Theatre review: All the feels, as Big Stuff takes an open-hearted look at the way we hang on to things
With plenty of laughter, improv-comedy veterans Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram candidly explore loss and how we attach meaning to objects
Big Stuff’s Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram. Photo by Dahlia Katz
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Big Stuff at the Olympic Village Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre to November 1
THERE’S A MEME floating around out there that lists the “3 stages of life”: Wanting stuff. Accumulating Stuff. Giving away stuff.
To that last item, let’s add a fourth: Giving away your parents’ stuff. It’s in that painful—and sometimes painfully funny—stage that Ontario improv-comedy veterans Naomi Snieckus and Matt Baram find such rich material for their show Big Stuff. Their set is a mountain of cardboard boxes topped with toasters, egg slicers, and other ephemera collected from close relatives over the years.
Early in the interactive two-hander, the throw-away-happy Baram places a dump box at centre stage, and he and his hoarder-adjacent wife try to decide which objects to part with. Will it be the gleefully unhinged hockey-collage family portrait by Baram’s late father? What about the delicate crochet hook from Snieckus’s grandmother that she’ll never know how to use?
Along the way, we’ll learn a lot about the couple, who candidly explore their own relationship to “stuff” and share their stories of personal loss.
There are big laughs in Big Stuff, in part due to the pair’s easy ribbing; watch the gently acerbic Baram needle the warm, sentimental Snieckus about her toaster collection when they have both sworn off bread. But there’s also a tender generosity to the way they share memories. Baram remembers thinking his mother was magic because of the way she could tell when his ears popped on a road trip. And the open-hearted Snieckus invites us into the final, transcendent weeks she spent with her father at a snowy cabin before his death.
The pair draw a lot from the audience throughout. Even before the lights go down, theatregoers are invited to write down the meaningful items they’ll never part with, and Snieckus and Baram intermittently throw to the crowd to talk about those objects. As with any crowd work, the results are mixed and will depend on which night you see the show. No one is forced to contribute, and there’s a big payoff when the pair taps the audience for a last act of communal magic that more than makes up for any lagging interaction that comes earlier on.
Big Stuff, cocreated and directed by Kat Sandler, was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe, and is set to head to New York and London after this Vancouver run. The production is at its absolute best in its more structured storytelling, in the unpretentious way it reveals its two leads, in the trenchantly honest way it touches on a life and marriage in the arts, and in the way it roots out our penchant for hanging on to objects when we lose people—even though that makes zero logical sense. As Snieckus insists, “My grandmother lives in that crochet hook.” No argument here.
It’s all moving and deep, without ever feeling maudlin or manipulative. Here’s a special show that’s got all the feels and all the things—one where puny humans deal with big, messy stuff, and lay it all out on the stage, literally and figuratively. 
Big Stuff’s Matt Baram opens audience memories. Photo by Dahlia Katz
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