Til Death – 05 December 2023
Til Death follows the story of a family trying to wrap their heads around the impending death of their beloved matriarch. While many stories like this tend to focus on the person who is dying, Elizabeth Coplan’s script is a character study on more than one character. Mary, the dying mother/wife of the other characters was very consistent about her understanding of her own death and dying; she exhibited equanimity and grace throughout the story, and was the least dramatic character.
Her children each exhibited different ways of coping with their mother’s impending death from cancer, and Til Death was, in a sense, a study of the vast spectrum of how people cope with this kind of information. Some of these perspectives were very clearly shaped by concepts accredited to Elizabeth Kubler Ross—the fact that preparing to lose someone can make you want to be kind to them towards the end, but can also make you angry and frustrated, can also make you turn your back, can make little things more significant than they ought to be and big things more significant than the little ones. Some people want to be practical, others want to be emotional, and there are varying states of wondering what might happen after, almost all of which remain unspoken. Coplan handled complexities that were messy and tackled the important dynamics of how everyone is going through their own hurt and pain at the same time, yet they rarely are in the same part of that emotional journey at the same time.
I appreciated Coplan’s commitment to telling a story that felt true, rather than a story that tied up every loose end. The adopted son who made the moment about him did not get any kind of closure, and the devoted husband was so busy trying to make Mary’s last moments comfortable that he missed them. One of the sisters was coping with her mother’s lack of response to a sexual assault and how it made her a little indifferent to being taken care of in her mother’s will. The rat race between siblings for who could provide the most money verses the most support was ugly—but also had a strong ring of truth.
This story was least about the dying person herself, with a strong focus on those who would have to keep living afterwards. The only thing these characters had in common was a love for this woman that was so strong that they felt every possible emotion counting down to an inevitable end. It brought some of them closer, others further, from each other, and brilliantly showcased the cost of the loss of a loved one. Despite death being anticipated and expected, the whole process took a huge toll on everyone involved, and the actors were remarkably clear about where they were in this process and the volatility of the characters. All in all, a heavy yet beautiful piece of theatre that dares to suggest that as different as we all are, we are simultaneously disturbingly similar.
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