Bonnie Duff’s This Feels Like the End premiered at Buddies in Bad Times on Thursday evening, directed by Michelle Blight, as part of Next Stage.  I caught the second performance on Saturday afternoon.  The premise is that the sun has failed to rise so the entire world is deprived of natural light and nobody can explain it.  It’s even more inexplicable in that there isn’t a drastic drop in temperature, plants still grow and the moon is visible but let’s not get hung up on the physics.  The play is about the different ways humans react to such a phenomenon.

We see five such humans.  Sandy (Tara Koehler) is a psychologist or social worker with a nine year old daughter Robin (Jasmine Case).  Emmi (Bonnie Duff) is a reporter of Finnish extraction with a boyfriend Jamie (Landon Nesbitt).  Eric (Cameron Laurie) is an extreme Evangelical Christian at least in part using religion as his way of coping with a failed marriage.  So we have multiple potential perspectives on events though perhaps the most prevalent ones; weird conspiracy theories, are not espoused by any of the characters.

Sandy is just trying to carry on hoping something will turn up.  Robin reacts like a nine year old.  She looks for explanations that fit her limited knowledge base.  Her part is actually very well written and brilliantly acted; perhaps the highlight of the show.  Emmi decides to go to her ancestral home in northern Finland to see how people who are used to months of darkness are coping. She discovers the Kalevala and its stories about the sun disappearing and being rescued and concludes that this has happened before and will resolve itself.

Her absence in Finland leaves a rather depressed Jamie (and cat) prey to Eric’s predictable rantings about the Last Days.  This goes on at rather too great a length.  Eventually Emmi reappears just as Eric and Jamie are off to a demo at Queen’s Park where they will reveal the Truth to the great unwashed.  Meanwhile Sandy has lost track of Robin.  Predictably with a very large, confused crowd in the dark things get a bit odd.  There’s a rather contrived ending that I won’t reveal. It feels deus ex machina but then I’m not sure how else one could tie up a whole bunch of threads that don’t really have endings.

It’s an interesting premise and it;’s pretty well executed.  It’s broken up into fairly short vignettes with characters coming and going with some frequency.  It’s sometimes quite funny.  Some of the ideas are interesting.  The lighting is well done and the sound design effective, if sometimes rather loud, and there’s some clever use of shadow puppetry.  I was particularly struck by how well Jasmine Case managed to convey the idea of a nine year old girl and the rest of the acting was pretty good too.  All that said, it still feels like a play that has some interesting starting premises but can’t really work them out and, frankly, the “religious nutcase” ideas are stretched out to patience testing point.

This Feels Like the End continues at Buddies in Bad Times until October 27th.

Photo credits: Barry McCluskey