Immense Love Equals Immense Grief in A Beginner’s Guide to the Night Sky

It’s a testament to playwright Colleen MacIsaac, and also to actors Geneviève Steele and Rooks Field-Green that A Beginner’s Guide to the Night Sky doesn’t even feel written at all. It is primarily structured as an astronomy class, led by Steele’s character Albertine, and it is easy to get so lost in the world of the play that you forget, briefly, that you’re watching a play at all. 

Albertine is a teacher with boundless enthusiasm and imagination. She turns all her lessons into music, and loves connecting with others through her passion for stargazing, and sharing her detailed knowledge of astronomy with anyone who is happy to listen. Her child, Lèo, played by Field-Green, is much more literal and serious, and shy, but they are as fiercely intelligent, and passionate about their own interests as their mother. 

Much of this play is just about getting to spend some time under the stars with these two people, to learn a little bit about the sky that you might not have known, and to witness a relationship where Lèo is loved with so much wild abandon, so beautifully thoroughly, and without limits or constraints, and where Lèo both nestles into that, but also, like most young people, wants to go off and explore beyond it. Unfortunately for Albertine and for Lèo, what Lèo doesn’t know is that they don’t have a lot of time left together in this beautiful mother/child dynamic Steele as Albertine knits so beautifully in the air around them. Albertine has early onset Dementia. 

The play is a lot about memory, but it is also about legacy. Lèo is left with a hole as big as the new moon, obviously, but they’re also left with the gigantic responsibility of choosing how to honour their mother, and how to bring forward who she was, and what she loved and valued into the future alone.

Geneviève Steele creates such a three dimensional character with Albertine, who is so immediately likeable, and warm and compassionate, but who has a fierce streak, perhaps of past abandonment issues she has never addressed. Everything inside her that that is raw and unprocessed gets blended together, of course, in a brain with Dementia, and Steele does such a beautiful job of oscillating from extreme to extreme and back again in a way that seems completely natural and understandable under the circumstances. I loved the way Albertine mixed French continually into her conversation, but how it was also very clearly used as a device to show the way our memories and our language are interconnected. Field-Green’s Lèo is gently lost, very much a parentless child trying to guide themselves through this scary situation, and feeling very small under an immense sky that can’t offer them any tangible explanations or advice.  

Director Garry Williams roots the play in this idea of gentleness, which is why when the rug is pulled out from under Lèo the whole audience feels the shock too. Yet, mostly, we feel like a community gathered around these two characters, as we sing together, and learn together, and respond to the cold, and the dark, and the train, and the natural world that really surrounds us. Perhaps that is part of the legacy that Albertine leaves for Lèo, too, a crowd of people who also know the old songs and stories, who knew their mother, and who can help them feel a little more connected in their grief. 

The Villains Theatre’s Production of A Beginner’s Guide to the Night Sky, presented by Eastern Front Theatre, plays at Ferry Terminal Park (2 Ochterloney Street, Dartmouth) at 7:30pm nightly until October 8th, 2023. Tickets are Pay What You Can, and can be reserved HERE. The shows take place outside, there is seating available at the venue, but you can also bring your own chair, if you wish. The two Sunday performances (October 1st and October 8th) will be in the Alderney Landing Theatre Rotunda. There is free child-care available for all performances. The outdoor space takes place across a wooden boardwalk from the ferry terminal, and along a paved pathway, on a mostly flat stretch of grass, but which may be uneven. The indoor venue is fully accessible for wheelchair users. There will be ASL Interpretation on October 8th. For more Accessibility Information, please visit THIS WEBSITE.