Posted by On March 3rd, 2023 I got plus-one’d into a stunningly poignant musical theatrical performance at the National Arts Centre Studio. I was in Ottawa for a couple of weeks playing guitar and jumping around like a musical clown for the Bluesfest’s annual Blues In The Schools program, which kept me pretty busy during the days. For the nights I kept myself occupied meeting friends here and there for drinks, laughs, and a fair amount of live entertainment.
One such meeting began when my arts reporter friend sent me a last-minute message asking if I’d like to join her for a play put together by a Newfoundland theatre company called Artistic Fraud that included a local children’s choir singing the music of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. I clicked the link and discovered that I Forgive You was a true story about a guy who had been paralyzed in a random homophobic attack who later made headlines for publicly forgiving his attacker.
I had already made plans to hang out with my friend Brucey that night so I arrived at his place nice and early so I could get a good hang in before cutting out and walking to the National Arts Centre. In a fit of ironic coincidence, just as I was walking out the door Brucey gifted me something that he had been saving for me since his brief stint working at the Royal Canadian Mint. Knowing my penchant for both coin collecting and for writing he thought I would appreciate a leather-bound notebook and pen emblazoned with the Mint’s logo that he received during his orientation week (and he was very correct; I love both). So when we took our seats in the theatre and my journalist friend pulled out her reporter’s notebook and pen I nonchalantly pulled out my own. “I’ll be reviewing your reviewing,” I said with a leaned whisper as the lights went down.
I Forgive You was written utilizing a technique called “verbatim theatre”, a fascinating concept that I had never heard of before. As the title suggests, in verbatim theatre a script is written by editing together solely the natural language of the protagonist as he tells his own story in a series of taped interviews.
For the first twenty minutes the play was almost entirely about itself, as a nonstop back-and-forth monologue shared by the play’s only two actors explained how the play was created. We learned that the man behind the actors’ words had sat down with the “writers” on many occasions as he was going through his physical and mental therapy following the attack. We also discovered that he is a choir director. We learned that on the day before the altercation that left him paralyzed he had convened the very first rehearsal of a his brand-new choir, and how one of the choir members had been in a wheelchair. When the choir director confesses to his friend later that evening that he was concerned about how he could “make it work” with a wheelchair in the choir several people in the audience around me gasped. When he went on to tell his friend “…if I was ever stuck in a wheelchair I think I’d kill myself…” many in the crowd started weeping. And not just because the voices of a dozen singing children seated in a semi-circle behind the actors punctuated these revelations with the despairing voices of innocent angels.
No, people were openly crying because by this time it was abundantly clear that the man who was seated in the middle of the stage conducting the children’s choir from his wheelchair was in fact our protagonist, Scott Jones. The fact that Jones sat mute and motionless with his back to the crowd as his own words bared his darkest moments, thoughts and truths made the experience truly unique and especially emotional.
There were no props involved and almost no physical action. The twelve singers and their conductor were on a short riser behind the two actors, both of whom took turns providing the sparse musical accompaniment, each with their own keyboard. There were a few stage directions that brought one or more choir members into subtle contact with the actors but overall the staging was as bare and as raw as was the libretto.
As the story commenced we discovered that Scott had been at a bar in Halifax with some friends when he made eye contact with a stranger. The impulse to “…check the guy out…” was quickly replaced with an ominous, menacing vibe from across the room. He and his friends finished their drinks and decided to leave, and when they did they found dude waiting for them outside. He approached the group and out-of-the-blue stabbed Jones in the back, instantly severing his spinal cord. When the case went to trail Jones temporarily veered away from his agreed-to and previously-submitted Victim Impact Statement to include the sentence that went on to start a media firestorm: “There is no justification for what you did to me, but I forgive you.”
Over two acts Scott Jones sat silently on stage as his tragic tale explained how those few words affected his life, and it’s not what you think. The trial had occurred just a few months after he’d gotten out of the hospital. Over the next several years the crushing realizations of how much his attacker had needlessly taken from him have continued to reveal themselves, and as time went by his very-public forgiveness dogged him and left him haunted, confused, and unsettled. Some days he still feels the way that he felt in the courtroom – that forgiveness is the only true way to move forward – but on other days it occurs to him that he’s not so sure about that. Some days he wakes up feeling like the media surrounding his case tethered him to a forgiveness that he no longer wanted to feel, maybe one he never really felt in the first place.
Aside from a handful of surprisingly comical one-liners that came early in the show, Scott Jones never actually interacted with the players, instead sitting on the stage as the silently looming elephant-in-the-room. But at the very end of the show, after the two characters playing the part(s) of Jones had explained the daily flip-flopping of the most important decision he’d ever tried to make, both actors turned to the protagonist and asked him in a single, unified voice, in his voice, “How about today, Scott? Today do you forgive the man who put you in that wheelchair?”
Then, after two hours of thoughtful and consistently powerful theatre Scott turned his chair around and faced the audience for the first time. He took a long, deliberate moment to slowly scan the room and peer into the faces of the sold-out crowd before speaking as plainly and truthfully as I’ve ever heard a man speak. During his unscripted speech Scott shared the complex, conflicting thoughts and emotions that had led him to sit before us this very moment, and about how these intimate thoughts made him feel about his attacker right now. And then the play ended.
It was the most honest piece of art I have ever seen.
Throughout his closing monologue everyone in the entire theatre was openly sobbing, myself included. Heck, the two ladies sitting in front of me had been going through tissues throughout the entirety of the performance, and they weren’t the only ones. When I walked out of the theatre I felt numb.
Thanks for the plus-one Lynn. Two thumbs up.
Todd Man Out 