Forget About It

Memory House comes out half-baked

by David Anthony Fox

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Published: Feb 19, 2008

For the first 20 minutes of Kathleen Tolan's Memory House, Maggie, a well-meaning, folksy-liberal mom, bakes a pie and utters smart-ass one-liners. Katia, her sullen daughter, a high school senior, avoids writing a college entrance essay — understandable, since it's something about a "memory house," where she stores her sense of self. We, the audience, wait with diminishing patience for these metaphors to go somewhere.

They don't. Oh, the author tries — there are shards of many important themes, especially the frustrating emotional roller coaster of moms and their teenage daughters (dad lives across town with a new partner). And, since Katia was adopted from Russia, how hard it is to be a girl with no identity — and how brutalizing it was to be wrenched away from a Soviet orphanage (really?).

But writing a play is a lot harder than baking a pie. Tolan's script is all arch moments, with nothing to pull them together. Katia and Maggie's 80-minute conversation — ranging from studiedly casual banter to accusatory harangues to teary "understanding" — feels like an unsuccessful writing exercise.

So don't blame the likeable actresses (Katy O'Leary as Katia, Peggy Smith as Maggie) if they seem consistently one-note. And Erin Lucas probably shouldn't be faulted that the stage business never really looks convincing — though there's far too much of Katia throwing herself onto the sofa and hugging a pillow (international body language for teenage petulance, I guess). Also, the pie that finally emerges from the oven looks nothing like the pie that first goes in. But then, everything about Memory House is half-baked.

Memory House Through March 1,Flashpoint Theatre Co. at Second Stage at the Adrienne,2030 Sansom St.,215-563-4330,flashpointtheatre.org.

 

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