May 2007
Satellite Theater
By Shamrock McShane

Water finds its own level. And so do we. That's what leads us to the Hippodrome and me to the Shamrock Pub.

The theater at its best presents our collective dream life. And in our latest crazy dream we are three Limey sisters and Mum has just died. Makes sense to me. Let's ask Dr. Freud here.

The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson, directed by Lauren Caldwell, presents a substance of some density. It establishes characters, a story, and a world where there are human consequences.

Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, there are no villains. It's adult, sophisticated, and serious, which means it's a comedy. You can see through it, like water, and you can see yourself in it.

There's the elder segment of the populous, who may find themselves identifying with the dead mother, but really she is for any of us with an imagination and a sense of reality, who try to picture the world when wešre no longer in it.

We become three sisters.

We are at each other's throats. We will argue with each other About Arguing! Sara Morsey and Catherine Fries Vaughn play the elder siblings, Teresa and Mary, of Kate Kertez's Catherine — the infant who came along so much later in life that obviously Mum mustšve messed up.

And the kid feels it, and has felt it all her life. Like a mistake. And now, in grief, as the three sisters mourn their mother's death, fueled by alcohol and drugs, the pain of life makes death seem like a dirty trick played on the living by the dead.

It's only when we are fully immersed in the dream that we realize how funny it is. Not the incongruity, but that everything seems to make sense. Incongruity we can find in waking life. Now we are in the harsh light of the middle of the night.

The men arrive, in the persons of the elder sisters' beaux, one legal, one not, played forcefully by David Brummel and Bryan Geary respectively, and farce threatens. Fortunately, cooler heads prevail.

As in a dream, a wardrobe opens and within it Marilyn A. Wall can costume a chanteuse in triptych.

The set by Carlos Asse is minimalist yet captivating, offering its own secrets.

The performances are all pull–out–the–stops interpretations of warm–blooded creatures we can recognize as our kin.

"Give me two players and a passion," Moliere said, "and I will show you theater." The Hipp triples the equation this time around with its tight ensemble of pros comprised of Jan Wikstrom, Catherine Fries Vaughn, Sara Morsey, Kate Kertez, Bryan Geary, and David Brummel.

The lighting design by Erin B. Hoffman cleverly yet clearly distinguishes reality from fantasy, imbuing the night with what they call in literature magic realism.

Th sound design by Risa J. Baxter lends a blues–jazz background to the night that is like a continuing boozy nocturne.

This is a clean, actor–centered presentation and staging of a character–driven play. There's a bed, a dressing table, and two mirrored doors, all of it heavenly white as befits nightmares.

The Memory of Water is very much the therapeutic is aspires to, a psychoanalysis full of jokes and humor, each with a personal significance. And it is not without its meta–dramatic aspect, once we begin to sense that the mother who just died, gracefully played by Jan Wikstrom, has given birth to a play and its people. It has been a process crammed with ingratitude.

"I can't believe I spawned you," Vi, the mother, says from beyond the grave. And in so saying, and in our hearing her voice, we become an informed audience. We like that, when we know more than the characters do.

That's reassuring, like the memory of water, knowing that nothing is ever really forgotten or lost, and a constantly recurring nightmare, thanks to the Hipp, that this time is funny.

The Memory of Water runs through May 13 at the Hippodrome State Theatre.