December 9th, 2030

The Memory of Water **1/2 The squabbling-siblings-home-for-the-funeral formula has provided playwrights with reams of material over the years. British playwright Shelagh Stephenson’s 1997 drama features a trio of troubled sisters from Yorkshire who gather to go through their deceased mother’s possessions and ransack their conflicting memories of childhood. It’s frequently entertaining and more than a little touching, but one wishes Stephenson had done more than offer up some tantalizing red meat for the actors. Still, Frances Limoncelli’s cast for BackStage Theatre Company tears into the often-witty slabs of acrimony with fearless abandon. The three women fall into overly familiar types. Mary (Anita Deely) is the single career woman edging up on 40, so of course her personal life is a mess; she has been having a years-long affair with a married colleague who not only shows no signs of leaving his wife, but also greets her announcement that she may be pregnant with the revelation that he has had a vasectomy. Teresa (Adrienne Smith) is the married control freak who falls apart as soon as the inevitable whiskey bottle makes its appearance, and Catherine (Rebekah Ward-Hays) is the flighty youngest sister whose Spanish paramour leaves her in the lurch. Vi (Franette Liebow), the ghostly working-class mother who appears only to Mary, doesn’t understand her girls at all. “You invent these versions of me and I don’t recognize myself,” she chides. Anyone who has ever heard a sibling describe a childhood event and thought, “That didn’t happen to her—that happened to me!” will find plenty of moments that resonate in Stephenson’s play. But her disquisitions on the unreliability of memory (the title refers to a homeopathic concept about the ability of water to “remember” the traces of whatever is dissolved in it) feel forced, despite such biting lines as, “Can you feel hostility for something that never happened?” But when the actors are in sync, as they often are in the tiny playing space, there are some terrific edge-of-the-seat moments. Deely is the most consistent at finding the emotional nuances, but each of the women finds ways to flesh out her character beyond the surface traits Stephenson gives them. And for consistent comic relief, there’s Ron Kuzava as Frank, Teresa’s exhausted, cranky, but surprisingly warmhearted husband, who slides in world-weary home truths with effortless aplomb.

- Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune

December 9th, 2030

Last fall, Backstage Theatre took a promising but deeply flawed play, Beauty on the Vine, and gave it a vigorous, persuasive production. Now they’ve done the same with Shelagh Stephenson’s 1998 comic drama about three estranged sisters holed up in their childhood home for their mother’s funeral. Director Frances Limoncelli has assembled six incisive actors so attuned to the droll surreality of death’s bullying imposition–mom’s ghost shows up to berate one of her daughters for her monumental ingratitude–that the tiniest shared silences are packed with complex emotions. Stephenson’s often meandering script is equal parts wit, pathos, and tedium, making two hours feel like three even in this sterling cast’s hands. When Backstage starts picking plays as well as they cast them, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

- Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader