I’m pleased I took my 87-year-old Nan to this feelgood adaptation of Mitch Albom’s memoir: it’s as comfortable as an old pair of slippers and warm enough to please the cockles of your heart on a winter’s night.

This is the second Newmarket Stage Company production – so far they specialise in two-handers with famous titles starring George Henare as an academic locking horns with a protege (the first was Educating Rita). [More]

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Newmarket Stage Company’s sophomore production is highly engaging, thought-provoking, witty and cathartic. Originally written in memoir form by Detroit sports journalist Mitch Albom in 1997, the story and its significance are as universal and timeless as life and death themselves.  In fact, they are the story.

Adapted for stage from his novel with co-playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, Albom narrates his poignant relationship with Morrie Schwartz, his old sociology professor and philosophical mentor at Brandeis University, Massachusetts where he studied in the late 70s.  Their time spent together there is succinctly described in the first ten minutes of the play, as is the subsequent decade and a half during which Albom’s musical aspirations are curtailed by personal tragedy and he falls into his sports writing career. 

These two heavily summarised ‘acts’ provide the background for the definitive story that begins with Mitch’s chance viewing of an edition of Ted Koppel’s Nightline, featuring an interview with Schwartz on the subject of his diagnosed motor neuron disease ‘ALS’.  What is initially intended to be a one-off visit to pay dutiful respects to his favourite tutor develops into the regular weekly trips implied by the title, providing an ultimately transformative experience.

In the role of the author-protagonist, Jason Te Mete portrays a clean-cut, serious young man – not bitter, just rendered emotionally distant by the march of time and the thwarting of his dreams.  Exemplary piano skills befit his character very well, but they’re not over-exploited or even made as central a feature as one might expect from the on-stage presence of a grand piano.

As increasingly ailing, 78 years-young Morrie, George Henare is your classic contrast and sagacious foil to the cynical egocentricity of comparative youth.  Witty aphorisms ever at the ready, the twinkle in his eye never fades even as his pain deepens and motor-functions steadily deteriorate.

The characters’ respective wives seem conspicuously absent, as they are often referred to and discussed but never seen, even in the one scene where Mitch’s wife Janine visits, although she is heard singing on request, in voice-over. 

Both actors’ Massachusetts accents are sufficiently credible to maintain the suspension of disbelief in their real-life characters.  Besides that all-important technical aspect, the masterful quality of the duo’s accomplished, understated performance is strong evidence that the entrepreneurial artistic director of the NSC, Adey Ramsel, has reached full maturity as a theatre director. It surely doesn’t hurt to have such experts in their craft to work with. 

Ramsel’s set design places us unpretentiously in the living room of Morrie’s humble but comfortable every-suburb bungalow.  Comfy armchair, reclining couch, large worn and faded rug, and a glass rear wall with French doors leading out to a just slightly distracting tree that appears to be squished slightly under the conservatory ceiling.  At one point Morrie remarks that the only two things in the room less than fifty years old are his wheelchair and Mitch. 

If there’s one singularly universal topic among all the plethora of issues related to the human condition, it’s that of one’s own mortality.  The one thing we can be sure without a doubt shall come to pass is at the same time encased in the most unanswerable mysteries of our existence: how, when and what next?  The first two are at least a mystery to the luckiest among us.  In terminal illness cases like Morrie’s, the how question is answered bluntly and the probabilities of when dramatically narrowed. 

For the rest of us, life’s one guarantee remains thankfully shrouded in uncertainty, which facilitates the necessary denial that keeps us going in spite of that other rhetorical conundrum – what’s this life for in the first place?  Morrie nails it in one of his many simple aphorisms, a seemingly obvious truism that answers none of the above questions but speaks volumes about how humanity has made it this far: “Everyone knows they’re going to die but no-one believes it.”

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