The Timely Review - Casey and Diana
Casey and Diana is, at first blush, a very sad play. Set during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, it tells the story of the patients and staff at Casey House, and the world-renowned visit by Princess Diana, an event widely credited with destigmatizing the disease in world opinion. She touched them, the lepers, and reminded the world that they were still human.
So we find ourselves in an AIDS hospital. Hospital isn't quite quite the right word - it’s more of a large scale hospice, to comfort the dying as they die. Our two helpers are women, Elizabeth Ledo’s sternly compassionate employee, and Colleen Madden’s volunteer, who once nursed her friend through the stages of decay and into death and has now shown up to to aid the dying. Ledo tries to pump the brakes on Colleen’s emotional entanglement, her too personally-involved compassion: you can aid someone through death once, she says. If you're really strong, you can maybe do it twice.
The implication is clear and devastating: you cannot do this over and over, over and over. To work in the AIDS hospital, you must not let the titanic individual humanity of each patient weigh so heavily on your heart. You will not make it, you will not last, you will not be able to help the many who will come in the future. You must remove yourself from personally experiencing the tragedy, of every death chiming in the midnight hour.
Our two dying men: Joe Meyer is young and scared, newly arrived, unable to process what is happening. La Shawn Banks is older, angry and outbursting, with the longest death sentence in the building, five months and counting. He could have died at any minute in that time, and in the next minute still. Both are covered in sores and wounds, bedridden and weak.
Our final pair, the outsiders: Dee Dee Batteast plays La Shawn's sister, with whom he had long been close, but now, she is unable to touch him for fear. Forsworn her, he has. She knocks now at the door of his dying place. Hannah Ruwe plays Diana, the glamorous princess, serene and kind, yet ultimately distant and enigmatic. Throughout the play, La Shawn dreams of her, hallucinates her, imagines their conversations and interactions, and the Diana we see is the product of the imagination of a scared and star struck dying man.
Whew. This all sounds like a real bummer, doesn't it? But fear not, dear reader, for Casey and Diana is a rollicking good time.
I didn't know that going in, of course, I never know anything, and I was prepared for a somber, dark and heavy performance. But even I should have known, that with La Shawn in the lead role, it might just be raucous, hilarious, and healing. And so it was.
This play is basically funny the whole time. We are not primed for it, but we get there quickly anyway, as La Shawn, bombastic and proud, cutting and truthful, exaggerative and gay, gets us laughing immediately.
But this isn't a comedy, not strictly. There are gut punches near every day in the week that we spend in Casey House in anticipation of Diana's visit. Not a week, says Ledo, seven days, as if to underscore that on each of these days, some might be expected to die. Would that Diana’s visit were tomorrow instead, or today, that all here living might live to see it. But in seven days, some, or many, might very well die.
A week is a week to us on a more lengthened mortal coil. But a day is a day for those with days to live.
La Shawn, upon hearing the news, is exuberant. He loves Princess Diana. He and his now-estranged sister had watched and rewatched the entirety of her wedding. He can act out her exit from the carriage, her train, her moment of regular old humanity, paused before the steps to the cathedral, giggling at it all.
What is La Shawn's relationship with Princess Diana? Today, we have ample opportunity to engage in parasocial relationships, the one way expression of human closeness that our ubiquity allows. But in those days, it had to be a princess, perhaps literally so.
He has invested so much hope in her. It is hard for me to identify with, this idolatrous glee at a statuesque other. They're Canadians here, I suppose, British subjects of a distant sort, but you don't have to love them, the royalty. And it in part adds to the sadness that the dying man is so invested in this distant figment.
Perhaps this is just a part of the human experience that I do not recognize within myself. But that is what art is for. Not just to present to you the grinning Truman Show, your own personal experiences reflected back, but to show that there are other human ways which you know not.
La Shawn is ecstatic, and in the night, shouts and screams from his bed, that all the dying men might hear it, that we are all going to make it. We will try to make it, for seven days. Everyone in there is just waiting out the clock. What's the use of subjecting oneself to the pain of going for a walk when there is no hope of getting better anyway. But now there is a reason, not to die at least, for just a little while longer.
The devastating humanity of his exhortation brought me to tears. To imagine myself, without hope, and yet summoning up the courage to believe in a blessedly-near future. They're all still dying, remember, as they well know, and everyone around them knows. The stabs to the heart keep coming, punctuating the uproarious core.
Dee Dee says to La Shawn, once they finally make some amends, that laughter-while-crying is her favorite emotion. We can't help but agree, feeling it in that moment, and in those before, and savoring it in the moments yet to come. It feels good to cry, sometimes - again, thank you, art - and when sorrow finds itself buoyed by laughter, it is a sweet thing indeed.
The more tragic figure is Joe, scared and defensive. One of the great tragedies of the AIDS epidemic is that many men were cut down in the prime of life, young and strong, their whole lives ahead of them, only to suddenly be handed a death sentence, enfeebling and quick. A recurring theme in the plays of this year is the wasted life, the road not taken, the potential not realized, lamented at middle age in Uncle Vanya, sublimely redeemed at ancient age in The Chairs. But Joe is but a boy, he has just begun to imagine what he could become, he is only now creating the possibilities that his future self would one day look back on with regret.
The paths stretched out before him, at least until these last weeks, when suddenly and shockingly the possibilities vanished. It is an altogether different regret, the impending early death. He does not have himself to blame for not living those years of life “correctly”. He's never even getting the chance. He is shaken by this, sullen, sleepwalking to his death, not quite believing it.
Look, I know it may be hard to believe because I keep ruminating on the depths, but this really is a funny play. All of this is lurking in the background, only occasionally punctuating the text, keeping us grounded in the grim finality of things, the tragedy of the heart.
As usual, four performances to note, two by two:
La Shawn Banks: Nobody plays a big gay man better. He’s preposterous yet endearing, strutting but not threatening, we are carried by the waves of words that unfold out of him, dance with his physicality. Truly a favorite actor of mine.
Dee Dee Batteast: The bad guy, a hard role to play, given that we, the audience, now know her fears of touching her brother are unfounded. But people in those times did not know, or at least understand. She is no cartoonish evil, she is sympathetic, desperate, summoning up the courageous earnestness that her brother’s forgiveness requires.
Joe Meyer: One benefit of sitting in the Best Seats in the House is that you get a closer look at a subtle performance such as this. At times Joe was right in front of me, lying on his side, thoughts churning, distant. I think that I might be like that, were I in this character’s shoes.
Hannah Ruwe: This is such an unreal character - I can not imagine being a prince or princess, and a princess conjured in a dream is a further step yet. She graces our presence, unflappable and kind, saintly, as La Shawn’s hallucination of the Princess requires. A great wig, she looks the part, regal and serene.
This particular performance featured a Talk Back after the play. As Brenda and the actors came on stage to reflect and answer questions, someone asked how they do it, come in and perform these devastating truths on a random Wednesday night, which so move us to tears. I believe it was Dee Dee who answered, that, really, you have to separate yourself from the reality of it, hold it at arm’s length for the audience's benefit. During the performance, at least - one can be devastated on one's own time.
This response echoed Ledo’s character: to be a good nurse to the dying, one must not be moved to tears so easily. It doesn't make it easy, but it makes it possible. Thank you, actors, for taking on the awesome responsibility of being this to us, that we may be moved.
So if you, fellow human, want to laugh and laugh, and cry and laugh again, go see Casey and Diana.
Making It,
Twin Crix
