This tour de force performance highlights the importance of resilience in the face of inevitable pain.
Review written by Our Theatre Voice Guest Writer Keilantra Huang
An autobiographical tour de force, Hello Sunshine! by Sara Porter is a one-woman performance that details her experience navigating a Polymorphous Light Eruption (PMLE) diagnosis at the age of 27 and the rippling effects of her reactions to UV light on her life. Over the course of an hour, Porter details the various ways that chronic illness and disability can alter an individual’s life in seemingly small but all-consuming ways. To that end, she does not shy away from depicting the practical realities of illness and pain. Still, without being overly cliché or cloyingly inspirational, Porter’s end product is a raw demonstration of resilience and a testament to the need to live life without fear.
The “black box theatre” nature of the performance allowed the stunning set design to shine. The immediate first visual attraction was the lamps downstage, which separated the audience from the performer and heightened Sara’s emotional depictions. Other times, the lamps creatively served as scene partners. The end result made the performance feel larger than its one-woman cast. Simultaneously, from her ukulele to her sticky notes, the set was consistently drenched in a bright yellow that both lightened the mood and seemed to mock Sara’s pain. Certain sickly hues of yellow and plasticky yellow hazmat suits emphasized how PMLE twists the traditionally joyful and unavoidable archetype of the sun into a source of violence
.Another creative prop was the hanging sun rug that became the central visual anchor of Sara’s story. Spearheaded by lighting designer Rebecca Picherack, fiery shades of red and orange ominously flooded the stage as Porter described the stabbing pain she lives with daily. Beyond her own words, Porter bolstered her description with real visuals of what PMLE looks like on skin.
Rejecting the typical sanitization of chronic illness, Porter instead presented an opportunity for a raw and unflinching viewing of what life can look like with PMLE, both in the good and the bad. After all, while Sara does not claim to be cured by the end of the performance, in fact, she is open about how this is a lifelong condition; her evolution throughout the performance highlights how things like chronic illness and disability do not have to be life sentences.
Completing the sensory experience of this performance is sound designer Stephen Joffe, who astutely captured Porter’s moods with music that ranged from light and whimsical, as when she explained what “polymorphous” meant, to ironic and oppressive. Songs like “Here Comes the Sun” were carefully curated to establish a comedic yet casually devastating atmosphere. Hello Sunshine! was created with help from blind artist Alex Bulmer and intentionally designed to be accessible to visually impaired audiences. Indeed, even elements outside the performance, such as closed audio descriptions and a pre-show touch tour, highlight the show’s thoughtful and inclusive nature.
Beyond the set design, Porter delivered an authentic and moving performance. She performed unique abstract movements, each with either fluidity or incisiveness, concurring with the musicality of each song. Her barefoot, grandiose full-body movements as she navigated the stage conveyed a vulnerable yearning for freedom from her pain.
While she spends most of the show alone on stage, the occasional involvement of the crew and audience further developed a relaxed atmosphere and highlighted the show’s greatest strength—being a safe, warm space to hold candid narratives. Casual interactions between Porter and crew members, like saying “and this is where the music comes in” to Joffe, underpinned how, despite the performance being a one-woman show, navigating chronic illness is easiest with a support network.
The only limitation of Porter’s one-woman show is that while she is exceedingly vulnerable as herself, her performance when playing other characters feels comparatively flat. Scenes with three scene partners (lamps) lacked Porter’s effortlessly gentle comedic tonal instinct or any unique charm and instead fused together into one singular voice. As a result, certain scenes were confusingly unclear in just how many characters were involved, though this could have also been Porter’s creative decision to showcase the formulation of her internal thoughts.
Hello Sunshine! is an unfiltered examination of the realities of living with a chronic condition like PMLE. While the subject matter is grave, especially because of its autobiographical nature, the show remains humorous and enrapturing because of Porter’s larger-than-life performance.
Hello Sunshine! runs from August 13th to August 15th at Theatre Centre, Franco Boni Theatre. For tickets and inquiries, visit: https://summerworks.ca/show/hello-sunshine/
Company: Sara Porter Productions
Choreographer, Writer & Performer: Sara Porter
Co-Producer: Alex Jodi Verge
Creative Collaborator: Katherine Duncanson
Video Designer & Choreographic Collaborator: Linnea Swan
Disability Dramaturge & Creative Collaborator: Alex Bulmer
Lighting Designer: Rebecca Picherack
Sound Designer: Stephen Joffe
Visual Art Contributor: Elaine Whittaker
Costume Consultant: Val Calam
Audio Describer: Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Technical Director: Franco Pang
Stage Manager: A.J. Morra
Assistant Stage Manager / Performer: Kathy Le
Accessibility Facilitator: Lorna Craig
Administrative Assistant: Cass Cabral Pucci
