RUN FOR THE DANGER
Confrontations with a body of memory
By Sarah Polley
One of the most silent films I’ve seen in recent decades is the 2006 independent feature ‘Away From Her’. Adapted from a short story by Alice Munro, it shows a long-married couple struggling with a woman’s advancing Alzheimer’s. and the chasm of memories that the dementia simultaneously digs up and erases. The writer and director is Sarah Polley, a Canadian artist who was then 27 and a well-known child actor, who appeared at the age of 8 in Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and then went on to star in the hit series “Road to Avonlea”. .” How ‘Canada’s sweetheart’, as Polley came to be known, grew so quickly into a filmmaker whose creative vision was beyond her years as the characters she put on screen (Julie Christie received an Oscar nomination for ‘Away From Her,’, like Polley’s script) was a question I asked myself more than once in the years that followed.
Polley’s author debut, “Run Towards the Danger,” answers that question as well as anything it probably could. In six sprawling but meaty essays, Polley, now 43, recalls a life where playing the part of children was obligatory and almost constant (her first acting job was at age 4), but actually being a child became an unnecessary burden for all. those involved . Born into a theatrical family, she was 11 when her mother died, after which her father, who was “proud of not being a father,” retired to a solipsistic funk. With her much older siblings long out of the house, Sarah decided at age 14 to be mature enough to move out of the house and at age 15 she moved in with her 19-year-old boyfriend. The following summer, she began a residency at the Stratford Festival where she starred in a production of “Alice Through the Looking-Glass.”
The book’s opening essay, “Alice, Collapsing,” deals with the woes of the Stratford production, one in which Polley, now famous on television but new to theater, develops such a debilitating stage fright that eventually the “fear turned into madness, and myself went through the mirror.” She also suffers from scoliosis, a diagnosis she received shortly after her mother’s death and which she has to deal with more or less on her own.After delaying an inevitable but not yet urgent surgery, Polley becomes so desperate to leave the show. that she comes up with a medical excuse and schedules the procedure as soon as possible, leaving an understudy scrambling to take over her role.
Polley devotes several pages to the 10-hour surgery and the lengthy recovery. Tellingly, though, the most poignant detail of this essay is the fact that Polley’s departure from “Alice Through the Looking-Glass” caused a subsequent run of the show to be canceled. When Polley wins a $500 prize from the Stratford Festival for “Best Newcomer,” she leaves the money in an envelope for a castmate who had been counting on the money to buy a carpet to cover the cold floors of her bedroom. daughter to cover. “I couldn’t look anyone in the eye,” Polley writes of her adult colleagues. “I had cost them their winter income.”
