That Night Follows Day: the mythology of parenthood

It has taken a couple of days for my estrogen levels to make their way back to normal. Whose idea was it to send a fertile 29 year-old woman to cover a show full of unbearably adorable scraggly east side kids [Ed’s note: it was Maryse, she volunteered]? I don’t usually have to resist the urge to run on stage and ruffle the actors’ messy hair, nor am I normally as forgiving of such a fidgety cast. Of course, when the actors are no older than 14, one has to make exceptions…

Yeah, yeah, OK. So the kids were cute. All 17 of them. But what lay beneath that layer of acute youthful charm? Is there meaning under there?

Fortunately, yes.

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to catch the show, "Theatre Replacement’s":http://www.theatrereplacement.org/ *That Night Follows Day*, part of the just completed "PuSh Festival":http://pushfestival.ca/index.php, features a large cast of children reciting, mostly in unison, parental axioms to an audience of adults. For a more complete description, visit Andrew Templeton’s "review":http://plankmagazine.com/review/theatre/night-follows-day-far-more-child....

I encourage you to read Andrew’s review, because although we both enjoyed this piece, we seem to have been affected completely differently. We both seem to agree that *That Night Follows Day* is much more than a bunch of kids reiterating what parents tell them day in and day out – that would have left this show at the “cute” stage, and there was much more depth to it than that. But where Andrew thinks the central theme of the play is focused on adults imprinting their notions on children’s minds, what struck me most was the revelation of the imperfections of the parents.

As much as there is a mythology of childhood, there is also a mythology of parenthood. In case you’re wondering, I am not a parent. But having seen friends and members of my own family become parents, I am always pleasantly struck by the fact that they remain the exact same people they were before they had kids – they don’t magically become better, more intelligent people. They tell their children about Gandhi, and about Mohammed, and about the Beatles. But they also can’t remember how to calculate the diameter of a circle, they do take money from their kids’ piggy banks and forget to pay them back, and get cranky and tell their kids to shut the fuck up. This part of That Night Follows Day was not a misguided attempt at Oprah-like sentimentality for me, but rather a candid presentation of the reality that, even though they are shapers and rule makers, parents are not perfect. They hold their own misconceptions of the world, and make their own mistakes.

For me, the focus is not the tabula rasa of the young mind, but an examination of the cult of parental perfectionism in Western society. There is much to take away from *That Night Follows Day*. The deceptive simplicity of the text and the presentation, not to mention a stellar cast, makes it a magnificent performance to partake in.

_That Night Follows Day By Tim Etchells; Direction James Long & Maiko Bae Yamamoto; Stage Management Jan Hodgson; Lighting Design John Webber; Set Design James Long; Production Manager/Technical Director Elia Kirby; Production Assistant Jennifer Stewart; Performers Ailish Elisabeth, Margot Berner, Luke McAndless-Davis, Andrew Warner, Garnet Barrett, Jordan Zanni, Rebecca Zanni, Phoebe Conway, Na’ku’set Shepherd Gould, Dexter van der Schyff, Yuki Nakahara, Sofia Newman, David James Wilson, Keita Dueck, Leina Dueck, Elena Anderson Kirby, Kino Roy. For more information go_ "here":http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=shows&spage=main&id=80#show