There’s a philosophical inquiry going on as well - about what we owe one another and about the nature of being human. In this production, actor Synthia Yusuf delivers that simple line with such protectiveness she left me with the sense that Hayley may be the one who sees Walker most clearly. She doesn’t want her father or anybody else to presume to speak for her brother. In one of the most moving passages in the script, Hayley challenges the underpinning of her dad’s book and, by implication, the play. There is also brightness, much of it involving Walker’s big sister Hayley. “I began to ask myself if it wouldn’t be braver to kill myself,” Ian says, “and take him with me.” The fundamental tension in the play is between love and survival, love and the capacity to go on. In the play’s opening, Ian’s description of tube-feeding Walker and changing his diaper is enough to banish any expectations of romanticism. Both parents love Walker tenaciously and endure endless sleepless nights and marriage-corroding stress to care for him. The great strength of The Boy in the Moon is that it is relentlessly clear-eyed, not sentimental or magical in the manner of so many popular entertainments about milder forms of disability. When he gets a little older, Walker starts to hit himself so hard that his body is black and blue. Describing Walker at birth, the character Ian says, “His body doesn’t want to live.” Walker is eventually diagnosed with Cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome (CFC), a rare genetic disorder that leaves him unable to speak or to toilet or feed himself. This version of The Boy in the Moon is playwright Emil Sher’s adaptation of Ian Brown’s memoir about raising Walker, his severely disabled son, with his wife Johanna Schneller. (Photo by Mark Halliday, Moonrider Productions) So, if it does nothing else, Boy In The Moon shows Ian Brown's maturity, his depth of character.Ian (Marcus Youssef) with a photo of Walker. Cole Porter recognized early that we lack a strong music that plays the bass notes of our souls and forces us together in dances that repeat the bitter-sweetness of life itself: tangos, and rumbas and beguines. The pop noises of our culture are superficial at best. CNN, pop-music, gizmos, the latest rve them up hot and ready and you may never have to think or feel or wonder about the purpose of small and painful lives whose ordeal challenges their caregivers and progenitors.

We can avoid thinking and feeling by choosing an embarrassing selection of diversions that prevent us from experiencing life deeply. In our increasingly secular world, we can avoid serious topics like these with ease. What Walker himself does most effectively is to occupy a place in his father's previously cold heart, one that provokes challenging questions about the quality of life, about our responsibilities as parents, about why suffering exists in the world, and about what we do with it or about it.

The Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown