undecided. I’m disappointed. I’m desperate. I’m stumped…. What should I do?

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We the people are all up against it — in ways, big and small, expected or not, that are as individually angled as our lives. At the centre of Tiny Beautiful Things, the season finale at Shadow Theatre, is the moving sense that we’re in it together, all of us improvising our lives, of necessity: to try and wrestle down loss and grief, pain and trauma, or look for love, to make changes, or make do. “We cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives.”

The 2016 play was adapted by Winnipeg-born Nia Vardalos (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame) from a collection of the anonymous online advice columns Cheryl Strayed wrote for The Rumpus. And actually it might not be a play at all, at least in the conventional sense of an over-arching story that propels its characters forward (or backwards or sideways) and leads somewhere.

When Strayed (Michelle Todd) impulsively agrees to take on the Dear Sugar column, in the first scene of Tiny Beautiful Things — one day in her kitchen doing home-y things like folding laundry — she finds herself surrounded by a swirling pageant of letter-writing strangers invading her world. Each captures a human impasse, in an assortment of sizes — attached to a question: “Dear Sugar, what should I do?”

Tiny Beautiful Things is constructed, oddly and not very dramatically, as a non-stop barrage of letters, delivered by the agile trio of actors (Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, Brett Dahl) who wander through Sugar’s kitchen, and the responses they get back from Sugar, delivered by Todd.

Brett Dahl and Michelle Todd, Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre, photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Sugar’s advice isn’t professionally glib or off-the-rack; it doesn’t come from a school of therapy or a self-help manual. As Todd’s performance beautifully captures, her advice is custom-made, and comes, however obliquely, from personal experience. It’s practical in that sense, not theoretical. Sometimes it’s free-associative. And Todd always conveys the sense that, hmm, she’s thinking and listening attentively, pausing to consider, appreciating the difficulties involved, remembering moments or predicaments in her own life that seem to shed light on the situation, musing on the possibilities. In short, she shares.

Let’s face it, people don’t generally write to agony aunts when they’re feeling euphoric, so be prepared. Sugar’s letter writers tell of miscarriage, of rape, of feeling trapped in a marriage, of being rejected or abused by parents…. And we learn quite a lot about Sugar’s own life as she formulates her responses: her rocky road through marriage, her grief over the death of her mother, her failed marriage, her life as a parent. Her saddest correspondent, and the most emotional example of sharing, is Sugar’s response to a father (Peng) whose grief for a son killed by a hit-and-run driver is infinite, and paralyzing. Irredeemable loss is a thought that takes Sugar back repeatedly to memories of her mother, the grandmother her daughter will never meet.   

The recurring subjects that anchor the letters Sugar gets are grief and trauma. She’s an empathetic listener, with a memory bank to match. And as an advice columnist Sugar is basically non-judgmental, and non-prescriptive, which could seem like a contradiction in itself (as some of her letter-writers note). But if there is a through line or at least a recurring motif, it’s the double-sided idea of forgiveness and self-worth, as a replacement for chronic anger and grievance. If in doubt about what to do, she advises, go the generous route and forgive, for your own sake.

Tiny Beautiful Things, Shadow Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

The other thought is that you own your life; it’s your most precious possession dammit and you have only one. So don’t waste time trying to “convince people to love you,” for example. It can’t be done. “Say no.” And there’s this: “tiny beautiful things,” which are sometimes all you can expect from huge loss, can be transforming.

The production directed by John Hudson is at pains, via Cindi Zuby’s detailed kitchen set (lighted by Ken Matthews), to emphasize that Sugar’s responses come from an ongoing real life and not a book. This results in a certain amount of arbitrary physical busy-ness for its own sake onstage. At one point, a correspondent opens Strayed’s fridge and pours herself an orange juice (don’t ask me why).

There isn’t any follow-up — to see what happens to the trans person abused by their parents, or the numbed woman who miscarried, or the girl who was raped and doesn’t know if she should tell her current boyfriend. Did people get their shit together, get happier, move forward? We don’t know. And there’s no real ending; it seems to end a few times; the play could be longer, or shorter. It’s cumulative, and really, that’s part of the emotional impact of it. Strayed’s responses are inconclusive, provisional, contradictory. They’re like life that way.

REVIEW

Tiny Beautiful Things

Theatre: Shadow Theatre

Written by: Nia Vardalos, adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things

Starring: Michelle Todd, Michael Peng, Sydney Williams, Brett Dahl

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through May 12

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org