Almost an entire season ago, when I closed the script cover on my first reading of Jonathan Lichtenstein’s Memory, I was dumbstruck. The latter half of this terse and economical play was devastatingly powerful, and contained scenes that were filled to the brim with wrenching, truthful moments of emotional power, and I was left breathless and purified in that beautifully cathartic way that only good drama can provide.
These deeply powerful moments revolve around two of the most emotional episodes in human history, the Holocaust and the present struggle for peace in the Middle East. These scenes are not about politics, but about ordinary families attempting to live their lives within a cage of troubling politics that are beyond the control of themselves and everyone around them.
As I sat in my chair with my script in my lap, there was something else that was nagging at me. Despite the devastating nature of the holocaust scenes (and they are vivid, painful, and transporting) this was not a Holocaust play. Nor did I feel it was it a political play intending to draw clear and provocative parallels between Nazi’s and Isreali’s (although some will inevitably feel that way). There was something subtler, something more abstract and intriguing going on in this usual play.
These latter scenes of striking emotional power, and the threads of the entire play itself, are framed by a mysterious convention of a play-within-a-play. The premise as it appears in the script is simple. Memory begins with a group of actors, a director and stage manager rehearsing scenes in a shabby room. The actors all play themselves, use their own names and they proceed to rehearse a play. There are interruptions; by the actors, the director and from noises outside and the actors inhibitions. But by the end of the play, these interruptions are all but gone, and those powerful scenes mentioned above have come to the forefront and the “actors” have all but disappeared into their parts. There are no hints from the playwright as to why or to what end this convention should be utilized or how to do it. The only reference to any kind of scenic instruction appears above the very first line of the play. “A rehearsal room.” Advice from the playwright begins and ends right there, before play even begins.
For weeks I tried to reconcile the convention of the play with the vivid story of the Holocaust and the Middle East. It was tough. On the surface, the playwright, with the exception of one deeply surprising and powerful moment, seems to abandon the convention 2/3 of the way through his play. But despite the mystery of the convention, the play-within-the-play element seemed somehow inextricable from the experience of the play as a whole.
A long time ago, a directing teacher once told me that my primary job as a director is to understand the play and its characters from every possible angle. He claimed that everything else flows from that understanding, and for the most part, I still cling solidly to that advice. But in recent years, I’ve become increasingly comfortable with taking a few steps into the darkness of uncertainty. As long as I trust the playwright, his instincts and the story he is trying to tell, I will let him take me and my actors into that dark place. If the playwright knows what he is doing, even if only on a subconscious level, the darkness can be navigated. That’s the true process of theatre.
And that’s when it dawned on me. As is so often the case, as soon as we stop over-analyzing and looking for ways to decode the hidden meaning, that is (of course) when the understanding comes and the meaning materializes. Despite the intensely moving and emotional nature of the pivotal holocaust scenes, this is not a play about The Holocaust. Memory is a play ultimately about the thing itself: the process of theatre. Play-making.
Very early on in our process, we discovered the parallels between Eva’s journey and the journey of the actress playing Eva. Both Eva and the actress Brenda must navigate the pain and anxiety of speaking the truth in the climactic scene of the play which, interestingly, is not during one of the holocaust scenes. The climax actually comes during that final, surprising bit of play-within-the-play that occurs after we have all but forgotten about the convention itself. It is startling and powerful and mysterious to watch actor and character struggle with the same climactic moment of parallel truth. It is a powerful, gutsy moment of playwrighting, and an astonishing example of deeply courageous acting on the of the part of Brenda Barrie. It is a moment that beautifully illustrates the complex and often painful relationship that real actors have to fictional characters whose stories they are expected to tell with truth and compassion.
But if the play itself was content at simply being “about play-making,” then it could become a clinical exercise that would have little impact on a lay audience. But thankfully, Lichtenstein, like all good theatremakers, cares deeply about various layers of truth, about his characters and about the story that the play-makers are attempting to tell. He bravely uses the framework of a semi-autobiographical story that reaches back to the holocaust to remind us that theatre is an intricate process of events that start with the desire for ordinary human beings with ordinary lives and ordinary problems to share stories with other ordinary human beings. That desire to share a truthful and transporting story with a roomful of strangers is at the heart of Lichtenstein’s generous play and is at the heart of theatre itself. The play-within-a-play convention disappears in the final half of the play, because the playmakers finally allow their own lives and personalities to take a backseat to the remarkable story they are telling. With the audience in attendance, unity is achieved with the unfolding story. The magic of theatre takes hold, and it ushers this collection of temporary strangers into an embrace of darkness and directly into mystery of the tale being told.
Memory plays now through December 18th at the Viaduct Theatre.
