FRINGE 2016: Empty Rooms

Empty Rooms drags the audience through the pain, guilt, and crippling despair one experiences after the loss of a loved one. Daring to say the things one often brushes over, this play held no punches.

The play starts with a still unknown female character humming to herself in — you guessed it — an empty room before a man barges in, clearly looking to get away from something. As the play develops you discover these (nameless) characters are at their mother’s funeral and are grieving in very different ways. Over the span of forty-five minutes, these master actors take you through the highs of childhood games, friendship, and personal triumph, to the lows of grief, conflict, and sadness.

Through these peaks and valleys, a nagging feeling kept begging me to take a side; to feel conclusively like one of the characters was right, the other wrong. However the character development was too strong to allow this kind of shallow binary thinking.

The character of the grieving brother (hereafter referred to as Brother) had years of guilt and post-traumatic stress weighing on him. In addition to that there was a pressure to, essentially, “just get over it”. Although I often found myself disliking him for his selfishness, at the same time my heart would break at the sight of his obvious pain. There was no way to feel one way during this play, things were far too complex for that.

His Sister, harsh but always the voice of reason, also brought out strong feelings in me. At first I interpreted these feelings as resentment, but quickly realized they were actually pangs of fear. She reminded her brother (and the audience) the importance of empathy. Perhaps more than that, of continuing to feel your pain but not letting that negate the pain of others.

The real beauty of this play was that, although tragic, it was incredibly tender. Sister would berate Brother for his selfishness, but, more than that, she was there urging him to go on, reminding him of his strength. Ultimately, Empty Rooms served as a reminder that one must accept that they are responsible for their lives as well as their role in other’s lives.

I walked away from this piece replaying the character’s reenactment of their childhood fantasy of capturing panthers. The sister trained her brother to capture the black beast with a simple instruction: “you’ll be afraid, but you must pounce anyways”.

Empty Rooms played at le MAI, located at 3680 Jeanne-Mance throughout the 2016 Festival. If you missed it, you can catch what their production company, BullPen, is working on outside the Fringe. And if you've seen it, continue to buzz it and support it!

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Sonja Hanson is part of CJLO’s Official Fringe Team covering the sights and sounds from the 2016 St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival. She also hosts Behind The Counter every Thursday morning from 11am – Noon, only on 1690AM in Montreal and online at CJLO.com.