Half Life unfortunately suffers as half a play,

MONTREAL- John Mighton's Governor General's Award-winning Half Life is set in a nursing home for the aged and deals with the ravages of aging and memory loss and the lives that the residences once lived.

The story is of Clara, softened by the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease and Patrick, a curmudgeon suffering from the effects of a lifetime of binge drinking. These two residents of the geriatric-care facility find an unlikely relationship in what might be consider the ruins of their lives. Brought together by their loneliness and their failing health, they bond, building on a shared memory that it is most likely imagined.

Half Life attempts to be more than a love story set in a nursing home by moving the action beyond the setting of the home in which most of the play is set and involving several other characters; Where by Mighton gets over ambitious by broadening the scope of the play to challenge our notions of memory and interpersonal relationships.

The four principals all give adequate performances, but stronger supporting characters are well portrayed by Maggie Huculak who brings a brisk warmth to her performance as a caregiver who actually does care, and Barbara Gordon who provides comic relief as Agnes, a crusty women determined to drag the entire world to suffer through her old age pains.

Half Life unfortunately comes across as half a play, better suited to a Fringe festival format rather than as a featured production. The space is ill suited for the intimacy required to enable the characters to properly ingratiate themselves with their audience. The lighting design, although among the best I’ve ever seen at this space, is so good that it distracts from the performances. While the limited audience that the play appeals too wait to receive the next social message being delivered by the characters salt and peppered humorous lines are sprinkled throughout the short play to ensure that they remain alert through each of the endless elaborately choreographed transitions that overshadow the scenes themselves.  The play leaves the impression that a pile of clever ideas were placed in a bag of shake and bake and a production then spilled out onto the stage but the bread crumbs didn't adequately coat and flavor those ideas.

The play would benefit from less effort to deliver socially relevant rhetoric to justify the significance for the message, and more attention to entertaining with substance in the dialogue. This would have made the delivery of the message that much more poignant. Half Life a presentation by Necessary Angel productions is playing at Centaur Theatre.