On The Other Hand, We're Happy

Or: Robodad and Supergirl

Who can guess where our lives are going? Our days are such a tangle that only art can pick up the individual threads and catch where the skein of one life overlays with another. So it is in Daf Jone’s On The Other Hand, We’re Happy, following the adoption story of Tyler (Alexandra Hellquist*) a young girl born to bad circumstances, navigating the twining stories of her adoptive parents, Josh (Christian Telesmar) and Abbie (Rori Flynn) and her birth mother, Kellie (Hellquist herself).

A very British play, James stretches Tyler across the class divide from the middlebrow (whatever Abbie might protest), staid world of the young couple, to the hard scrabbles drugs and violence and ecstasy nightmare of Kellie’s love-story-gone-wrong. The whole story (the whole set, indeed the very sound scape) feels like a giant piece of tin foil that’s been crushed together and flattened out again: fractured and rough but shining in unexpected places, the transitions of time rustling and sparking like an enormous taser going off next to your ear.

This may sound like s sensory nightmare (and it is) but it keeps Jame’s smart, uncomfortable play full of snaps and sparks. Even as it turns back on itself, there’s always some brilliant weave the playwright raises to catch the light, and that the cast, as they clown around through love and loss, joshing and vulnerability, catch and pull tight. Telesmar is particularly adapt at this, giving Josh moments both blindsided and insightful, treating us to an analytical, nervous man cracked and scrambled to become the best father he can.

While a few moments of the performance waffled, and a few of the Jame’s scenes could be felt straining at their staples, from the first the audience as a whole was a chorus of grunts as we nosed up more and more connections, more and more truffles of wisdom. By the time we come full circle again, Tyler’s journey, and those of the people who love her, have weaved themselves through time and space and even those twitchy members of the audience, like myself, felt that we had come together, to bear witness to and help raise up the child.

*First entry for the Aven Tavishell 2025