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The Patient Hour

• Written by Kristen Thomson
• Directed by Chris Abraham
• Starring Todd Thomson, Waneta Storms, Liisa Repo-Martell and Patricia Fagan
• At the Tarragon Extra Space in Toronto
• 

You are in a coma. No, no, it has nothing to do with the theatre you've been seeing lately. You've had a stroke and now you are lying in a hospital bed being fed through a tube in your nose.

Your name is Dawn — don't you remember? — and you are 77 years old. Are you there, Dawn? Can you hear me?

Kristen Thomson's new play, The Patient Hour, puts you in Dawn's hospital gown and semi-comatose mind. (The characters address the audience when they address Dawn.) As you lie in your offstage bed, your eyes half open, your brain half functioning, you are visited by your son Charles (Todd Thomson), a lonely mechanic with an offbeat sense of humour, and your daughter Laura (Waneta Storms), just out of prison after serving time for fraud.

Also regularly entering the room as you nod in and out of consciousness and hallucinations is a nurse with sad eyes named June (Liisa Repo-Martell), whose upward inflection makes every statement sound like a question? Then there's that mysterious woman billed as Young Female Patient (Patricia Fagan) who keeps wandering in. She's lost a baby and possibly her mind, and is oddly drawn to you.

The Patient Hour — more like an hour and a half, truthfully, so be patient — is Thomson's downbeat follow-up to her four-star smash debut, the one-woman mask play I, Claudia. Here she's dropped the masks and stepped into the wings, leaving others to speak her words for the first time.

Thomson's key writing strength is her great ear for idiosyncratic patterns of speech. Charles, who seems to be in quite good shape despite all the Double Gulps and chips he is seen ingesting, speaks in particularly recognizable mangled sentences. "I'd like to ask you so many stories," he tells you, suddenly realizing all he'll lose when you're gone.

Charles is your most frequent visitor and, being an optimist, he desperately tries to find a silver lining in your predicament. Maybe, during the long hours he spends at your bedside, he'll meet the nurse of his dreams?

June humours him up to a point, but he comes on too strong and his neediness is off-putting. Nevertheless, she eventually opens up to him — and to you, while she gives you your bath — about her previous career as a potter, the schizophrenic brother who smashed all her work, and her threatening cop ex-husband.

As Charles and June, Todd Thomson (brother of the playwright, on a visit from Vancouver, the city that has greedily hoarded his talents) and Repo-Martell are both excellent; their will-they, won't-they friendship is the heart of the play.

Laura and Young Female Patient, however, are less clear as characters. Kristen Thomson hides so much of their personal information that we don't really get introduced to them until the play is almost over. It could have enriched the play to clue us in earlier, but instead they wander around delivering oblique speeches like an episode of Generalization Hospital.

More problematic is that we think we know Laura, but it then turns out that Thomson has been deliberately misleading us about her. Aside from being confusing, this leads to a near-fatal fracture in our belief of the world the playwright has created.

While The Patient Room has flaws and gaps — who is Charles and Laura's father? — it remains engaging, and director Chris Abraham's languorous production perfectly captures the purgatorial atmosphere of a palliative-care ward.

Yes, sorry — it looks like you're not going to make it. But despite being not well off, you are being cared for in a nice, big, private room, designed by Julie Fox to look like the real thing right down to the hand-sanitizer dispenser glimpsed through the door in the hallway. The authenticity extends to designer Rebecca Picherack's use of real light sources (subtly enhanced from above).

Abraham playfully explores the shadows created by this lighting and has the scenes overlap each other, making much of The Patient Hour feel like a waking dream. Your diagnosis may be grim, Dawn, but the care you receive is top notch.

The Patient Hour continues until March 29.