Playwright: Mia McCullough
At: Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield
Phone: ( 773 ) 883-8830; $18-$22
Runs through: Nov 19
Echoes of Another Man is one of those plays with a premise that excites and engages our imagination completely. The story, by Mia McCullough, is about a man ( a middle-aged visual artist whose health is failing due to diabetes ) whose brain is transplanted into the body of a young professional golfer who is brain dead. The story, seemingly the stuff of science fiction, raises all sorts of questions and incites a great amount of empathy from the audience. How would we react if confronted with the essence of a person was suddenly transplanted into another body? Could we still love that person? Could we continue to think of the person behind the new, unfamiliar eyes in the same way? What about if one of our loved ones, dead to all thought and ideas, was suddenly brought back to life with another personality inhabiting the same physical form? Would we continue to love the physical form, even though we know that many of the connections, memories, and thoughts of that person were gone? And if we were the person upon whom this radical and revolutionary surgery was performed, how would we react to so-called sense memories, or instincts stored in places other than our own central nervous system?
Playwright McCullough and director Kevin Heckman do an admirable job in Echoes of Another Man exploring these questions and making them into credible and compelling drama. McCullough's Frankenstein-ish tale is not really about forging brave new paths into medicine, but more about deeper questions of identity and connection.
Cory Kresbach plays the 'patient,' with equal measures of sympathy, hope, angst, and confusion as consciousness emerges and the bandages come off. Can his relationship with his agent and lover, Raina ( mature, controlled work from Marguerite Hammersley ) continue as before: paradoxically loving and abusive? What about his relationship with the widow of the golfer whose body he now inhabits? It's heart rending to watch this pair grapple with forging a new connection here and Cat Dean's performance as the widow draws us in completely to her pain and confusion.
Echoes of Another Man raises fascinating, thought-provoking issues and does so without ever becoming mawkish or exploitative. Credit this fine, subtle production with making what seems, at first glance, to be a rather far-out premise into something real and absorbing. This is what good theater is really all about: drawing us in and making us think, keeping us entertained, and engaging our hearts and minds equally.