Lighting designer Itai Erdal can’t have planned it this way, but the same week that his one-man-show How to Disappear Completely has made its way to On the Boards (through March 24; tickets), a middling controversy erupted over whether Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere for the vaster reaches of interstellar space.
So just as the 35-and-a-half-year-old seeing eye detects barely any particles of solar wind, you hear Erdal explain, “When a PAR can dims, it gets warmer and warmer.” Besides parabolic aluminized reflectors (PAR), he’s discussing, though it doesn’t sound like it, the death of a parent. Or maybe it does sound like it: Emelia Symington Fedy’s sound design incorporates a heart beat as Erdal stands there, dialing down percentages of light more and more slowly…from a rock-concert’s iconic glare to five percent, four percent, three percent, two percent, one percent.
Metaphors pile on top of metaphors: A heliosphere can look like a light bulb, can look like a chart of child’s emergence from parental influence. Erdal’s mother died of cancer. When he learned she was sick, he left Vancouver, B.C., where he lives and flew home to Israel. He started making a documentary of sorts. Conversations with her and his sister (and arguments), a scene of her husband lovingly shaving her head after chemotherapy, are projected on a screen (Corwin Ferguson’s remount of Jamie Nesbitt’s projection design) as Erdal stands in front, translating for the audience. His mother, smoking, explains that sickness is when you feel your body impinging on your consciousness. The memories vanish behind a black curtain.
Erdal also translates lighting conventions for you (while running his own cues). Slowly dimming slows time. A low, side lighting creates a sculptural quality, uses light and shadows to emphasize spatial presence. Why step into a square box of light to deliver an important soliloquy? You don’t find many square boxes of light in nature — people pay attention to this. He’s a natural storyteller, as impassioned about lighting as he is about finding the right person to settle down and raise kids with, two maybe three. Probably three. (Erdal gets a little insistent on children being our future.) Time out while he detours to tell you about the time he was molested by a sea creature.
His collaborators — James Long, director; Anita Rochon, dramaturg; Fedy, sound — stitch all this together as if it’s completely natural, and in a way it is: it’s Itai Erdal’s life. He credits their influence with opening up the story, which is lit (so to speak) by his mother’s death, but not limited to it. That’s no doubt why it’s much funnier than you might expect, and free of sentimentality. There is no unearned pathos, near the end, as Erdal explains how his mother died and his part in it.
“Call your mother,” one audience member wryly summarized, getting up to go, but the post-show lobby was quietly reflective, as if the show were still going on, but slowly dimming.
