Play targets medicated world

Edmonton’s Jon Lachlan Stewart is one of those actors that spark with provocative creativity and his latest endeavour, as both playwright and lead actor, takes him into the frightening world of mental illness.

Dog: A 1950’s Homelife Nightmare, produced by Surreal SoReal Theatre, one of the area’s edgiest young companies, is slated to hold its world premiere at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre on March 17 for a 10-day run.

Also starring with him in this multi-media work is the man of many skins, Vincent Forcier, and St. Albert’s own Sarah Sharkey (Communion).

The original concept for Dog was imagined about three years ago when Stewart wanted to play around with the idea of a tight relationship between two people being wedged apart by a third party.

In Dog, Edward (Stewart), a brilliant psychotherapist, and Vally (Sharkey), a restaurant hostess, are a loving couple that suffer a sudden miscarriage. A wave of depression blankets their relationship. Edward, in the middle of developing post Second World War pharmaceutical treatments for depression, experiments on his wife.

At the same time, Vally finds a stray dog to keep her company during the lonely times. But when she hears her child’s voice through Lupus the dog (Forcier), secrets, lies and betrayals surface.

“The dog talks in the qualities of a partner that Eddie can’t fulfil. He [dog] becomes like a child. This is a play that deals on different levels of reality,” Sharkey explains.

In a world that is fast-paced, stressful, ambitious and heavily reliant on prescription drugs for every ailment, Stewart wanted to address the medicated world. “In the past century we have come to believe that if we have a problem, we need to be medicated. But we can break away from this. Relationships are worth working for and relationships give us the fuel to fight for people we love,” says Stewart.

While Edward is an uptight psychotherapist trying to save the world, his marriage to the effervescent and fun-loving Vally flounders in part because he is terrified of developing an inherited mental illness, much like his father.

However, just to add extra spice and intrigue, Stewart has set the plot in both the 1950s and 1970s flipping back and forth. One of the big challenges for director Bradley Moss, who first directed a 15-minute installation of Dog at Nextfest two years ago, is that some of the text has been pre-recorded like a radio play and is interspersed with real-time dialogue.

With about 500 sound cues, and the norm being about 100, it’s like watching a movie where it can be paused and rewound. Says Moss, “I think some people will really like it. Some won’t. But what excites me most is the experience they will have. It will be cool and I’d like to tell people not to worry about what’s next. You will get all the information you need by the end.”