(L-R) Amelie Lyons, Joanne Jacobson and Lenora Champagne - Photographer: Gary Breckheimer
TRACES/fades runs about 75 minutes and is Ms. Champagne's "meditation on Alzheimer's and our national inability to remember history." Therein lies the challenge with this sometimes affecting but often off-putting production: a mixture of themes and devices that have not been blended dramatically. The script's constant references to wars and bumbling presidents and amnesiac societies is butted up against the central story of a memory-losing Ann (Joanne Jacobson) who, packed away in a nursing home, is beloved by her granddaughter (Amelie Champagne Lyons) and only marginally attended to by her daughter (played by Ms. Champagne). Naturally, the old woman's story steals center stage because it is immediate and visceral as opposed to the more abstract commentaries on big-picture politics. The play's structure mimics this uneasy link of part-to-part, with presentational elements morphing into song-singing to prettyish tunes by Daniel Levy and Lisa Dove to some very wry and wrenching interactions among the denizens of Ann's nursing home (Mary Fogarty, Matthew Lewis, and Judith Greentree) as they spar with their well-meaning but overwhelmed care-giver Nettie (Quanda Johnson) -- all of which are individually interesting but which are also not quilted into a dramatic whole. (Not to mention the video projections by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty of purling water under ice, snowstorms, hands that write then un-write what they've just written, and so on, which are more distracting than illuminating.) The moments I found most touching were the ones ungussied by "theatrical device" and "author's message," such as when Nettie complains to Delores about how her getting-older body is thickening in the middle, and Delores responds, straight and acerbic, with "That's nothing. Just wait. Everything hurts." Truth plain and unadorned in those words, and the audience, understandably, laughed in both recognition and commiseration. Or when Nettie muses, "If we are what we remember, then who are we when we forget?" Moments like those are what makes seeing TRACES/fades worth the effort.
Michael Bettencourt
