The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: The Lipstick Project’s In Memory Of
By Dennis W.
Dealing with mental illness is difficult in even the most supportive environments. The Memory Of, written by Rachel Schulte (Author, “Thicker Than Blood,”), is an interesting exploration of one woman’s battle to regain her life after trauma has made it impossible for her to distinguish between reality and the specter of an old love who haunts her. The play tells us about artist Renee played by Nikki Lye Neurohr (Alumni Theatre Co.’s Stick Fly) who is surrounded by a sister and friends who have her well-being at heart and encourage her to not give up her battle for sanity. Renee has already been saved once from taking her own life and everyone is on edge and will do their best to make sure she doesn’t try again. Neurohr’s portrayal of Renee, although stiff at times, gives the character that sense of living in her own world.
The Memory Of was presented as part of The Lipstick Project’s Fresh Fruit Festival at The Wild Project in the East Village. Schulte says the idea for the play was born out of a “vivid dream.” She developed the idea of keeping a dreamlike aspect to the work by frequently shifting from past to present using more than a dozen scenes of varying length each separated by a blackout. They are supposed to offer a fluidity of time but this surreal shift from past to present leaves the audience bewildered. The script doesn’t provide enough information for the audience to follow the timeline. The author provides a list of the dates in the program but it is useless once the house lights go down and everyone is sitting in the dark. The shifting storyline zig-zags, jumping ahead then jumping back, with a vague roadmap of the author’s vision often leaving the audience in the dark. [The concept was better handled in The New Group’s The Seven Year Disappear.]
Renee and writer Charlie played by Hunter Hopkins Dunn (The Hypocrites/The Yard’s The Fourth Graders Present…) are caught in a tangled friendship that begins as Charlie is trying to help Renee deal with her demons and hopes their relationship evolves into a romance. As their relationship grows, Charlie becomes a stronger force in Renee’s day-to-day life. The actors seem to have some chemistry at first when the two are friends but as they become more romantically entwined, the scenes between them become more awkward..
Renee’s sister Kyle played by Julie Thaxter-Gourlay (LawnChair Theatre’s A Midsummer Nights Queen) is doing what she can to help her sister battle her mental health crisis. Thaxter-Gourlay believably swoops in as a concerned sister when the need arises and interacts with Renee’s friends, who all hang out at a local bar to deal with the current emergency. The bar is crowded with several minor characters who occasionally add a line of necessary dialogue or provide a moment of comic relief, but their connection to the main storyline is never quite developed.
Director Alysia Homminga has divided the sparsely furnished stage into quadrants and has the characters continually crossing the stage to get to the proper location which adds artificial pauses in the action until everyone is in place.
The Memory Of starts off as an intimate story of Renee, Charlie, and Kyle dealing with Renee’s attempted suicide and her objection to her current treatment. Schulte seems to be on the right track at the start of the play but loses her way as she tries to weave the growing cast into an ensemble that struggles to bring all the storylines to a cohesive end.
The Memory Of comes with a disclosure of discussions of suicide and depressive episodes.