Wells explores loss in one-woman show

Jane Wells’ one-woman show explores ideas of hope and dread in an attempt to find meaning in her grief over the death of her beloved brother.

How To Live With Dread is the latest piece written and performed by Wells. It was presented by Zuppa Theatre Company at the Bus Stop Theatre Wednesday night in Halifax. The 75-seat theatre was packed, with only a few chairs unfilled. 

“My heart feels really full right now,” said audience member Rebecca Wolfe after the show. “Though it was about grief, I actually felt like it was more about celebrating life with those you love.”

Wells, who grew up in P.E.I., introduced the audience to her family with laughter and tenderness. She has theatre in her blood, conducting drama workshops with the River Clyde Pageant in New Glasgow, P.E.I., and has worked in Toronto for the past 20 years.

It’s how her grandparents met. It’s what allowed her to work for 10 years on and off with her older brother, Ker, who died in 2019. And now it is how she grieves him.

During the show, she shared several stories about growing up with Ker.

After their first winter as kids in P.E.I., she and her siblings asked her father, “Will the grass ever be green again?”

The audience laughed, but that’s the question she now asks herself about loss. “How do we recover? How do we follow this death with spring?”

Wells also talked about apocalypse, being barefoot and the last months with her mother. She remembered childhood fears. The lights in the theatre went dim as she played her younger self creeping down the hallway to the bathroom at night imagining murderers and monsters behind every door.

She said that’s the sort of dread everybody lives with. It’s what makes children afraid of the dark and it’s why she worries about her son skateboarding to school.

She said she became aware of it after her brother died of cancer at 55. She thought he was healthy but now it seems like “anything could happen.”

“I have to live with dread,” she said in an interview before the show.

“I have to accept that it is always part of how I make decisions, how I say goodbye in the morning and how I get on a plane.”

Ker was her director and collaborator for so long, and now she has to pick up the tasks he was best at. She said she often asks herself what he would do, but finds she already knows the answer.

“It’s given me a sort of structured pathway that allows me to think about Ker and miss Ker,” she said.

Ursula Calder has worked with Zuppa in the past and was in the audience for Wells’ piece. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen a play like this in Halifax,” she said after the show. “It’s nice to see a show that’s so well done, was cared for so deeply.”

Wells hopes her piece will help audiences understand grief better.

“Grief is also transformation,” she said in an interview. “If there is any counsel, it is to allow that transformation to happen.”