Frank Moher in Boy Player, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If there ever was a testimonial for the hope-filled insight that family is something you can discover and create for yourself — should your original one be absent, AWOL, screwed-up, or somehow out of the frame — it’s the solo show that’s landed at Workshop West, to launch the season there.

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Boy Player, beautifully fashioned by playwright Frank Moher, is the true story of a prairie kid, orphaned at 12 and transplanted suddenly to New York City to live with his older sister and her family. That it’s told to us by the boy himself, now one of the country’s star playwrights making a rare return to the stage (and his home town) in person, gives the experience a particularly vivid and heartbreaking engagement. Not least because the play and the Workshop West run of this Western Edge Theatre production return Moher to a theatre with which he has a formative history in the ‘80s — with a story that includes being rescued by theatre as one of its two principle motifs.

There’s something immediate and dramatic about seeing the man himself before us. The Frankie we meet has a story to tell that begins, dramatically, with “one of the worst things that could happen to a kid.” Tragically, his parents died within six months of each other. And the orphan finds himself abruptly relocated a world away. It’s linked to the world he knows only by theatre, specifically, musical theatre.

This is a show, directed by Jonathan Greenway of Western Edge Theatre, that comes with real-life family slides, and show tunes, and the theatrical fun of seeing Frank in his theatrical debut, age 11, in Jackpot, a Canadian musical produced by Walterdale at the new Centennial Library Theatre. It was, he says wryly, “the greatest musical in the history of the world.’

Moher is an amusing, puckish, lively performer onstage; he’s fun to be with. And he writes about his earlier self with an appealing self-deprecating sense of humour, in a judicious mix of show and tell. When a lonely kid needed “something to hang on to,” theatre was there for him, along with the theatre family that forms itself in any production.

The parent-less boy we meet has a resilience that will touch your heart; here’s a jaunty quester. And, surprisingly, New York City isn’t such a bad fit: that storied city of violent, jaded cosmopolites, and theatre (!) had room for him. When there was a big winter storm in NYC, he teaches his impressed new friends how to build a snow fort. They wonder if he is, perhaps, an actual “eskimo.”

Frank Moher in Boy Player, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Darla Woodley

The other life-changing rescue from vast empty existential solitude, in the nick of time as he bravely describes, comes after Moher’s return to Canada. At a moment when depression submerges him completely, he meets a woman with a horrifying, uncannily similar story, configured in reverse. And it comes through theatre, which only goes to show that theatre has always been the right career choice.

Diana, orphaned early, found herself teleported from Toronto to Smoky Lake, AB. And via a production of an early Moher play at the U of A, with the impressively resilient Diana as stage manager, Boy Player becomes a love story. Its players create themselves a new family, a new way to move forward, in a way that makes you want to cheer.

Boy Player is a real play, artfully formed, and not a Fringe-style confessional ramble. And its particular mix of sadness and charm is enhanced by the way our hero onstage steps up to the personal — in Frank’s and Diana’s parallel, then convergent stories — but resists the self-dramatizing and sentimental. Everything may not be “coming up roses,” as the famous Gypsy song goes, ah, but “maybe nasturtiums,” he says mischievously.

There’s “life to get on with,” he says, in a recurring mantra. Boy Player is expansive that way. A lovely night in the theatre, funny, with an inspiring lift-off.

REVIEW

Boy Player

Theatre: Western Edge Theatre at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Written by and starring: Frank Moher

Directed by: Jonathan Greenway

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd

Running: through 15

Tickets: workshopwest.org