Showing posts with label
girl in the picture tries to hang up the phone.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
girl in the picture tries to hang up the phone.
Show all posts
Honest Picture of a Parent
or Where Theatre and Therapy Meet
by Christopher Douglas
In his elaborately titled play, The Girl in the Picture Tries to Hang Up the Phone, Hume Baugh tackles the minefield of a parent-child relationship – his relationship – with a dying, alcoholic mother. And that is the key to this piece of theatre: it is Hume we watch onstage telling his own story.
As an audience, we sit in this small storefront theatre to watch Hume talk about himself and his mum as if he has had us over for tea or a beer: no fourth wall, no pretensions – pure honesty. Something which makes it admirable for him as a writer and lucky for him as a performer that Hume is as commanding and intriguing as he is, though odd for us watching. There is no pretence of an actor or a character stepping into the light; there is very little stage magic. As he states at the top of the show, there is only one sound cue and one projection. These two technical elements are the keys to the title however: one a recording of the phone trying to be hung up and the other a photograph from eighty years ago. These two artefacts symbolically bookend the life of Hume’s mother and his show about her.
