Plays about people grappling with various forms of dementia are not uncommon these days. The Other Place, The Memory Show, and The Father are among recent dramas drawn from this sad occurrence of modern life.
Currently onstage at The New Victory Theater through this weekend, The Nature of Forgetting is an uncommonly lovely and poignant work that somehow succeeds in viewing and illuminating dementia through an affirmative lens.
It is a wonderfully vibrant music-movement-theater piece that relates a story not so much about memory loss, but about what still manages to remain alive inside somebody’s mind.
Devised by members of the ensemble of Theatre Re, a London-based company, The Nature of Forgetting is a mostly non-verbal event that centers around Tom, a 55 year-old man stricken with early onset dementia. As the 75-minute show begins, Tom’s adult daughter is tying his shoelaces and reminding him that he is getting ready for his birthday party. She tells Tom that his suit jacket is hanging on the end of the clothes rack.
Disregarding his coat, which he soon tosses aside, Tom rummages among other garments on the rack, which trigger memories from his childhood:
Being alternately mischievous and industrious among his rowdy classmates in school. Rampaging on the playground. Grabbing his first kiss. Going to the movies. Running, rollicking, and recklessly riding his bike. Being a young and happy and carefree kid.
These memories keep repeating and refracting in nearly kaleidoscopic patterns of movement, driven by a rhythmic, percussive, jangling score—performed live-—that squeals with a joyful fiddle and marks the passage of time with a tick-tock beat. Led by Guillaume Pigé as Tom, five other performers adeptly portray numerous people as he grows up amid a cascade of good times that are fleetingly evoked in recurring fragments, which culminates in his wedding.
This whirlwind of bright shards of memory contrasts against the several points when time returns to the present as Tom silently sits on a chair, hands on his knees, looking vacant. Soon the audience knows better—although this man cannot recall his daughter’s name today, those distant yesterdays still vividly flicker deep within him.
The acute yet easy physicality of the performers, several of whom also play instruments, is impressive as they swiftly cavort among the desks and chairs of the show’s minimal setting. Pigé, who founded Theatre Re and stages this piece so keenly, believably assumes Tom’s boyish qualities. Alex Judd, who composed the cheerily cacophonous score, also is a member of the cast. The central focus of designer Katherine Graham’s lighting is expressive, but one wonders whether the pitch darkness that surrounds the action might present a less gloomy effect if sepias or blues were used.
Importing this fine production for The New Victory Theater, which presents events for young audiences (this one is rated for youngsters nine years old and up), proves to be highly thoughtful programming, since no doubt some kids are aware of older relatives whose mental processes are failing. Held in the theater’s downstairs lobby, a pre-show session of games and activities about memory reinforces the show’s theme. Still, it’s likely that the adults in the audience are going to appreciate the tender message that glows within The Nature of Forgetting a great deal more than the kids.
