Michael Bérubé’s new play Hoarding premiered at Tempest Productions, directed by Cynthia Mazzant (who also starred). The performances were and the script is an emotionally powerful journey through a difficult mother-daughter relationship, strained by both physical and emotional distances and by the traumas and tribulations each character has experienced.

The play focuses on Margaret and Alice, a mother and daughter respectively. Alice returns to Margaret’s home having not been back in two years—and it’s been two months since Margaret broke her hip and has needed help. In the house, Alice finds stacks and stacks of rubbish, papers, junk mail, newspapers going back to 1998, and general clutter filling Margaret’s house. As Alice starts to clean—which Margaret characterizes as throwing away all of her things—Alice increasingly recognizes how much disarray Margaret’s life is in. As Alice tries to tidy up her mother’s life, both physically and metaphorically, the two women clash because Alice takes charge against her mother’s will, and friction builds over the role that Timothy—Margaret’s son, Alice’s brother—plays in Margaret’s life. She remains in and tries to repair the house because she’s terrified that Timothy may turn back to drugs, lose his job, and that he and his kids may end up homeless again. Alice detests Timothy because Margaret and their father always helped him out when he screwed up, but Alice didn’t get the same support, and because the abusive Timothy stole from their mother to pay for his drug habit. As the play goes on, the tension mounts until a final climax, where nothing is resolved and everything is left hanging.

The Tempest production was extremely good. One thing that worked very well is the actual space of Tempest Productions, which is quite a small theatre space, and so filling it with boxes, books, piles of newspapers, etc. really created the cluttered, claustrophobic feeling of a hoarder’s house. Within the limited space of the room, the audience very much got the feeling of being in the cramped, packed space, and the consequent anxiety that can evoke.

The small space also puts the audience in close proximity to the actors, meaning we got a close-up view of their emotional struggles and conflict. The two primary actors, Cynthia Mazzant playing Margaret and Elaine Meder-Wilgus playing Alice, gave extraordinarily emotive performances, showing the women’s alternating anger, resentment, love, fear, uncertainty, hope, and frustration. Margaret has mobility issues because of her broken hip, and so Mazzant’s performance was much more physically constrained, meaning she built her character primarily through mannerisms and facial expressions, which was a very powerful way to convey Margaret’s anger, resentment, and periodic uncertainty when confronted about things like taking too many pills or not remembering where important documents are. Meder-Wilgus’s character demanded a much more physical approach, as Alice moved frenetically around the stage cleaning up and sorting through piles and then taking things off stage. The constant flurry of energy gave insights into Alice’s anxiety about her mother’s living conditions and health, but also into her own psychological need to try and fix everything in her mother’s life (perhaps to assuage her guilt over not living closer and being around more often). The third character, Ellen played by Stephanie Gates, is also an interesting figure in the play because her role seems largely to be to come into the home occasionally and be made uncomfortable, either by Margaret and Alice’s fights or by being implicitly asked to judge one or the other’s actions—which she very politely refuses to do. Gates did a good job enacting Ellen’s conflicted experience of tactfully trying to avoid getting caught in the middle, while clearly wanting what’s best for both women.