Review: THE CHILDREN at Gamm Theatre

What would you do if faced with the chance to make a difference that would risk your way of life in your twilight years? Would you go or take the safer route?

The Gamm Theatre closed its 38th season with the provative and hugely thought-proking "The Children" and those and many other questions hang in the balance throughout the 90-minute play performed without an intermission.

The phenomenal cast includes Candice Brown as the always on edge Hazel, etched in a comfortable life-if there is such a thing after a nuclear fallout-about to see that life unended with her husband Robin, played perfectly by Richard Donnelly, both nuclear physicists. Trinity Repertory's legend Phyllis Kay completes the cast, making her Gamm debut as Rose, a friend and fellow scientist of the couple, who comes back into their lives after a nearly 40 year absence with a stunning purpose.

This award-winning Lucy Kirkland play, set in Britain and based on the events surrounding the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, throttle you throughout the play as you grapple with the decisions you would make in these circumstances.

As long-retired physicists, Robin claims to spend his days with the cows located in the exclusion zone, but we find out later the cows have been dead for months and he's just aimlessly walking the countryside, crying alone for hours each day. Hazel's got her tasks, mostly yoga, that she works out daily, but she lacks a purpose that she just can't admit.

When Rose comes back into their lives, telling them she plans to help relieve the young scientists working hard at the nuclear plant and asking if they could join her, Robin and Hazel must grapple with a life-altering decision. Do you risk your comfy lifestyle to have an impact on the future of the world and lesson the chance of another nuclear accident or do you stay at your cabin and live the rest of your days as you have been? "If you're not going to grow, don't live," Hazel utters hypocritically, knowing deep-down there's no growth in her world now. She forces herself to think that her children need her though they haven't for years. "You have a real duty to that child to f*&k off" says Rose.

Robin, clearly long-missing a purpose in his life, laments "I'd quite like to die at some point."

But even Hazel, who can't fathom a return to the plant or any of its repurcussions, sums it all up inadvertently, "I don't know how to want less". Do any of us?

In the end, "The Children" makes you think about what you or your wife or significant other would do if faced with the chance to make a different but at a great cost.

The Children, titled likely as the focus of the generation-should we think about the children and risk our lives to save future generations or should we be comfortable in the lives we have now, knowing we already did our part? Everyone will come at this one differently; whose comfortable being safe for life? Who needs to have an impact? Who can't decide?

When you walk away, they'll certainly be more questions then answers but how you deal with it and what you would do if faced with this situation, is yours alone to mull.

Photo by Cat Laine