Real people, real events and real laws with medical implications provide the story in Rob Mermin's play Act 39. A mime who trained with Marcel Marceau and founded Circus Smirkus, Mermin wrote a play about his own experience supporting a friend who used Vermont's medical aid in dying law, Act 39. That friend was Bill Morancy, one half of the cinema commentary show "Talking About Movies" with Rick Winston, who ended his life in 2015. Mermin tackles mortality without sentimentality, but he does throw in a little fantasy in the form of visions of people from memory, myth and history.
The play premiered last year, and Mermin has lightly revised the script for a Vermont tour produced by Highland Center for the Arts. The actors who originated the main roles return, with J.T. Turner as Rob and Donny Osman as Bill. Jeanine B. Frost and Matthew Grant Winston play supporting characters. Mermin and Turner codirect.
Mermin tells the true story as he recalls it. Bill and Rob are friends living in the same apartment house in Montpelier. Rob entertains Bill with magic and soap bubble tricks, and Bill regales Rob with information he's accumulated from curiosity and a deep love of cinema. They play catch, talk on the porch and then absorb the news that Bill's sudden pain comes from stage IV pancreatic cancer. And instantly, the past, present and future all take on new meanings.
Both men have medical diagnoses looming over them. The survival estimate for someone with Bill's cancer is six months, and all of it will be spent in pain moderated by pharmaceuticals. Rob's condition doesn't have a timeline. He has Parkinson's disease, and the tremors have started but not slowed him down. Both characters start looking at each day differently.
The focus of the play is on coming to terms with death, but on a practical level, not a psychological one. We follow Rob's perspective as he supports Bill's decision to end his own life. As a dramatization, Act 39 is a fine demonstration of how people with terminal illness can pursue death with dignity. As a drama, the play is more about ideas than emotion, and it inherently lacks suspense — the dying man does die. Leavened with magic tricks, gags, and the occasional appearance of Freud and Hercules, the play is far from somber, but it also never gets close to a personal sense of sorrow.
As a mime with experience in creating circus shows, Mermin bends theater to his style of formal, outward presentation. Dialogue is aimed at the viewer, just as a magic trick would be, and we're not watching emotion register on another character who is listening, but taking in information ourselves.
Typically, drama is about what changes in a character. The story often concentrates on what causes the change, whether it's circumstances or another character, but the effect on a person is how that story comes to matter to the audience.
Here, change comes from outside forces affecting Bill's health. We watch Rob and Bill enjoy each other's company, but their friendship is presented without emotional depth. As Mermin's record of real people, perhaps that's the truth of how they treated each other — laughing together with the confidence that they each had a friend but never needing to reveal their feelings to prove it. Instead of depicting sadness, the play simply shows the conditions in which it would emerge.
Act 39's best ideas about the meaning of life and death come from the artists Bill and Rob quote. A beautiful observation arises when Bill describes the Japanese movie After Life. The film's characters must select a single memory to sustain them after death. Bill sums up the movie's premise as a different sense of time: maintaining a memory that doesn't repeat but rather stretches infinity into an endless present.
Turner plays Rob with the light step of a man in sneakers and the easy grin of a jokester ready to diffuse any melancholy with a gag, preferably a well-worn one. He threads the needle of playing a character with a light heart and some heavy burdens. His low-key performance shows Rob at peace with Parkinson's and in tune with his pal.
As Bill, Osman spends the first act playfully sputtering out facts about history and art and trying to outthink Rob's tricks. Bill is steadfastly cheerful, enjoying the philosophical disagreements with his friend. In the second act, Osman gets to strike deeper notes, but his internal struggle lies in the background of a story about the mechanics of aid in dying.
Frost and Winston play the medical practitioners whom Bill and Rob encounter in real life, as well as fantasy figures who personify the main characters' thoughts. Among her characters, Frost becomes a particularly fascinating, intelligent incarnation of Death, and Winston makes Freud and Hercules comically pop with life.
A soundscape by Johnnie Day Durand fits some moments but can be intrusively cute when the music tries for whimsy with clichés. Cavan Meese's set and lighting design give the production the flexibility for dream sequences and the solidity to convey reality.
Like the soap bubbles Rob blows, life is fragile and beautiful for its brevity. Mermin's script packs in more foreshadowing than a story should bear, but it also lets Bill and Rob speak with humor about the end of life.
Death holds the horror of a cliff's edge and some of the same fascination. Having some control of that boundary is important to Bill, and Rob provides a last feeling of safety as he approaches it.