It's a story so powerful that award-winning playwright, novelist and screenwriter Dennis Foon elected to work with it twice.
His stage adaptation of Michael Ignatieff's novel Scar Tissue, which runs on Granville Island until April 28, encompasses an emotional journey about Alzheimer's, the family dynamics that accompany it and a philosophical examination of memory and loss.
Foon first adapted the Booker Prize-nominated novel for CBC TV in 2002, but the imagery that fills the book wasn't realized in the three-camera studio shoot, according to Foon, who received a Gemini nomination for best screenplay.
"I felt like there was this unexplored opportunity that I really yearned to do," Foon said. "The book is a very cerebral piece of work, it's all inside a guy's mind, and I wanted to capture that idea."
So when Bill Millerd, artistic managing director of the Arts Club Theatre Company, mentioned the company's Silver Commissions Project to Foon at a party, Foon immediately pitched him a stage adaptation of Scar Tissue.
"Just that idea of being able to use the strength of theatre to create a piece of drama that utilized what's great about actors on the stage seemed to me to be a fabulous opportunity," he said.
Foon favours the way a theatre audience can easily follow a character's consciousness and swift transitions in time. He says visual imagery animates the production with an "ingenious" set, lighting and photographic projections.
The stage version of Scar Tissue has been three years in the making. Foon named the characters who weren't named in Ignatieff's more abstract, fictionalized account of his mother's death and unravelled the story from the perspective of the more sensitive of two sons, David.
When David's mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, he races against time to unravel a mystery that has haunted him for years, before his mom's memory is completely gone. He wants to know why his mother, a gifted and successful painter, abruptly abandoned her craft two decades earlier. Was she already noticing the onset of Alzheimer's? And is he, the son that's most like his mother, destined to share her fate?
"He's trying to figure out what went wrong between them in his youth," Foon said. "It's had a devastating effect on him."
David also battles with his more pragmatic scientist brother.
"They're grown men, but as is so often the case, we tend to keep our childhoods alive in our adulthood," Foon said.
Struggling for connection with aging loved ones is the source of Foon's obsession with Scar Tissue.
"A woman who had a large part in raising me in recent years has suffered from dementia and I saw her last fall and it's hard. It's hard to have someone you know your whole life, she's the person who made me into a reader, turned me on to books as a kid, and she doesn't know who I am," said the man who co-founded Vancouver's Green Thumb Theatre for children, has penned more than 20 award-winning plays, received Gemini, Leo and Writers Guild awards for his screenplay of the CBC movie Little Criminals and has seen his fantasy/sci-fi trilogy of novels, The Longlight Legacy, published in five languages.
Named to recognize the 25th anniversary of the first play to premiere at the Arts Club, the Silver Commissions Project provides money and development resources to established Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»artists who create original works for the company's three stages. The project was established in 2006 with the generous support of Stan and Kathy Hamilton and contributions from longtime Arts Club supporter Bonnie Mah.
Director Craig Hall and a cast that includes Craig Erickson (Tear the Curtain!), Kelk Jeffery (It's a Wonderful Life) and Gabrielle Rose (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) bring the play to life at the Revue Stage, 1601 Johnston St. For more information, phone 604687-1644 or see artsclub.com.
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