Kate Levy as Juliana. ©Photo by Jerry Naunheim, Jr.
“If I had dementia I would know about it, don’t you think?”
The black humor of this joke, uttered by the main character in the compact drama The Other Place, currently playing downstairs in the Rep Studio, belies the horror of slowly losing one’s mind to disease, old age, watching the Lifetime Movie Network, etc. (Hey, madness comes in many forms, no?)
What’s more, the joke cracks open the puzzle box of this tricky kinda play, in which madness colors the scenes. Is what we’re watching real, or is it only the schizoid imagination of that main character, one Juliana Smithton?
The mindf*ck is not exactly on par with that in Inception or Memento, and that’s too bad. The is-it-real trick informs one-half of the viewer’s impulse to stay in his seat. The other half of our attention is drawn by what empathy Juliana and company can manage, and until the very climax of the play, that’s a hard sell.
Our main gal is a business-suited coffee achiever with a snooty Caucasian name and mien whose strident take-charge personality runs headlong into the memory loss and confusion of early-onset dementia.
The character is also the subject of a series of coincidences that might make a writer blush, but playwright Sharr White just goes for it. The lady thinks her problem might be brain cancer. Her husband is an oncologist. He’s having an affair. They’re splitting up. She needs his pull at the hospital, but this betrayed, foul-mouthed spitfire won’t kowtow to anyone. It sure is a convenient device for generating huffy dialogue.
Then there’s Juliana’s job as a drug-company research scientist who’s developed a drug to treat—wait for it—memory loss. Oh, irony, you adorable scamp!
Her illness and her husband’s double-dipping has left her a brittle mess, and the audience gets to follow the ping-ponging repartee as Juliana bickers with her husband and her doctor alike. It’s a tempest of angry exchanges that almost feels real, I guess. We are meant to understand the anger of the recently diagnosed and the hurt we fling at our loved ones.
Actress Kate Levy as Juliana felt more like a termagant stereotype than a three-dimensional character to me, but your mileage may vary. (The Broadway incarnation featured the estimable Laurie Metcalf in the lead, by the by.) Levy does what she can with the drama, a choppy, rushed affair that stops for tears late in Act Two, after the play’s mystery—what’s real here?—has successfully subsumed its mushy heart. It would be quite a trick to break open that gimmick and reveal the naked human need within; The Other Place almost pulls it off.
The real magician here is Amelia McClain, who plays multiple roles as Juliana’s daughter, Juliana’s doctor, and a magnanimously empathetic stranger who finally gives Julia a little TLC. Her turn as that last one, a stranger who encounters a confused Juliana in a vulnerable state, brings a sudden stab of recognition deep in the second act when the scene ripens. This is the connection to Juliana we need to care about the action. Apparently, we needed a character to show us what naked, ugly pathos sounds and looks like. McClain gets it.
By that point, though, The Other Place has essentially wrapped up its sturm-in-a-box so neatly as to be suspicious—or to smell like a made-for-TV drama.
The decision to have Juliana address the audience doesn’t help; it pulls us out of the drama, and reminds us we’re watching a play. And the emotional mortar blast of a surprise plot point revealed late in the action feels like the answer to a riddle, sure, but it also manages to feel like a dramatic contrivance.
The Rep’s set, designed by Luke Hegel-Canterella, is a visual metaphor with square tiles arranged in perfect gridlock upstage, becoming random and overlapping as they extend toward stage left, a breakdown surely intended to reference Juliana’s advancing dementia. Some may find it too subtle; others, too obvious.
Sometimes the spirit craves a theater of experiment, surprise, or shock, to jolt us from urban, capitalist comfort. The Other Place is not that; it is closer in ethos to a well-written single episode of a TV drama popular amongst a respectable, middle-aged female demographic. Its plangent notes enter the morass of theatre, film, TV, webisodes, radio—all the places we turn for entertainment— and are quickly enveloped by passing time. The puzzle box that reveals its mysteries even as a woman’s memories are dissolved is an elegant conceit, but in the end, the narrative may come off as a touch too pat for more aggressive tastes.
The Other Place runs through February 9. For times and ticket information, visit reptstl.org.
