Jerry Vogel as Gerry and Maggie Conroy as Sally. Photograph by Peter Wochniak
There were sniffles to be heard throughout the audience as a recent performance of Forget Me Not rolled to its climax in the black box theatre at the Kranzberg. The tear-eliciting drama, by one Tom Holloway, managed to elicit a standing ovation shortly after, too. Audiences are into the tale of a grown Aussie trying to track down the Liverpudlian mother who, many years before, surrendered him to a government-allied “child migration” service trying to seed the world with “good English stock.”
An air of mystery pushes the tragedy along. Who is this older woman, Mary? Is she the mother of our man, the angry, intimacy-challenged Gerry? If it’s his mother, why is their chat so stiff and disjointed? Indeed, why is every single scene in this one limned by tortured communication, lines that flow out but never seem to reach their conversational target?
The answers come out, history is divulged and re-lived, and theaterniks will get a kick out of how director Philip Boehm uses scene changes and props to enhance the action. Characters stay onstage for the first few lines of the next scene, then casually walk off. Props are left onstage and never removed. It’s part and parcel of a drama that bends time, and eventually proves not only nonlinear but indeed, not necessarily real. Look for sequences later revealed as fantasy. Trickery!
Donna Weinsting as Mary offers her typically rockin’ performance. She always seems to nail it. Indeed, Weinsting is so noted for her comedic chops, the audience spent a chunk of the first scene chuckling away before they realized they were watching a wrenching exchange between two long-estranged family members. The gal has a following.
Likewise, it’s always great to see Terry Meddows. His turn as a well-meaning government factotum benefits from that Steve Buscemi-style comic oddness he seems to bring to every role.
Maggie Conroy as Gerry’s long-suffering daughter is solid, and Jerry Vogel as the orphan who’s grown into a damaged father centers the proceedings.
Sound designer Chris Limber contributes some interesting interstitial music/noises, including one that might be described as “ominous didgeridoo.”
Scene designer Michael Heil has blown up a vintage black-and-white photo of a group of these “migrated children” tugging their heavy suitcases to their new lives, as a backdrop for the performance. There are smiles on the kids’ faces. They have no idea that for many if not most of them, their childhood has just ended.
The More You Know: One scene in this one involves a chocolate cake. At play’s end, a woman behind me asked the stage manager if she could have some of the cake. No, the Upstreamer replied, we push the slices of cake back together and re-ice it each night to make it look new; it’s old cake, and you wouldn’t want to eat it. Trickery!
Forget Me Not, presented by Upstream Theater, runs through February 16 at theKranzberg Arts Center, 501 N. Grand. For time and ticket information, visit upstreamtheater.org.
