Theatre review: Casey and Diana's portrait of early AIDS era builds to poetic climax
Arts Club play edges true-life story of Princess Di hospice visit into unexpected transcendent realm
Damien Atkins and Lindsey Angell in the Arts Club’s Casey and Diana. Photo by Moonrider Productions
Alen Dominguez and Nora McLellan in the Arts Club’s Casey and Diana. Photo by Moonrider Productions
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Casey and Diana at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage to May 25
ON ONE LEVEL, Casey and Diana captures the grim realities of the AIDS era—details that will be painfully recognizable to anyone who visited loved ones in the hospices of the late 1980s and ’90s. There are the palliative beds with blue-striped flannel hospital sheets and volunteer-knit afghans, and personal knicknacks sharing space with medications on side tables. More painfully, those beds are filled with men faced with dread and resignation; in these days before drug cocktails, there was only one way out. And there are the female caregivers who try to help them through their final days without losing themselves emotionally in the process. (The fact that playwright Nick Green is a trained social worker gives these details added authenticity.)
But what makes Casey and Diana most powerful, especially in its second act, is how successfully it moves out of that reality, playing on the delirium of “sundowning” and drawing on the mythical status of the titular heroine: Princess Diana, who’s set to visit Casey House in seven days.
Playwright Green based the plot on a real visit to Toronto’s Casey House that happened in October 1991, but takes that story beyond the literal: the Diana here is the idealized princess of hospice patient Thomas’s imagination, an angel in a cream-coloured ’80s power suit—a ghostly presence, or possibly a shepherd to the other side.
Damien Atkins’s Thomas is a sarcastic, witty patient with a penchant for quoting Steel Magnolias and The Golden Girls (and rolls his eyes in derision at anyone who doesn’t get the references). One of his life’s fondest moments was watching “every minute” of Diana’s wedding on TV with his now-estranged sister, Pauline—he remembers her dress looking like a “big ball of Kleenex”. So he’s understandably excited about the royal visit.
What the occasion really offers him is hope in a place where that’s in short supply. Despite late-stage facial lesions and problems walking, Thomas has to find a way to live for seven more days. With typical black humour, he describes himself as a cat hanging onto a screen door with its claws, ready to drop at any second. In Atkins’s adept hands, we can see the fear and vulnerability behind that caustic wit—and the way his Thomas uses humour to protect himself from his bleak prognosis.
At the same time, Thomas gets a new roommate, his fourth in five months. Younger and cast out by his parents, Andre (a nicely understated Alen Dominguez) is depressed and alone, not even old enough to have formed bonds in the gay community yet. Through gentle teasing, Thomas works to bring him out of his shell. In passing, we learn about the stigma that has haunted both of them in an outside world that still believes you can’t touch a person with AIDS without “catching” it.
Not much happens as the first act spends a bit too long setting up the relationships between the two roommates and their caregivers: the all-business social worker Vera (a steely-yet-warm Ivy Charles) and the cheery volunteer Marjorie, perfectly captured by Nora McLellan as a well-meaning empath who starts to cross boundaries with the people she’s trying to help. (Here’s betting you’ve met a Marjorie.) Princess Diana appears to Thomas throughout, like a guiding light—Lindsey Angell nailing every detail of Di’s tipped head and shy eyes.
It’s not until the second act of this 2.5-hour-plus show where things really start to crackle. Emma Slipp’s Pauline arrives like a hurricane of anger and emotion, wanting to reconnect, and we start to discover the unresolved pain that haunts Thomas. Pauline’s loud outbursts contrast the quiet, serene Diana in ways that are important to the play’s profound climax, but the character loses some of her nuance in the process.
Like Tony Kushner’s epic two-part Angels in America and the hyperlocal verbatim play In My Day that showed at The Cultch a few years back, Casey and Diana pays tribute to the unnamed thousands who were stigmatized while losing their lives in the early days of AIDS. At one moment, Thomas talks about how his fascination with Diana’s wedding ties into her “leaving a mark”—something that so many dying HIV patients, with their lives cut short, were robbed of.
But the work’s most powerful moments explore a more universal theme of mortality and how we want to leave this Earth. Lauchlin Johnston’s sets, with their suspended stained-glass heritage windows, and Jonathan Kim’s lighting, with its switches from daylight to unearthly glow, fluidly transport us back and forth between reality and the dream-limbo that hovers beyond. It takes a while to get there, but under Andrew Kushnir’s direction, those visual details, the nuanced acting, and some unexpected poetic touches coalesce to make Casey and Diana’s final chapter so authentically moving and theatrically mesmerizing that most of the audience was reduced to tears.
So remember to bring your own big ball of Kleenex. 
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