A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath opened last night at the Young Centre in a production by Outside the March and Soulpepper.  It’s one of those pieces that is perhaps easier to admire than enjoy.  Technically, everything about it is excellent but sitting through ninety minutes of egotistical bullying is not a whole lot of fun.

It’s very tightly written in the form of a screenplay about himself that Walt directs on stage.  So we get a lot of $dialogue, “camera closes on Roy”, Cut! which makes for a kind of staccato, unsettling mood.  That’s reinforced by the subject matter.  Walt knows he is ill and when he starts coughing up blood between cigarettes it’s fairly obvious what’s happening.  But Walt is one of those people who have to control everything and always get their way otherwise the world will go to Hell.  Making successful mouse movies has convinced him that he’s a genius polymath with the answer to all the world’s problems and woe betide anyone who stands in his way.  He’s manipulative and a bully and he uses then discards people.

We see this in the episode of the lemmings.  He has branched out into nature documentaries but the lemmings refuse to jump and it’s costing time and money.  As it happens lemmings don’t commit mass suicide but someone once showed Walt a drawing of them doing so, so it must be true.  A means of projecting lemmings over the cliff is found.  This sounds trivial but (a) it comes back to haunt the Disney corporation and (b) it’s the funniest scene in the play.

Walt’s foil, at least initially, is his brother Roy.  Roy actually runs Disney and makes the corporation work while shielding Walt from a reality he can’t really deal with but Walt just sees him as a fairly useless factotum and bullies him mercilessly.  Roy knows that Walt is the Disney brand so he tolerates it right up to the point it becomes intolerable.  At which point Walt discards him and “adopts” his ex football player son-in-law Ron as his designated fixer.

Walt is also obsessed with immortality.  After all, if he dies how will the World carry on?  He wants one of his grandchildren named after him despite the fact that his daughter can’t stand him.  And he wants his head to be cryogenically preserved until the technology is developed that can bring him back to (eternal) life.  The final scene has Walt directing/describing his own freezing and decapitation. “The saw cuts through the spine” in deadpan narration.

It’s all really rather horrible but it’s brilliantly executed.  Hnath’s writing is tight and razor sharp and he knows how to do quiet horror.  (He also wrote Dana H).  Walt is played brilliantly by Diego Matamoros.  He’s on stage for the whole ninety minutes and is quite mesmerizing.  Anand Rajaram, as the long suffering Roy, is also quite excellent. They are backed up by Tony Ofori as the rather gormless Ron and Katherine Cullen as his traumatised daughter.  The latter makes the most of a fairly small part which serves to show just how destructive Walt is.  His daughter can’t even hear his name without panicking.

The set (Anahita Dehboinehie) is just an office table with four chairs on a revolving platform (the set up is “in the round”) with a large Mickey Mouse phone.  It’s enough.  It provides a central space dominated by Walt into which the other characters can come and go via the audience.  Mitchell Cushman’s direction is tight.  The timing is impeccable and maintains a tension between humour and horror that is really uncomfortable.

The idea that Walt is making a film about himself is effectively reinforced by the lighting (Nick Blais) and sound design (Heidi Chan).  The lighting really excels in the final scene where Matamoros’ head is illuminated in a way that makes it look almost separate from his body.  The sound includes lots of somewhat distorted soundtrack from Disney cartoons (getting earwormed by “Dixie” is part of the experience) that really reminds us that Walt is not the ruler of the world but a man who makes cartoons about a mouse.

I think as a final summary I can’t do better than quote the content warning in the programme; “The show contains explicit language and implicit references to capitalism’s concentration of power in the hands of egoistic, emotionally stunted men.”

A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney continues at the Young Centre until May 12th.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz