How far would you go for justice?

That’s a question at the heart of Why Now Theatre Collective’s A Life Sentence, which opens tonight (May 23) at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre.

The show is based on real, verbatim transcripts from when co-producer and playwright Jarred Stephen Meek’s mother, a BC resident, pressed charges against her father for the abuse she experienced while she was growing up. 

After having its Studio 58 production cancelled due to the pandemic, the show debuted at 2023’s Vancouver Fringe. This time around, A Life Sentence is being put on as part of Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival from May 23 to May 26. Following that, it has a run at Edmonton Fringe.

Spanning from the 1970s through to the ‘90s (but undeniably relevant in a post-#MeToo world), A Life Sentence is deeply personal to not only Meek, but his family.

“My mom came to watch the show with my twin brother and his wife, and it was really important for me for my twin brother to see the show,” Meek says. “I think it was really important for him to have this understanding of our mom, because over the last seven years of writing this, I have gained such an understanding of her.” 

Meek’s co-producer Alina Blackett, who also plays the lead, says that this show means a lot to her, too.

“It’s a huge honour, and it’s close to my heart in a lot of different ways. And it’s something that I really value in theatre and art in general is the potential to heal,” she says. “That’s really important to me as an artist and as a human being and as a producer.”

She says that while it’s a heavy piece, the cast manages to find humorous moments in it.

“We can just do the heaviest piece ever and we’ll have each other belly laughing the next moment,” she says. “To be able to bring that part of ourselves and the process into it also brings another real human part of it. We laugh through our pain and alongside our pain, and that also helps us heal.”

The audience is finding it emotional, too: Blackett says that she often gets people coming up and sharing their personal stories with her following a performance.

“That was the most common reaction that people approached me personally with, and it was so beautiful for them to feel safe enough to say, ‘This reminded me of this thing that happened to me as a kid,’” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s our job done.’”

Meek says that he will never forget the night that his family came to the show; when the play was over, everyone else had emptied out of the audience except for them, and he quietly observed a poignant moment.

“I got to see, from the wings, my mom and my brother sitting there just crying,” he remembers. “But good tears.”

A Life Sentence is at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre from May 23 to 26 as part of rEvolver Festival. Tickets are available here.