In The Memory Exam, playwright Steven Fechter imagines a country where citizens of a certain age, having been observed with cognitive lapses, are required to undergo a test from which they never return should they fail.
The test, not incidentally, is based on a familiar current type at which the person examined is asked to remember a number of objects — Fechter uses five — and then, after responding to distracting questions, must recall the list entirely.
Death as the consequence of memory failure: Scary, no? In Fechter’s discourse on that subject of infinite facets — memory — he wants audiences to think loss is a nagging common concern. And he’s got something there. Where’s the person even at 40 who doesn’t have a temporary qualm when a name isn’t remembered for a few troubling seconds? There’s even a blaming phrase: senior moment.
The circumstance is something Fechter is ready to prey upon. Naughty, naughty! He introduces Dale (Vernice Miller), who, after her tested husband has disappeared, decided she’s going to offer an illegal service. She’ll instruct people due for the more-often-than-not fatal examination how to prepare for it.
She does this by taking groups into the woods for instruction – woods even more frightening than the now-revived Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Into the Woods woods.
For Fechter’s intermissionless 90 minutes, Dale attempts to wise up Tom (Gus Kaikonnen) and the married Jen (Bekka Lindstrom) and Hank (Alfred Gingold). All three are scheduled for the frightening procedure three days hence.
After some time given over to the possibly doomed trio resisting Dale’s authority and motives, they acquiesce to her insistence on remaining succinctly positive through the actual process. To the immediate point, she tells them to consider five objects she’s about to mention as an equivalent of what they’ll encounter under test conditions. She mentions these: pencil, Bible, compact mirror, red leather glove, gun.
She advises Tom, Jen and Hank to find a way to connect the objects mentally and, more cogently, to format them in a story based on their own experiences. In other words, she challenges them to draw on personal memories as a life-saving device.
Though initially balking, Tom, Jen and Hank each tell time-consuming stories from their dredged-up past, stories that indeed include references to a pencil a Bible, a compact mirror, a red leather glove, and a gun.
Here’s where this reviewer, already having trouble buying Fechter’s eerie fantasy, gave up on it. He had nothing in his memory-compromised history containing a pencil, a Bible, et cetera, and so wondered why Dale doesn’t come up with something simpler. Why doesn’t she counsel her aging charges to construct a short sentence or two containing the five test words?
Had she done that, there would be much less of a play, of course. Not that the Tom, Jen and Hank tales — serving as sufficient revving up for their impending exam — end things. Fechter has twists and turns up his sleeve that won’t be revealed here for the sake of those determined to find out for themselves.
It’s enough to say plot elements involve Jen and Hank having a reason briefly to leave the stone-slabs-and-fallen-autumn-leaves set that Tamara L. Honesty designed and Greg MacPherson lights to suggest looming trees. Alone together, Dale and Tom manage to pass a saucy kind of quality time. (The Memory Exam has Rebecca Brinkley as intimacy choreographer and Bryce Biederman as fight choreographer.)
Wait, there’s more. On Jen and Hank returning, Dale says training has ended and they all must leave the woods. Tom suggests they meet in the same spot the following week when Jen, Hank and he have undergone their exams and, they all hope, have succeeded. Dale declines at first but soon agrees.
Thereupon, MacPherson’s lights dim for several seconds and go up on the following week. That’s when Fechter indulges in more twists and extremely melodramatic turns that also won’t be detailed here so’s to avoid ill-mannered derision as well as to maintain at least a modicum of respect for director Terrence O’Brien and spunky actors Miller, Kaikkonen, Lindstrom, and Gingold.
At one tense moment in the action, Dale informs the recalcitrant others, “Science tells us that we forget fifty percent of what we learn within an hour; we forget seventy percent within a day; and ninety percent within a week.”
A bemused reviewer recognizes that Dale very likely refers correctly to the scientific findings. He worries that he might not adhere to the included percentages and that five things will stick like Lady Macbeth’s spots to his memory walls: pencil, Bible, compact mirror, red leather glove, gun. He further suspects that he’s not the only audience member still ticking off the list at frequent intervals as reassuring proof of intact memory.
If little else, Fechter can take credit for that.
Memory Exam opened September 10, 2022, at 59E59 and runs through September 25. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
