Hard-hitting yet humorous play, Getting to Room Temperature, tells a bittersweet story of death and learning to cope with it when someone you love asks you to help them end their own life.
Based on a mostly true story, playwright Arthur Milner wrote the one-man play about his mother’s wish for euthanasia.
“The play is a solo piece for an actor. It tells a powerful, intimate, and very personal story about how a man deals with his mother’s death and her request that he help her die,” Maureen Labonté, the play’s dramaturge explained. “She’s 94 and tired. Very tired. She believes it’s time to go. He’s an intelligent, mature man who takes her request seriously and starts investigating how he would do it. More importantly, he starts asking himself questions about how we die and how we would like to die.”
It’s these kinds of difficult questions that the play focusses on, and pulls the audience into the story.
“I want people, even young people, to talk to each other about how they would like to die,” said playwright Arthur Milner. Getting to Room Temperature has been sparking these kinds of challenging conversations across Canada since its first performance in late 2015.
Getting to Room Temperature is only one of many plays that Milner has written, however, out of all Milner’s plays, this may be his most personal — and controversial — so far.
“It was when Arthur started telling me how his mother had asked him to help her die and how he had dealt with that request that I realized his was a very special story,” Labonté said. “How do you go about helping someone die? No. I’ve got that wrong. Not ‘someone’ but your mother? How do you go about helping your mother die because she’s asked you to?”
It’s this personal and controversial approach that makes Getting to Room Temperature sentimental, inspiring, and most of all thought provoking.
Getting to Room Temperature is coming to the Chilliwack Cultural Centre’s HUB International Theatre on March 19 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets $35/adults, $32/seniors, $30/youth, and can be purchased at the Centre Box Office, online at www.chilliwackculturalcentre.ca, or by calling 604-391-SHOW(7469).
Note: Contains adult material and situations — may not be appropriate for all audiences.
