Liam Monaghan in Strange/Familiar. Photo by Mat Simpson.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

In a telling moment in Strange/Familiar, a new play by Liam Monaghan, we see the protagonist open a suitcase. Liam, who shares a name with the playwright in this “autofictional play,” seems to have packed light: a single skinny mirror. But he comes, as they say, with weighty baggage.

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As the title and Liam’s reaction, a mixture of perplexity, horror, and fascination, suggest, his reflection seems both strange and familiar to him. Sartre once said, memorably, in No Exit that hell is other people”; Monaghan’s ‘no exit’ takes the alternative view: hell as the Self, anxious to live in a mirrored world, frantic to blockade “reality.”

In Brett Dahl’s inventive production, the stage designed by Whittyn Jason is dominated by an old trunk, Liam’s own pandora’s box of mysteries which he nervously refuses to open. In fact Liam (playwright Monaghan), a queer musician who’s just moved in with his hard-working oncologist boyfriend Joseph (Graham Mothersill), has made anxiety about its contents into a veritable art form; his response is flamboyant self-creation. 

The stage is lit by scattered lamps on the floor, like footlights (as Liam says, “overhead lighting is a crime”). And a sense of a flickering unreality plays across a gauzy screen, which sometimes seems to have ominous shadows and at others looks a bit like looking at Monet’s waterlilies by moving your head without your glasses while stoned.

Liam Monaghan and Graham Mothersill in Strange/Familiar. Photo by Mat Simpson

You can cocoon the self in fantasy like Liam, imagine yourself into sequined suits (“I was born with a taste for sequins”), barricade yourself from the past and your adoptive Bible belt family with glamorous fantasy friends like chanteuse Julia (Kathy Zaborsky). But damn, there you are, with a boyfriend who’s actually real, out in the hard-ass “real world” every day, looking for moments of happiness.  “What are you protecting yourself from?” the remarkably patient Joseph asks. “From strangers, from my family, (pause), from you,” says Liam in a rare moment of candour.

The catalyst of the play, and the crisis that’s brought Liam to the stage to tell us his story, is the arrival of a note from his birthmother, the first communication he’s ever had from this mystery person. “So weird, like a letter from beyond the grave,” as he says. And it topples his fragile hegemony of reality and fantasy. Anxiety and obsession turn to panic.

“I hate it here. On planet earth,” he tells his showbiz mama Julia, who arrives to sing vintage jazz from time to time, in Zaborsky’s red-lipstick performance, full of  showbiz pizzaz. You know you’re pushing the histrionics when an alluring old-school diva tells you “I know a wallowing homosexual when I see one.”

There’s a fair bit of repetition involved in the unravelling of this knot. And after a very gradual build, the resolution seems sudden. To me, the play seems to end a couple of times. And since the playwright doesn’t let himself off the hook in performance as a conflicted character who late in the play comes to see that the world contains other people, Liam’s petulant tone does grow a bit tiresome in truth.

Mothersill is compelling and sympathetic as the doctor boyfriend who gets tired of coaxing, and being the tent peg that anchors Liam to the ground. And Zaborsky as the fairy godmother who offers Xanadu (and musical numbers) is convincing, too. To wonder about editing her numbers for length is not to be unappreciative of them.

Bountiful in its literary and theatrical allusions, Strange/Familiar is an intriguingly theatrical way to capture a certain sense of unreality, of elusive identity, of the self as exotic centre, a view that maybe in the end is plain old self-centred. Liam, a queer self-exploration addict, feels like an outsider in his own life. But there’s a part of him who wants to be “strange” as he puts it, and different — doubtless the orthodoxies of the southern Alberta bible belt are conducive to this sense — and a mystery to his boyfriend.

And the idea that family and home are not just to be inherited but also to be created by who you love is powerful, and generous-minded.

Strange/Familiar

Written by: Liam Monaghan

Directed by: Brett Dahl

Starring: Liam Monaghan, Graham Motherwell, Kathy Zaborsky

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through Saturday

Tickets: showpass.com