The elegance of John Mighton’s theatrical writing betrays his other field of expertise: mathematics. In fact, Mighton is a playwright, mathematician, and educator. Accomplished and innovative in all these forms, Mighton is an adjunct professor at U of T, founder of the math tutoring program JUMP, and winner of two Governor General’s Awards for Drama, three Doras, one Chalmers, and the 2005 Siminovitch Award for playwriting.
His latest play Half Life-a delicate meditation on age and memory, and the re-imagining of a forgotten love affair between two seniors who meet in a home for the elderly-is currently being remounted at CanStage, after a hugely successful run at the Tarragon Theatre in 2005 and an ongoing run at the Bluma Appel Theatre.
Speaking from his office in the Fields Institute at U of T, Mighton spoke about writing Half Life, and the ideas and experiences that feed his work as a writer and mathematician.
“Many of the things I write are based on found material,” said Mighton when asked how the idea of setting Half Life in a seniors’ home developed.
“My mother was in a home for five years, and there was a couple who fell in love and decided to get married. They were both in wheelchairs, and had difficulty communicating. You could see the progression of their marriage-all of it happening in an accelerated form. So the idea partly came from that.”
The various characters in Half Life reveal Mighton’s background in philosophy. In fact, he got his undergraduate degree in philosophy from U of T, before moving on to graduate studies in the subject at McMaster.
“I’ve always been interested in the question of what makes us ourselves, and the extent to which our identities depend on memories and what happened to us in the past. One of the questions within the play is that even if [the lovers] Clara and Patrick weren’t in love when they first met, does it matter? They seem to be in love at the end of the play, after those memories have faded. Maybe they’ve constructed their present love through their past.”
While Mighton can muse on the older characters’ seemingly irrational newfound love, Clara’s middle-aged son Donald has more difficulty understanding it. “The whole play is about entropy and our fight against loss of memory, loss of order, and dissolution,” Mighton said carefully, opening his hands to illustrate. “It takes a lot of mental discipline to control our memories. We all have very deep memories of things that have shaped us that are almost impossible to let go of, and that will stop us from taking risks, changing careers, or even reinventing ourselves. We’ll think, ‘I don’t have that ability, no, I wasn’t born with that gift,’ so we don’t do certain things.”
Half Life takes the form of a series of dreamlike vignettes: scenes fade into blackness, or are abruptly interrupted. Mighton relates this form back to his affinity for found material. “I didn’t know what to do with all this material until I just remembered randomly one day that people tend to forget stories at parties. As soon as I wrote the monologue that opens the play I realized I had a form for the rest of the piece. Then I didn’t have to worry so much about wrapping everything up…which is always a problem for me.” He laughs gently at this admission. “I could just let the stories tell themselves and then fall away whenever they needed to.”
And what about the constant interruptions in Half Life? Do they make a larger comment on how much of a struggle it is for people to get to the end of things they start? “Almost every conversation, a large percentage of what we do, is interrupted,” says Mighton wistfully. “That’s not usually shown on stage. Characters usually get to the end of their thoughts, leading to the dramatic conclusion of the scene. In a nursing home in particular, you’re constantly at the mercy of the home and its schedules, so it was very important that the play have that feeling that things are always being interrupted.”
Curious as to what draws Mighton to his mixture of mathematical, philosophical, and above all personal material, I asked how he navigated through all his found material, and what he responded to most.
“I love it when people speak out of their depth on stage, saying beautiful, grand things. There’s always some suspicion that they really have no idea what they’re talking about! I’m interested in that duality, how the mind can feel this sense of wonder and euphoria about the world, and also recognize that we don’t know anything. We were meant, I think, to be in a state of wonder,” he paused, swallowed up by this thought. “Wonder, and a state of abject humility at the same time.” At this, he broke into a big smile as affable as it is enigmatic.
Did Half Life happen onstage in the way he imagined during the writing of it? “The production is better than I imagined it, as it always is when I work with [acclaimed Canadian director] Daniel Brooks,” Mighton replied fervently. “He’s able to lift the play, make it deeper than I thought. He’s a fantastic dramaturge.”
Mighton enjoys seeing how productions of his plays are shaped by the suggestions and quirks of their actors and director. “When I write something, I rarely imagine how it will be staged-so it’s always a nice surprise seeing it up there.”
As we finish our conversation, I inquired about what writers, scientists and artists have influenced him in his different fields. Mighton cites elegant and inventive bodies of work, much like his own. “Chekhov, and Beckett definitely, and Wittgenstein’s Investigations has influenced me more than any other book I’ve ever read. I just learned a way of thinking from it that helped me in my math and in my writing.”
The diverse future projects on John Mighton’s agenda include creating a new theatrical project with Daniel Brooks, developing JUMP further, and writing a book about education called The End of Ignorance.
Half Life continues its run at the Bluma Appel Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre until Feb. 3rd, 2007. Every Monday, Canstage offers pay-what-you-can tickets, which is great for students. For more information about John Mighton, visit www.jumpmath.org, and for Half Life, www.necessaryangel.com
