Beside Myself

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

In addition to being a writer and actor, Jennifer Wynne Webber has
worked as a documentary researcher and a television journalist. Beside
Myself, her first play, draws on theories of particle physics as it
explores its central theme of renewal. Following the premature death of
her young and vital husband, Hally, a physicist, leaves her Saskatchewan
home and goes to live on a sailboat off the coast of British Columbia.
As she seeks to purge her old life to make way for the new, she finds
herself challenging the laws of human nature that she once thought were
eternal.

Webber successfully blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy by
introducing the ghost of Hally’s husband as a character. Quantum wave
theory (the idea that the simple act of observing something changes that
which is observed), multiple coexisting realities, and other aspects of
theoretical physics are woven into the narrative so carefully that the
intellectual theorizing reinforces and deepens the emotional text,
rather than overwhelming it. Beside Myself is a remarkably assured play.