Itai Erdal is an Jerusalem-born, once-aspiring documentary filmmaker who became a lighting designer and now lives in Vancouver, B.C. He's also a nimble, funny storyteller and on the opening night of his show, How to Disappear Completely at On the Boards, artistic director Lane Czaplinski said several times that Erdal was the kind of guy you wind up closing down a bar with—Erdal likes to talk, and people like to listen. I'm sure he's closed down bars on several continents with his story about swimming with a sexually aggressive Australian dugong.

How to Disappear Completely works on two levels. The first is lighting design. The second is his mother's lung cancer, how it changed the family (his mom, her second husband, Erdal, his sister), and the fact that Erdal helped her commit suicide.

The first level is marvelous—I learned more about lighting design in one hour of this short show than I have in years as a theater critic. Erdal wanders around the stage with a small light board in his hand, activating cues and explaining how they work and what they're good for. In the early minutes of the show, he stands in a pitch-blackout, saying it's a common misperception amongst theatermakers that actors are only really heard by an audience when they are seen. But he proves that the words of the obscured, like the words of the dead—the words of anyone disappeared—can be haunting.

Erdal talks about the emotional uses of different colors of lighting gels and his affection for the way "shinbusters" give unexpected dimensions to actors (which are so named because they're banks of lights that sit on the stage and will bust your shins if you run into them during a blackout). He delivers a paean to bright white can lights, which some designers dismiss as a crude rock 'n' roll/concert effect. But their light spills across a performer, creating a dichotomous illumination-silhouette effect—the presence of absence—and becomes warmer as it dims. He turns one on and dims it, percentage by percentage, looking increasingly human and sympathetic as he disappears.

Which brings us to the second level—his mother's illness and death. This level is problematically manipulative. On its face, that's an odd criticism. Theater is manipulative by definition. But there's a whiff of disingenuousness when a middle-aged performer walks into a theater full of middle-aged people and starts toying with us by talking about parent death.

Odds are that a significant percentage of people in the room have dealt with, are dealing with, or are becoming anxious about dealing with that viscerally painful experience, which is a kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions and an easy way to disturb people. (Full disclosure: I'm in that target audience.)

But simply invoking parent death and leaving it at that is us doing the work. If a performer is going to stab that raw nerve—the emotional equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater—he (in this case) has an obligation to tell us something we don't know, to show us something new. Otherwise, it's just picking at our scabs.

That's where Erdal chickens out, or at least stretches for something he can't reach—ostensibly, the show is hung on the peg of him helping his mother commit suicide. But how he came to that decision, how he carried it out, and how he feels about it in retrospect gets only a few sparse, descriptive sentences. When it comes to the heart of the matter, his loquacious gifts begin to dim and almost (almost) disappear. Death is common, in life and art—so common that it's extraordinarily difficult to say anything meaningful about it.

While it doesn't accomplish its deeper ethical/aesthetic mission, How to Disappear Completely is entertaining and its first level, the lighting design level, is a surprising and satisfying success. If you can induce enough insta-amnesia to forget what it's trying to do on that second level, the show is (paradoxically) a breezy and charming monologue about lighting design with some small footnotes about how and why to kill your mother.

How to Disappear Completely plays tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm. Get tickets here.