For the penultimate show of its 2024-25 season, New Stages Theatre is presenting a staged reading of Emil Sher’s acclaimed real-life drama The Boy in the Moon for one night only on Saturday, May 3 at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre.
Directed by New Stages’ artistic director Mark Wallace, the staged reading will feature Cliff Saunders, Linda Kash, and Sydney Marion, and several local performers will also be lending their voices for the play.
The Boy in the Moon is based on Canadian journalist and author Ian Brown’s award-winning 2009 memoir The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son, which grew from a series of features he wrote for the Globe and Mail about Walker, the severely disabled son he has with Globe and Mail film critic Johanna Schneller.
Walker has cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome, a genetic disorder so rare that only 1 in 810,000 people are born with it. CFC syndrome is characterized by a combination of distinctive malformations of the head and face as well as developmental and intellectual delays.
When Brown began his newspaper series, Walker had just turned 12 and weighed only 54 pounds, was still in diapers, couldn’t speak, and needed to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he couldn’t continually hit himself.
“Sometimes watching him is like looking at the man in the moon — but you know there is actually no man there,” Brown writes in his book. “But if Walker is so insubstantial, why does he feel so important? What is he trying to show me?”
Brown sets out to answer that question in a journey that takes him into deeply touching and troubling territory.
“All I really want to know is what goes on inside his off-shaped head,” he writes. “But every time I ask, he somehow persuades me to look into my own.”
A national bestseller, The Boy in the Moon was the winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for both literary non-fiction and Canadian non-fiction, the Trillium Book Award, and was named a best book by both the Globe and Mail and The New York TImes.
Canadian playwright Emil Sher’s adaptation of The Boy in the Moon was co-commissioned by the Great Canadian Theatre Company and the Belfry Theatre, and premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in September 2014.
“I was drawn to Ian’s book because of the compelling, difficult questions he asks,” Sher wrote in his notes for the original production. “I felt driven to plant many of those same questions on stage. What is the value of a life like Walker’s? It is not a life that can be measured by traditional yardsticks. You need a different measuring stick, let alone a different yard.”
Sher said the stage version of the book “weaves in conversations I had with Walker’s mother, Johanna Schneller, and his sister, Hayley” as well as reflections that Brown shared during an interview in Australia and in an online documentary that aren’t in the book.
As for what audiences can expect from the play, Sher noted “The Boy in the Moon doesn’t serve up any tidy, bite-sized answers because there are none.”
“We’re left, instead, to sort through an experience — complicated, colourful, painful, moving — that has been dropped in our laps.”
The 2017 production of The Boy in the Moon by Crow’s Theatre in Toronto was nominated for three Dora awards in 2018, including for outstanding new play.
“This work is generous, funny, and deeply moving in a way that I’ve rarely encountered,” said Crow’s Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham. “This play challenges us to have more humanity, it challenges us to think about the fundamentally fragile and uncertain nature of parenting and of life, and it is striking for the rare candour of the source material.”
For New Stages’ staged reading of The Boy in the Moon, Cliff Saunders will read the role of Walker’s father Ian Brown, with Linda Kash reading Walker’s mother Johanna Schneller, and Sydney Marion reading Walker’s sister Hayley.
Saunders is one of Canada’s most celebrated actors, having performed on Broadway, in Chicago, at the Stratford Festival, in Toronto, and across the country. Kash is well-known to Peterborough audiences for her comedy and improv work, but is also a dramatic actor who has appeared on stage and the big and small screens. Marion is a rising star who is a recent graduate of the Randolph School of Performing Arts, where she won the school’s triple threat award.
Voice actors for the staged reading include local performers Kate Suhr, Hilary Wear, Laura Lawson, and Maria Luis Belmes. Along with Wallace as director, the crew includes Bruno Merz (Showmakers Peterborough) providing original sound design with stage management by Esther Vincent.
Playwright Emil Sher will be in attendance and will participate in a question-and-answer session with the audience following the play.
Fewer than 50 tickets remain for the May 3rd staged reading at the Market Hall, which begins at 7 p.m. and runs for approximately 90 minutes. The play is recommended for audience members 14 and over due to mature themes.
General admission tickets are $28 ($14 for students, arts workers, and the under-employed) and are available online at markethall.org, by calling 705-749-1146, or by visiting the box office at 140 Charlotte Street.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be media sponsor of New Stages Theatre Company’s 2024-25 season.
