“For good times and bad times” — that’s what friends are for, right? With apologies to the late Burt Bacharach, what if the ultimate act of friendship is also the one that ultimately ends it?
That’s the moral dilemma facing two besties in Act 39, written by Circus Smirkus founder Rob Mermin. The play runs from June 22 through July 2 at Goddard College’s Haybarn Theater in Plainfield. Act 39 is based on Mermin’s friendship with Bill Morancy, who, with Mermin’s support, ended his life, and his suffering from pancreatic cancer, in 2015 by exercising his rights under Act 39, also known as the Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act, which became state law in 2013.
The play is so autobiographical — “based totally on true events,” Mermin said during a break in rehearsals — that its two characters are named Rob and Bill.
Mermin recalled this friendship in a moving 2016 episode of Erica Heilman’s “Rumble Strip” podcast on Vermont Public. That first-person account rendered personal, intimate and palpable an issue that many Vermonters encounter as political and abstract. Mermin began speaking directly to people interested in learning more about medical aid in dying, sometimes in collaboration with end-of-life advocacy nonprofit Patient Choices Vermont.
“In this phase of life, I find that I have stories to tell that are meaningful.” Rob Mermin
After a few years of telling his Act 39 story, he began writing it down. The first draft, he said, was “cathartic.” It also took a somewhat on-the-nose approach — a kind of “panel discussion,” as Mermin described it in a phone interview. After shelving and retrieving the project a few times over a few years, Mermin realized that “just telling the story of what happened and how it went down with me and my friend Bill” might offer more illumination of the issue.
To remain true to that story, Mermin wrote into the script his own serious illness — a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in 2014 that would foreshadow, in a sense, the challenges ahead for Rob, played by J.T. Turner, and Bill, played by Donny Osman, who is also the show’s producer.
Disclosing such personal details “was not easy for me. I’m more of a private person,” Mermin, the retired clown-mime, said over the phone. In one poignant exchange in the play, Rob tells Bill that “having Parkinson’s is like doing mime all day long. Every movement is intentional.”
While Mermin may have been reluctant to open up, others in his circle were unsurprised to see him write from the heart.
“When he mentioned that he had started writing a play, I had a sense that humor and friendship would be a central theme,” Patient Choices Vermont president Betsy Walkerman shared via email. “Rob is a story-teller, and a great one.” Walkerman added that Mermin also checked his facts with her about the medical aid-in-dying process.
Act 39, directed by Monica Callan, is a fresh take on the story of Mermin and Morancy’s friendship in the unique language of theater, reanimating painful but also joyful moments. The plot follows the general arc of their relationship, starting in 2007 — the year Mermin left Circus Smirkus — when they each moved into the same School Street apartment building in Montpelier. They soon crossed paths at the Savoy Theater, where Morancy worked as a projectionist. The two became friends.
As dramatized in the play, they would initiate hangout time together with a tap on the floor separating their apartments. Sometimes this would lead to a game of catch outside the building — action also included in the play. But it wasn’t all fun and games: Morancy was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in fall 2015 and learned that, the cancer having metastasized, he’d have about six months to live.
The autobiographical mooring of Act 39 creates an unavoidable spoiler, since the play’s title implies the resolution of Morancy’s life, an outcome that Mermin has shared publicly. That’s OK. Because, as a recent rehearsal revealed, the play is not so much a mystery as a meditation — on friendship and how sometimes fleeting human connections give life form and meaning.
As Bill and Rob together navigate events that neither had anticipated, the journey brings out their contrasting characters. Rob is the mystical believer prone to magical visions — and ready with a magic trick — while Bill is the “grounded realist,” as Osman described his character. (Osman’s collaboration with Mermin dates back to Osman’s Circus Smirkus ringmaster gig in the late 1980s, the early years of the troupe. He later served in the state legislature.)
Under Callan’s direction, Act 39 mixes friendly dialogue with more dramatic flourishes, such as when some events — backstories, historical anecdotes and dreamlike visions — play out on a center-stage riser, with Bill and Rob interacting in the downstage foreground. Two additional actors play multiple roles in these memories and sidebars, among them Rob’s lost love Marian and Mistress Death (Maren Langdon Spillane), and Hercules, Samuel Morse and Sigmund Freud (Dominic Spillane).
Cavan Meese’s set and lighting design and Johnnie Day Durand’s soundscapes will transform Mermin’s heavily autobiographical script into “realms of reality and fantasy and almost a magical sense about things,” Callan said in a phone interview. “We want to leave room for the audience [to] experience a sense of wonder and a sense of the celebration of the present.”
To call Act 39 timely is an understatement. A decade after the eponymous law’s passage, Vermont now extends medical aid in dying to nonresidents, leading a small but growing national movement. What makes the play resonant, however, are the questions it raises beyond the political sphere — about life’s greatest mystery: death.
Hidden in the breezy, platonic repartee is a dramatic structure punctuated by a series of debates: Rob and Bill debating the elusive question of what happens to us when we die; Rob and a pharmacist debating whether Rob’s “picking up a little white bag of death for my friend” is kindness; Rob and Mistress Death debating whether his planned intervention in Bill’s passing can be considered fate; and Freud and Mistress Death debating whether the indignity of the jaw cancer that reputedly hastened his demise was really necessary.
Director Callan reaps the pathos in this small story of two friends while drawing energy from its connection to larger debates about civil liberties. During a break in rehearsals, she spoke of opposition to Act 39 and the rollback of Roe v. Wade as “disturbing” encroachments on individual autonomy.
“Who are we to tell people how they live and die?” she said, adding that it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of such intolerance. She looks to her theater art — “telling stories that move us” and urging audiences to think for themselves — as a way to have some agency in the face of overwhelming, polarizing political forces.
“That’s the only power I have,” Callan said.
For Mermin, Act 39 has launched what sounds like a second act for the retired circus performer. He’s been sharing his experiences, along with some therapeutic circus artistry, with other people dealing with Parkinson’s. He’s considering whether another play might come from that.
“When I’d be performing in the ring,” he said, “I was a silent clown performer, a mime-clown. But now, in this phase of life, I find that I have stories to tell that are meaningful.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Exeunt Strategy | A play inspired by Vermont’s end-of-life law celebrates a twilight friendship”
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2023.
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