Lazy Susan @ Inside Out & Handsome Alice

Col Cseke’s Lazy Susan, was my first foray into a tactile play and for the first two-thirds of the production I have to say it was a resounding success. Elinor Holt as Susan creates an incredibly compassionate, motherly figure to open up the scene for us, immediately physically upending part of her life onto the stage for us to feel as she describes what is going on. As the play continues, we are introduced to Ashley King as Mia who gives us an introduction of what life is like for those who are visually impaired, but may not seem it at first glance. These two woman bounce back and forth, sharing the struggles of their daily lives, until eventually we hit a climax where Mia is brought back into her mother’s orbit and her own life comes crashing down.

Director Cayleigh Crow does a lovely job of provideing clarity on where we are, what is going on and who is in the space for essentially creating a show in the round, with the round being a massive prop table the actors are not allowed to be on top of. Jamie Cesar, our table host, helps us as the audience navigate this incredibly deftly and works with the actors should something strange come up. Ali DeRegt, the tactile designer, is the other standout, giving those sitting along the actual lazy susan so many items to touch, discover, and really feel the world of these women.

Unfortunately what did not work was the ending portion of this play. From my prior understanding of the show based upon advertising and discussions, it was supposedly about a mother-daughter relationship and about blindness. The end of the show takes a dark turn though. There is a steep dive into discussion of gambling and alcohol addiction with unfortunately no prior content warning. While obviously there is no content warning for this information in life, this noticably took a number of audience members by surprise the evening that I was there. As an addition to this our table host, became the gambling addict father for the closing of the show, delivering us a conversation at GA/AA. For a show that had been so strong prior, covered so much, and centred women in the story to then end with a man telling his story at the end felt quite odd. This is not to say it didn’t entirely work and it may have worked better for me had I been somewhat prepared to deal with addiction prior to attending the performance. As the first staging of this production, there is a lot of potential, and it seems to have only just barely missed its final mark.