Patricia Darbasie in Donna Orbits The Moon, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If you’ve ever found yourself furious (and really who hasn’t?) for no reason you can pinpoint, you’ll take to Donna.

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The middle-aged woman we meet in Donna Orbits The Moon is used to being cheerful and even-tempered, famous at bake sales for her gooseberry blondies. Lately, as Donna reports to us, she finds herself explosively angry, leaving a trail of shattered glass, holes in the wall, perplexity amongst her family and friends. And the triggers are unpredictable: rude drivers, vacuum cleaners, the minor pushiness of other people….

In the 2010 solo play by the American writer Ian August, currently running at Northern Light Theatre in a visually beautiful Trevor Schmidt production starring Patricia Darbasie, Donna is up against the mystery of … herself.

Why on earth, for example, would she slap a woman reaching for the same bag of all-purpose flour on a grocery shelf? Why would she grind her husband’s rib-eye steak dinner into the floor, or unleash a string of obscenities at a teenage driver who cuts her off in traffic? It’s so not Donna, as Darbasie appealingly conveys. She’s mystified by her own anger.

“You’re not yourself these days,” says Donna’s husband. Church is not a calming refuge. “It is not the place to discuss the potential homicide of other church-goers,” as she points out, implying that discussion might well take place elsewhere.

Patricia Darbasie in Donna Orbits The Moon, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

The play rolls out an escalating series of episodes in which colours flash, and Donna feels herself spinning out of control in Outer Space, in a fathomless cosmos. And she’s begun to hear a man’s voice in her head. God? The Devil? Some kind of ghost? No, it’s the voice of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, advising her enigmatically to “go up” before she can “come down.”

Describing episodes as they happen is an extreme single-handed dramatic challenge for an actor: is the character re-creating them for us, or experiencing them onstage? The play, the production, and Darbasie’s performance, tries to float both possibilities, which is tricky. But, after all, mysteries are all about holding back.

Patricia Darbasie in Donna Orbits The Moon, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective.

These chapters, each a minor variation, are charted by the striking visuals of Schmidt’s design. The stage is overhung by a giant orb, whose textured surfaces catch the light in subtle ways that suggest the moon, or a disc of veined and beautiful granite, dusted by something sparkly. Rae McCallum’s lighting and Matt Schuurman’s projections exert a kind of magic on the story being told onstage, in a blue-hued room by a blue-clad woman.   

After each”episode,” Donna scrambles to be conciliatory, repeatedly avowing to everyone that she’s fine. Darbasie’s performance conveys a kind of cordiality that gradually turns to desperation. The arc of her unravelling seems to happen in fits and starts; the character becomes less confident, more scattered, and her fury more thinly covering a secret sorrow. The audience will see into the mystery of Donna’s bad behaviour long before her control over it finally fractures and she reveals it.

In the course of the 90-minute play, the nature of Donna’s alliance with the audience seems to change. It won’t give away too much to say that she’s harbouring a terrible heartbreak, a shattering grief, and that the play is a psychological study in denial.

After all her delays, when Donna finally lands, as Buzz Aldrin has advised, the pay-off is release into a dark universe that may be directionless but is full of shimmering stars. The human predicament in a nutshell.

REVIEW

Donna Orbits The Moon

Theatre: Northern Light

Written by: Ian August

Directed and designed by: Trevor Schmidt

Starring: Patricia Darbasie

Where: Studio Theatre, Fringe Theatre Arts Barns

Running: through Feb. 3

Tickets: northernlighttheatre.com