Canadian comedy couple explore grief and memory in Fringe show Big Stuff

Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus’s show Big Stuff was created in response to their own bereavement, but it also gives audience members a chance to share memories of those they’ve lost. Interview by Mark Fisher

Matt Baram is an actor in control of his emotions. Even when performing a show about grief, he keeps a lid on it. By contrast, Naomi Snieckus, his partner offstage and on, is quick to express her feelings: she recently had to apologise for welling up at the dentist. But Baram stays cool. Which makes it all the more surprising that when he finally buckled on stage, it was because someone in the audience had mentioned a colander.

“That one broke me open,” he says. “I was like, ‘Why am I crying? It’s just a colander.’”

It is the kind of question the two of them ask in Big Stuff, a comedy about loss which, having played more than 100 times in their native Canada, is heading for a three-week run on the Edinburgh Fringe. The play looks at bereavement not so much in terms of the five stages of grief, but in terms of the objects people leave behind. Anyone who has had to clear out a dead relative’s wardrobe will know the feeling: the clothes that once defined the person suddenly have no purpose. Getting rid of them can feel like saying goodbye to your loved one all over again.

Clothes are particularly personal, but we invest all kinds of things with the person’s memory: a CD, an ornament and, yes, even a colander – in that case, one that reminded an audience member of her grandmother.

“It’s just a colander, but it’s not,” says Snieckus, thinking of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe which had the subtitle Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe (This Is Not A Pipe). Because of her emotional investment, the woman in the audience had transformed the colander into something significant.

Set in a basement, Big Stuff is about a couple going through boxes of belongings, one keen to clear the clutter, the other anxious not to let go of it. “The show is about what we leave behind and the love and connection that is in the stuff,” says Baram. “It’s about our relationships to each other and our stuff and how our heart can get buried in these things.”

Half by accident, the pair have stumbled onto an unusually resonant subject. It seems everyone has an anecdote to share. “When we tell people the plot of Big Stuff, we don’t even get to the end,” says Baram. “People are connecting themselves to it. Our job is done. In the theatre, you’re already on the same page.”

Snieckus agrees: “If you love somebody, you want to share stories about them. We end up in the lobby, talking to people for another hour after the show because there are so many stories to tell. It’s an honour and a pleasure to hear them.”

To their surprise, age is no restriction, says Baram: “We did a show for high school kids. We thought they wouldn’t connect with it because they hadn’t experienced enough loss, but they were the most engaging audience we’ve had. It was devastating.”

“They had stories of fires that took their homes and grandparents that they loved,” says Snieckus. “We all know loss on some level.”

For this reason, Big Stuff builds in the opportunity for audiences to share memories – hence the anecdote about the colander. The play is scripted, but Baram and Snieckus, who met at Second City Theatre in Toronto, are experienced improvisers and love the spontaneity of live interaction. On the way in, audience members can choose to fill in a card to say if something at home reminds them of someone. Their responses mean no two performances are the same.

“We didn’t know it was going to be this impactful,” says Snieckus. “Within the first week of shows, somebody said she had been given a necklace by her husband. As soon as she said that, Matt knew that the husband had passed. The magical part was you could feel the audience take a moment for this person who had obviously gone through something. They embraced her and her story. We realised it was bigger than we thought it was going to be.”

They wrote the play as a way of reflecting on their own grief, but early drafts felt weighed down by the effort of eulogising their parents. Their director, Kat Sandler, helped them find the joy in it. When they introduced humour – the human quirks, the unfished jokes, the happy memories – it sparked into life. “After 16 drafts, we finally came up with what we wanted to say about our parents, which was all the things that made us laugh – with them and at them,” says Baram.

“We didn’t want everybody to leave the show depressed,” says Snieckus. “I don’t want to be responsible for people having a bad evening. There’s levity in everything. We wanted people to leave the show with hope and connection.”

“We approach everything with lightness,” says Baram. “We feel you can’t approach death without it.”

Has doing a show about loss helped give them a better understanding of their own grief? “I don’t think I’ll ever understand my grief,” says Snieckus. “You learn how to move around it, because you don’t move past it. If I understand my grief today, it could change tomorrow. Matt and I process things through art and comedy. The show gives us a chance to find levity and celebrate our parents with their idiosyncrasies and nuances. That’s joyful.”

Big Stuff is at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, from 5-30 August as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This feature was produced in association with Metal Rabbit

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