This all feels exactly right - a little dreamy, a little less than pure realism, but also familiar and true to life.
#SUSANNAH FLOOD CHILD ACTRESS TV#
Maggie's apartment is at once naturalistic and dreamlike it has a workaday kitchen, complete with functional stove and sink, but no back wall - just a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard backdrop, decorated with a child's scribbled drawings of rooftops and TV antennas.Īfter a shaky video, showing a beribboned little girl responding to questions and commands in Russian, plays on the large TVs at either side of the stage, Maggie enters and starts the play proper by flicking on the kitchen lights. Now it's back at Trinity, where it feels marvelously at home in a delicately balanced, subtle staging by current artistic director Curt Columbus.Ĭolumbus wisely infuses the play's domestic drama with a slightly surreal aura, aided by Eugene Lee's thoughtful design of set and lighting. When Eustis left Trinity for New York's Public Theater, the play fell into a brief limbo, then was given two well-received productions, in New York and, last spring, by TheatreZone in Chelsea. But what's wonderful about "Memory House" is that it is not an issue play "about" adoption it just takes the complexity of having raised a child who was born to someone else on the other side of the world - or of being that child - and makes it one of the many things we learn about these two intense, conflicted, and fascinating women. And, in fact, the mother here, Maggie (with her now-divorced husband), brought the daughter, Katia, home from Russia when the girl was 6, and the fact of adoption is naturally an essential part of their relationship. Tolan, who was commissioned to write the play by Trinity Repertory Company under its former artistic director, Oskar Eustis, has said that she began by thinking she would write about international adoption. Punctuated by the sound of paper being crumpled and the smell of baking crust, their conversation - funny, biting, and exasperatedly affectionate - feels at once deeply familiar to anyone who's been a parent or a child, and unique to the particular circumstances of their complicated bond. But these mundane tasks anchor Tolan's portrait of one evening in these two women's lives. Kathleen Tolan's "Memory House," of course, is not just about a pie and an essay. PROVIDENCE - A woman bakes a pie while her daughter races the midnight deadline for completing her college application essay.
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