Memory and Identity are Present in “Absence”

Up a steep concrete ramp, tucked away in the heart of Boston University, sits the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, home to new productions from up-and-coming writers. BPT focuses primarily on staging  professional productions of thesis projects from Boston University’s Masters of Fine Arts Program. The theater closes its season next month with Peter M. Floyd’s moving and unconventional new play, “Absence,” running from Feb. 6 to March 2.

“Absence,” directed by Megan S. Gleeson, tells the story of Helen (usually played by Joanna Merlin but triumphantly portrayed by Kippy Goldfarb on Feb. 8) a woman slowly losing her mind to dementia as her husband and daughter try to help her accept the consequences of her disease. Though many stories of this heartbreaking illness focus primarily on the relationships and emotional struggles of patients’ close friends and family, the script of “Absence” distinguishes itself by choosing to focus primarily on Helen’s interior losses. In doing so, the production forces the audience to contemplate the fine line between memory and identity in a way that lingers in the viewer’s mind afterwards.

The show is set up to keep the audience confused alongside Helen, and the cast successfully  ensures some perplexity remains for the bulk of the show through their nuanced acting. The set and writing are extremely fluid, making both the temporal and physical transitions fade together. The minimalist set is built mostly of boxes and plexiglass walls that transition from house to hospital to house again. At the beginning of the play, boxes line the front of the small stage and overflow into the audience. Throughout the play, different characters carry the boxes offstage to represent Helen’s slowly deteriorating memory. The plexiglass walls slide open to act as different sets and allow quick transitions and exits. The ever-moving set expands the physical limitations of the small stage. The material fluidity of the set perfectly captures Helen’s memory lapses and unreliable mind.

The narration works so that the audience to lose track of time with Helen. At one moment in the play, Helen’s husband, David (played sternly and complexly by Dale Place), tries to convince Helen that they have had the exact conversation a week before. But the repeated conversations are blended together in the narrative, making the audience momentarily wonder whether Helen’s family is cruelly playing tricks on her. This moment is made all the more heartbreaking by Helen’s remaining ability to adeptly name family stories from decades before; she tries to deny the symptoms of her growing illness, but, if anything, Helen’s growing difficulties are emphasized.

However, the most affecting portrayal of subtle change comes in the gradual decline of Helen’s ability to understand language. Throughout the play, Helen’s daughter, Barb (Anne Gottlieb), slowly begins interspersing her speech with apparent gibberish. Despite the conscious decision on the part of Floyd to replace lines with nonsensical language, Gottlieb delivers these lines consistently with consistently unfaltering emotion. The fever pitch of Gottlieb’s superb delivery makes the audience feel, just as Helen must, as if they can almost understand her, but eventually it is simply too difficult.

The most questionable decision in “Absence” comes on stage in the form of Dr. Bright (Bill Mootos), a quirky personification of dementia as well as death. Dr. Bright, a character that only Helen ever sees, delivers some of the play’s most profound lines; the decision to create such a character brings a level of complexity to the semi-traditional tale. However, the execution of many of his scenes can tend toward the awkward. Bright sporadically appears with a bubble gun, aviator glasses, and bananas. Though the character may have been present to inspire laughter, it seemed slightly like a lost opportunity.  Although Dr. Bright’s interruption of the narrative appears purposefully and effectively, the disturbance of tone disrupts the emotional momentum of the play. Without the props and the camp, the character of Dr. Bright could have been a strikingly eerie personage, a modern-day Harvey jovially promising to make Helen a child once again.

The play grapples with the idea that our memories create both our joys and sorrows. Largely avoiding from melodrama, “Absence” goes beyond the heartbreaking losses of family names, old memories, and speech to the gut-wrenching realization that memory includes the taste of a cinnamon stick, the feeling of a man’s fresh shaven face under her hand, and the sensation of tea warming her from the inside out.  Her memories become more than Helen’s identity; they become her mortality. With a thought-provoking and slippery narrative, Floyd challenges the audience to question what happens if every small memory that defines us slowly gets boxed up and taken off stage.