Falling apart together

The Outside Inn, Prairie Theatre Exchange’s season-ending production, is a comedy about the ways a family carries itself, in both a physical and literal sense, as the forces of gravity and entropy attempt to simultaneously keep its members in place and painstakingly pull them apart.

That much is clear when Lily (Sharon Bajer) arrives at her camper — sorry, her vintage caravan — singing Joni Mitchell’s eternal lyrics about trading Eden for a parking space, using the concrete language of urban life to explain the ephemeral nature of living.

Left by her husband and, in her perception, abandoned by her child, Lily is entering a new era, toying with the concepts of a new age, dousing herself in the mist of Saje diffusers and the advice of books with titles such as Find Your F*ckyeah and Everything Isn’t Terrible.

When her child, Patrick (Elio Zarrillo), shows up, unannounced, in Lily’s pad, there’s a sense of interruption and an air of reintroduction: neither is who they were the last time they lived under the same roof.

“Sometimes we have to be around people who disagree with us,” Lily says to Patrick shortly after a deleterious venture into their past.

“That’s a family gathering for you.”

Lily’s character is defined by external stresses and internal growth — a cancer diagnosis she hopes to treat by a mixture of dopamine and natural medicine. Patrick’s character, meanwhile, is driven by the desire to find a place to exist outside of external perception, an inward journey of gender and form defined by self-assessment rather than the eye of strangers.

After testing the waters of the world and still feeling somewhat adrift, Patrick, who is trans, returns to the cradle, where both they — the pronoun matters — and their mother are rocked by revelation, confronted with realities of their new, old living arrangement and the freshly established contours of mutual understanding.

“Do they want a blanket?” asks Lily, trying valiantly and failing hilariously to use a gender-neutral alternative.

While the vintage caravan by set designer Wesley Babcock and assistant Ryan Wilcox resembles on its surface an ideal glamp-ground, viewers who put the structure under the microscope will notice its cellular construction, filled with the various organelles — an espresso maker, a space-age trash can, a plant that’s notably turning a new leaf — that Lily has allowed past the semipermeable membrane of the camper’s pesky latch.

It’s a brilliant bit of stage design, made more potent by the idea that Patrick’s arrival is unplanned and unexpected. Not to compare the character’s existence to that of a cancer, but there is absolutely a shared visual and narrative language at play here: the caravan is a closed body and any visitor allowed inside is certain to evoke some sort of immuno-response.

Lily’s general reaction to unwelcome news is to hope it diffuses, cleaned out by natural processes. Patrick tends to leave such unfortunate circumstances — notably, the disapproval of their father — like an action hero walking away from an explosion, refusing to look back in anything other than anger.

What makes this symbiotic character study — written by Bajer and Zarrillo and directed by Annie Valentina — so witty, so sparkling and so charming is the subtlety with which Zarrillo and Bajer, as writers and performers, suppress those initial mechanisms of defence as they move toward acceptance of alternative medicines.

But not entirely without reluctance.

A comic delight, Bajer is heartbreakingly hilarious in her approach as an actor, summoning every trick up Lily’s athleisure sleeve. After her diagnosis, Lily is petrified, but also free to entertain each of her drama-queen fantasies, which for Bajer is catnip.

Lily wakes Patrick up, only to then ask for a favour “seeing as you’re awake…” She spends a decent amount of time under the table, squirming. Concerned about Patrick’s mood creating airborne impurity, she reaches for her diffuser.

“You know how I feel about rage,” she says. “You’re contaminating the ions.”

Zarrillo, vibrating with a mixture of nebbishness and understated confidence, is excellent when lined up with Bajer, which is no simple task. The actor tells stories with eyerolls, shrugged shoulders and arched brows, tactfully leveraging the body to illuminate the conflict of the mind.

In a production about going through changes, the transitions matter, especially the balletic interludes between scenes that become showcases for the range of technical accomplishments holding the entirety of the comedy together.

The set is lit by a backdrop horizon, which changes colour to foretell mood, but mostly by a rock lamp, stringed twinkle lights and handmade, wooden appliances — a toaster, a blender and a microwave — conceived of by lighting designer Ingrid Risk. During the scenic changes, Bajer and Zarrillo lift and move those appliances as if moving through jelly, a visible treatment of an element a lesser production would attempt to hide in the dark.

Sound designer and composer Dasha Plett’s score evokes both the circus of family and the spectacle of shared experience, something Lily and Patrick learn to accept for both its messiness and necessity.

None of this matters if the writing isn’t as strong as Bajer’s and Zarrillo’s, or if their interplay doesn’t rise to the occasion. But it is, and it does, especially during the later third of the 65-minute run-time, and during moments of writing that feel too real to have been inspired by anything other than life itself.

“You can’t twist my words around to get your way,” Patrick says to Lily.

“I have cancer,” she replies. “I can do what I want.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com