Itai Erdal, with his mom, Mery Erdal, z\u201dl, on screen, in How to Disappear Completely, which opens at the Historic Theatre in Vancouver March 15. <\/i>(photo from The Chop Theatre)<\/i><\/p>\n
Itai Erdal\u2019s award-winning How to Disappear Completely<\/i>, which has toured the globe, will be at the Historic Theatre in Vancouver March 15-22.<\/p>\n
Created by Erdal, with James Long, Anita Rochon and Emelia Symington Fedy, How to Disappear Completely<\/i> premiered at the 2011 Chutzpah! Festival. The one-man show then toured internationally, being performed in more than two dozen cities around the world before COVID hit. The March run marks its first remount since the pandemic.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a dream come true,\u201d said Erdal about traveling with the production. \u201cPerforming this show is the closest thing I have to hanging out with my mom, so being able to introduce my mom to so many people around the world has been wonderful. I also got to do it in Hebrew \u2013 I performed the show in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and many of the people in the audience knew my mom so that was really special.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erdal immigrated to Canada from Israel in 1999. The following year, he found out his mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer and only had months to live. He returned to Israel to be with her as much as possible and, during that time, encouraged by his mother to do so, he shot hours of film and took hundreds of photos.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe laughed a lot, and you can see it in the show,\u201d Erdal told the Independent<\/i> in 2012, when How to Disappear Completely<\/i> had its first remount. \u201cIt\u2019s a tragedy turned to joyful memories,\u201d he said about the piece, which also focuses on his approach to theatrical lighting. Erdal is a\u00a0<\/span>multiple-award-winning expert in lighting design.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was the first show I wrote and the first time I performed, so we had to come up with a theatrical device to explain why a lighting designer is standing on stage and telling this story,\u201d Erdal told the Independent<\/i> in an email interview earlier this month. \u201cSo, the premise was that this was a lecture about lighting design, and I ran all the lights from the stage. The connection between my mother\u2019s story and lighting design wasn\u2019t obvious at first, but when we started doing workshops, the audience loved all the lighting stuff and responded very strongly to it. I wanted to show how a PAR [parabolic aluminized reflector] can get warmer as it dims, so I took it down one percent at a time, and people got emotional because they thought about the life leaving my mom\u2019s body. The show is full of these accidental metaphors, and the lighting became the emotional heartbeat of the show.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the 14 years since he first wrote and performed How to Disappear Completely<\/i>, Erdal \u2013 who founded the Elbow Theatre \u2013 has co-written and performed several other works: Soldiers of Tomorrow<\/i>, Hyperlink<\/i>, This is Not a Conversation<\/i> and A Very Narrow Bridge<\/i>. So, while How to Disappear Completely<\/i> hasn\u2019t changed much since it was written, Erdal said, \u201cI am much more relaxed as a performer, so the show got better.\u201d<\/p>\n He added, \u201cThe main thing that\u2019s changed in the past 14 years is that I have become a father and I understand better why my mother said it was so important to be a parent. I often think about what a great grandmother my mom would\u2019ve been and I wonder how she would\u2019ve handled some tough parenting moments.\u201d<\/p>\n Erdal doesn\u2019t tire of performing How to Disappear Completely<\/i>, and he sees how affected audiences continue to be.<\/p>\n \u201cCreating this show has been the most exciting and rewarding thing I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d he said. \u201cYou would think that reliving the hardest moment of your life on stage every night would be a daunting task, but it\u2019s a joyful experience. My mother was smart and funny and her personality really shines through. Every time I perform the show, there is a lineup of people waiting to talk to me after, wanting to tell me their stories about finding love and about losing their parents, and I love connecting with them and feeling that my show might help them a bit with their grief.\u201d<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what makes this very personal show widely popular.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, almost everyone in the world knows someone who died from cancer, and the grief of losing a parent is something almost everyone can relate to, so the show has many universal themes,\u201d said Erdal. \u201cIt also deals with loneliness and the search for love, which are also very relatable themes.\u201d<\/p>\n