Photos : Carol Rosegg

Reviews
Fiona Watt (Designer) has manifest the bare bones of a clearly, hand-built home with terrific originality.

Alix Cohen, Woman Around Town

Fiona Watt’s set, which renders Don’s house as a piece of driftwood, sharply bisecting the stage, is striking….

‘ Light and Sound America Online ‘

With such an intimate story, the stage’s design remarks this intimacy beautifully. From Fiona Watt’s inspired wooden set, complete with a gigantic trunk that raises it and Don’s bedroom to the ceiling. On the ground is an eye-opening amount of discord that represents Don’s deteriorating mind. Louis cannot stand his childhood home to be in its disarray and he meticulously moves through the clutter. Amidst the dirty dishes and piles of “askew-eth” papers are also several means of light. Privy to real cabin decor, warm lighting is used lovingly in this production; but lamps and open refrigerators are also used as signals and passages to unspoken thoughts. Grant Anderson’s lighting sets a calming tone in this lonely fort, but also invigorates our realism with some beautifully surrealist moments…

Though it tackles heavy issues like the study of dead languages, limiting Canadian locations, and dementia, this play is warm, unexpectedly charming, and powerful. The Scottish actors’ portrayals are very satisfying, the set design is fresh, and direction by Phillip Howard is tighter than a ship captain’s. This little show takes on many epics — the Odyssey and Gaelic language, for example — with real curiosity, depositing old tales into the blood of this play. And soon In My Father’s Words itself reads like an epic with something new to say about discovering inward and out.

Jerron Herman, Theatre is Easy

A person without language is a person without a soul. When memory is consigned to oblivion, it can put up a fight in mysterious ways. In My Father’s Words, a play written by Justin Young and directed by Philip Howard, tells the story of Don (Angus Peter Campbell), an old man who lives on the edge of Lake Ontario in the early 1990s. Don’s home, all stark simplicity and wooden surroundings, is reminiscent of a run-down boat – adrift and disoriented.

StageBuddy.com