Lazy Susan was the sensory experience of my dreams

Ashley King and Elinor Holt. Photo by Fifth Wall Media.

Over at the Werklund Centre, Inside Out Theatre and Handsome Alice Theatre have come together to put on Lazy Susan. Following a mother and daughter  on different-yet-similar journeys in their life, dealing with crises of their own, the play explores an honest and strikingly vulnerable story. All set on a lazy susan, where for the first time in your life, you won’t have to reach across the table to grab something.

If you haven’t come across Inside Out Theatre yet, they’re a deaf, disability and mad theatre company here in Calgary. Aside from putting on lovely productions — the company does work in the community, advocating and facilitating for greater accessibility in the performance arts. 

Playwright of Lazy Susan and Inside Out’s artistic director Col Cseke said, “[Writing plays]’s been one of the few true throughlines through my life. I’ve been making up stories and writing stories for as long as I can remember.” He finds relationships the most inspiring to write about. 

Lazy Susan came, partially, out of Cseke’s friendship with Ashley King — who plays the daughter, Mia — but even more out of their joint effort to bring Inside Out’s “Good Host Program” to a bigger stage . One of the key elements of the program is the touch tour, where the blind and low vision audience can come up and have a tactile exploration of the stage to enhance their experience. As Cseke said in the opening remarks of the performance, “we do things a little differently around here.”

The play itself does the touch tour an immense service. From the get go, you get to interact with everything the actors interact with — clothes, makeup, poker chips … I mean everything — and the entire production being structured around a giant lazy susan means you’re never really far from the action. The creative direction on the production is beyond stellar, it’s advancing the discourse of accessibility in such a unique manner. As Cseke encapsulated, “this show in particular has just gone so perfectly, like every person on the creative team was the right person for this show.”

King’s performance as Mia was splendid. As a character, Mia goes through so much growth. From the beginning where she’s talking about her ‘depression cafes’ — personal favourite? a cafe called “sort” where you quite literally, sort things — to the end where she’s standing up against her identity being used as a performance. There wasn’t a single moment where King didn’t command the entire room’s attention. 

When they’re on the stage together, King and Elinor Holt — playing her mother, Susan — amplify each other’s best strengths. Unique dialogue and storytelling isn’t the standout in their exchanges, rather the vulnerability of a mother-daughter relationship. Cseke found inspiration in “complex and strong” mother-daughter relationships surrounding him, like his sister and now his wife and daughter. 

“There's this kind of deep, unshakable love between these two characters, but there's also, you know, generational differences. They have different life experiences and even though they love each other terribly, they're not always getting along and they're not always understanding what the other person is going through. It was that journey I was interested in,” said Cseke.

Elinor Holt. Photo by Fifth Wall Media.

Susan made me cry. I wish I could capture in words the emotional journey I went on following along as she navigated the life she’s known to crumble in front of her. “Hoarder is a derogatory term,”she said, and from there on I was entranced. A hoarder of objects and a hoarder of memory, her character transforms in the play’s run and you witness it all while sitting right next to her. As her story follows, Susan gets bored of real estate and finds herself on dating sites — honestly, who hasn’t done that? Reflecting on her performance, Cseke said “I was totally taken out of everything else. I forgot I wrote this.”

And there I was around a spinning table with a group of people I didn’t really know but felt deeply intimate with. With performances so moving and a sensory trip you’ll never forget — Lazy Susan was an experience unlike anything I’ve had. Inside Out and Handsome Alice theatre have put on something truly magical.

The show runs until March 28th, more information here. If you go see it, get the tableside seats, you have to.