George F. Walker has spent five decades excavating the lives of Toronto’s working-class survivors: scrappy, sharp-tongued, and often their own worst enemies. His latest, Getting to Normal, now in its final performances at Red Sandcastle Theatre, finds him in familiar territory: a young couple pinned beneath poverty and trauma is desperate for some foothold toward stability. The play’s promotional copy asks: “How do you help a guy who can’t even help himself?”
That question hangs over every scene. Walker splits Red Sandcastle’s intimate stage cleanly in two. At left, an elderly Michael (David Cairns) spars with his therapist Rita (Elizabeth Friesen) about the formative disasters of his past, when he formed half of that young couple. At right, we flash intermittently back to those disasters. Here, young Mickie (Louis Akins) and his partner Amber (Kierin Clarke) are locked in their own combative rhythms of financial desperation and tangled family dynamics, with a baby daughter caught between them.
Walker directs to maximize the venue’s proximity. Each actor is right up on top of their scene partner, so we feel the confrontations land. A baby carriage tucked stage right reminds us of the stakes. The split-screen creates useful, even comfortable structural clarity … until it doesn’t.
The performances are uniformly strong. Cairns carries the weight of exposition with weary determination: he is a man tacking to and fro, narrating his wreckage while standing stooped beneath Rita’s relentless, hectoring scrutiny. Friesen, who memorably played the patient in Walker’s 2024 therapy drama Fierce, brings the same irascible energy from the other side of the couch. As Michael’s therapist, she is combative, bordering on cruel. At one point, Michael tells her, “You’re talking like a real asshole now.” He’s not wrong, and it’s not just “now.”
Akins gives young Mickie the play’s only flash of tenderness: he is soft-spoken and browbeaten … trying. Clarke’s Amber is his fierce counterpart: a survivor who browbeats him relentlessly, while acknowledging she loves him. Both performances are vivid. Both characters, like the two others, are hard to like.
Here’s where Getting to Normal becomes disorienting. As the play progresses, the clarity of the split-screen fractures. What, exactly, are we watching in those flashbacks of Mickie and Amber at stage right? Factual history? Unreliable memory? Self-protective, deliberately constructed fiction? Or dreams, which access deeper truths that can’t be spoken directly? The play suggests … but doesn’t cleanly answer.
I left confused. After sitting with it, I’ve come to suspect that the play has more in common with Fierce than I initially realized. Therapy is not just a dramatic vehicle that Getting to Normal uses — the play is an argument for the value of therapy, and the importance of tough love (or hate), storytelling craft, and non-rational insight in a process that more conventionally centers safety and rationality. “Getting to normal,” it seems to argue, requires everything … whatever it takes. And that process is barely beginning when the lights go down.
Have I got it, or have I missed the point entirely? Like Michael with his browbeating therapist, the audience has work to do to decide — perhaps more than should be required.
Getting to Normal runs through September 18 at Red Sandcastle Theatre, 922 Queen Street East. Tickets are available via Eventbrite.ca.
