October 26–November 2, 2000

theater

Sister, Sister

Sister act: (left to right) Susan McKey, Mary Elizabeth Scallen and Marcia Saunders in The Memory of Water.

by David Anthony Fox

The Memory of Water

People’s Light and Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, through Nov. 19, 610- 644-3500

In Shelagh Stephenson’s play, three adult sisters return for the funeral of their mother to the isolated town in northern England where they grew up. If this TV Guide-like scenario sounds familiar, the play sure feels familiar, too. Memory invokes so many dramatic clichés that even when there’s no single referent, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Let’s start with the sisters, each of them an archetype. Teresa is the dowdy, buttoned-up, compulsively organized one. Mary — now a doctor — has outgrown her lower-middle-class roots and seems impatient to move on. Catherine, the ditzy-pretty, hippie-ish one, is a mass of over-stimulated ganglia and regularly sleeps with men who mistreat her.

Yup, it’s Olga, Masha and Irina for the ’90s. But any comparisons to the riches of Chekhov end there.

We never get beyond the archetypes. These women don’t seem like real people, let alone members of a single family, and we can’t take their stories seriously. Memory is further compromised by dialogue that regularly goes for cheap laughs (one sister tells us that when she learned her mother died, "the first thing I wanted to do was have sex"), or worse, for portentous epigraphs ("Who are you if you take the memories away?"). Stephenson piles on more bromides: the dead mother is a visiting presence.

I won’t reveal more, since the play seems to want each predictable twist to come as a surprise. But I will say that, as with the characters, the plotting rarely rises even to the level of the mediocre chick-flicks and TV dramas that seem (along with Three Sisters) to have inspired the author.

I first saw Memory a few years ago in London, where it was a modest hit. There, a fine director and three sensational actresses built a vivid world that suggested the kind of surreal emotional chaos that rises out of the death of a parent: every inappropriate joke was the result of real pain; and conversely, the grief was tinged with dark humor. The ensemble superimposed on the script an unwritten level of class and emotional connection, and such was their achievement that I left the theater thinking the play was quite a bit better than it is.

The People’s Light production bears a remarkable visual similarity to the London staging. But director Abigail Adams, who has wanted to do this play for two years, is stymied by its platitudes. Rather than rise above the triteness of Memory, the production sinks to its level.

There is no believable emotional arc here; instead, the world is separated into two clumsy halves. First, there is the funny stuff, which is pitched for maximum effect. Virtually the whole of Act 1 falls into this category, and frankly is handled so crudely that the mother’s death seems merely a catalyst for situation comedy. Where is the grief and anger?

In the second act, sentimentality takes over. This is preferable to the comedy, but it’s mistakenly milked for bathos, and again there’s no connection to the larger emotional world.

The three actresses playing the sisters — Mary Elizabeth Scallen (Mary), Marcia Saunders (Teresa) and Susan McKey (Catherine) — have all done good work in other things, but they are unable to make anything of this material. (Specifically, Scallen does too little, Saunders and McKey too much.) In what could be a touching supporting role, Lenny Haas mugs egregiously — it’s like Harvey Korman just walked into an English living room. But Tom Teti and especially Alda Cortese find some simple (and very welcome) dignity in their supporting roles.

There’s nothing memorable about Memory; it’s merely treading water.