Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre's Kill Me Now a messy, heartbreaking and funny look at disability

Brad Fraser's 2013 play Kill Me Now opens with a father bathing his son. Not such an unusual scene — except that in this case, the son is 17 years old.

And that question of what is or isn't "normal" is one of many at the heart of Fraser's blunt, sometimes shocking and darkly comic drama, closing the season at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse — a play that's imperfect, but carries an undeniable emotional heft.

It centres around 17-year-old Joey (Myles A. Taylor), who lives with a severe physical disability — though, as his frequent wry one-liners prove, there's no difficulty with how his mind works.

• Disability, teen angst take centre stage in Royal MTC play 'Kill Me Now'

He lives with his single dad, Jake (Cory Wojcik), a writer who's given up his career, and most of the rest of his life, to devote himself to caring for his son. He gets help from his sister Twyla (Andrea del Campo) and occasional respite through his trysts with Robyn (Sharon Bajer), a married woman.

Rounding out this unusual extended "family" is Jake's buddy Rowdy (Braiden Houle), who has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder but is, as Twyla observes, "surprisingly charming."

But Rowdy is pretty randy, and Joey is getting there himself — on the cusp of legal adulthood, he's experiencing a belated puberty and urges he hasn't felt before. That becomes just one of the family's issues when Jake's own health takes an unexpected turn.

And to be sure, Fraser's play takes on a lot of issues, like living with a disability, what "disability" even really is, sexuality, family and — no spoiler if you check the title — euthanasia.

That doesn't all gel perfectly. It does sometimes feel it's a breathless rush to cram it all in to its 100-minute (without intermission) running time. The dialogue is sometimes awkward, as though there just isn't enough time to say things more gracefully.

And Sarah Garton Stanley's production, which heads next month to Ottawa's National Arts Centre, showed some occasionally ragged timing on opening night.

But perhaps fittingly for a play concerned with disability, it's not hard to love Kill Me Now in spite of its flaws. Fraser's characters are genuine and well drawn, all of them imperfect people but more believable and likable for it.

And there's much to like in the performances, too. In his professional stage debut, Taylor finds the everyteen charm in Joey (see, for example, how monosyllabic and oblivious to the outside world he becomes when presented with a new computer tablet), and brings his humour out.

Houle is a scene-stealer and crowd-pleaser as the irrepressible Rowdy, big-hearted but honest to a fault. He delivers much of the play's ample comic relief, along with del Campo, who gets to put her considerable comedic chops to great use as the harried Twyla. Bajer and Wojcik have great chemistry together, and Wojcik gives the play some of its most wince-inducing and heartbreaking moments.

This production of Kill Me Now isn't perfect, and neither is the play. But life isn't perfect either. Sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's very (if darkly) funny and sometimes it's deeply unfair, and it's usually messy.

Fraser's play is also all of those things. And it's that complexity that makes Kill Me Now as compelling, and oddly life-affirming, as it is.

Kill Me Now runs at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre's Tom Hendry Warehouse until Apr. 15.