Playwright: Kathleen Tolan
At: Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: ( 773 ) 871-3000; $35-$40
Runs through: Oct. 23
Sometimes the simplest premise is the one that works best, in whatever art form one is talking about. That's the case here: with Kathleen Tolan's masterful, yet simple ( and never simplistic ) 80-minute look into the life of a teenage girl and her mother. Played out in real time, the story can be summed up quickly: adopted daughter Katia needs to have her college entrance exam finished before a midnight deadline ( it's New Year's Eve ) , her mother Maggie leans on her to complete it. The topic for the essay revolves around a memory house, a pneumonic device that one would use to store memories by imagining a house and then placing the events of one's life in different places so one can easily access them. The writing of the essay becomes a point of contention between mother and daughter and we begin to see why. Katia was adopted from an orphanage in Russia and her memories of the time before she came to America are scattered and difficult to access or even put some semblance of order to. She shrinks from the assignment because she, like many teenagers, is uncertain about her sense of self, and her unusual route to having parents compounds this.
What makes Memory House work is the fact that the essay ( and the mother's baking of a blueberry pie, which she actually does on stage ) are tools to explore the issues mother and daughter face, many of them universal: the divide between parents and children, how we order our lives based on our perception of ourselves at a particular moment in time, and how familial relationship can unify and divide, sometime almost simultaneously. Memory House also has unique political overtones as the daughter questions her parents' choice to adopt her from a Russian orphanage ( where, she asserts, they won't ever have to worry about the birth mother wanting her back ) and sociological ones: Katia's sense of herself is confused because she knows so little about where she came from: her memory house is scattered, broken, and filled with emotional debris.
Sandy Shinner's crisp, clear, and well-paced direction helps make Memory House a winner. Tolan provides us with characters with whom we can identify and even love. Taylor Miller ( as the mother, Maggie ) and Cassandra Bissell ( as Katia ) create real, fallible human beings that reach in and capture our hearts and minds. Bissell's performance is perfectly pitched throughout, her angst, sarcasm, and grief very real. Miller, a veteran of TV's All My Children, gives an amazing performance, one so good that one wonders how another actress could ever define the role so well. Taylor seems born to the part … and she makes Maggie a character I would love to know.
Memory House, simple, heartfelt, and complex all at the same time, is one of the finest productions I've seen on a Victory Gardens stage.