This one has a more serious subject. But it does have monologues, bits and video.
One review.
A write-up in the Vancouver Courier:
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Being Inside is based on Joseph Baker’s experience of having a father suffering from dementia and how it has affected his family.
Son’s labour of love comes to life
By Fiona Hughes
An average teen living in his own world, Joseph Baker didn’t take much notice when his dad started showing early signs of dementia. The 15-year-old Surrey resident had other things on his mind—school, friends and surviving the teen years.
"At the time, I didn’t give a damn," says Baker, now 24, whose written a play based on his family’s experience with the disease that runs at the Roundhouse Community Centre from Jan. 5 to 21.
"I wasn’t paying attention because it was just little things—like forgetting how to spell his name. Then it gradually progressed to getting up in the middle of the night and going over to the neighbours and asking them if they were going to take him to work. It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20, when the disease was far along, that I wanted to sit down and talk to him about things."
In 1995 after many years of tests, Baker’s father was finally diagnosed with Diffuse Lewey Body, a dementia with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Thomas Baker, now 74 and a former priest and counsellor with two master’s degrees, has steadily declined in the last five years and has been unable to care for himself.
"I first wrote a poem about him. I grew up pretty fast because we spent a lot of time dealing with him and not dealing with me," he says. "But as painful as it is for me to watch my father dying of this disease, I don’t know how much pain he’s in."
Joseph says that as he faced the loss of his father, he was forced to come to terms with his own adolescent struggles and deal honestly with his emotions.
In the early stages of the disease, he was cared for at home by his wife Janice with help from a home-care worker. Eventually, after a year on a waiting list, he required 24-hour care and was placed in Delta View Hospital, where he still resides.
Watching his father decline physically and mentally has had a profound effect on Joseph, who wrote Being Inside while at Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash. where he graduated from last year.
"It explores what it means to be caught inside a personal tragedy where the cause and cure are unknown and the sentence is unrelentingly progressive and indeterminate," Joseph explains.
He and his brothers—22-year-old Jeremiah and 17-year-old Nathaneal—are much younger than most kids whose parents are living with dementia. Compounding his sadness is guilt. Joseph, raised a Catholic with a strong sense of family, left B.C. to study at Evergreen College while his family remained behind to care for his father. (With dual citizenship, Joseph had always dreamed of attending university in the U.S.)
"I felt bad about being so far away. My brother Jeremiah visits my dad every other day and has been supporting the family since he finished high school," he says. "The guilt is something I’m still dealing with."
As his senior thesis project at Evergreen, a unique, interdisciplinary college one hour south of Seattle, Joseph created Being Inside, which he describes as a "multi-media environmental theatre piece that maps the suffering that can sear and transform lives." Evergreen and its teaching philosophy played a key role in how the play developed. Begun as a poem, Being Inside eventually included video projections, music, dance, interviews and monologues.
"Evergreen is like a Montessori university—those are my words, not the college’s," he says laughing. "Going there changed my life. Their approach is very non-traditional, but it’s not weird hippy crap that no one can understand. I learned that theatre is a way to increase your vocabulary with your body."
Being Inside is based on his own experiences, but includes stories of other victims of dementia and their families, some of whom live at Delta View Hospital. Joseph insists the play has broad appeal and is not just for those who have a family member with dementia. He says the show is for adolescents dealing with the loss of a father or mother, for caregivers coping with heavy burdens and suffering, and for artists to experience an emerging and organic form of theatre.
"Ionly hope that people go home with questions and walk out with a better understanding of what it’s like for people going through the disease," he says. "But I want people to have their own experiences. I don’t want them to have my experience or my family’s experience."
The one person it’s really for, though, is his dad, which is why Being Inside is premiering in Vancouver after a trial run at Evergreen a few months ago.
"He’ll be at the opening, if his health permits it. How much of the show he’ll understand I don’t know but that’s why we’re opening here. I want him to be there."
