By Martin F. Kohn
Ashe Lewis as Katia and Stephanie Nichols as Maggie in Memory House.
Katie's parents have split up, she doesn't answer the phone when her friends call, it's New Year's Eve and her college entrance essay is due in three hours. There are better times to have a teenage identity crisis.
Nor is it the ordinary who-am-I kind of crisis in Kathleen Tolan's one-act drama "Memory House." Young Katie has some specific issues. She was adopted from an orphanage in South Africa when she was very young and taken to America. Katie is black; her adoptive mother, Maggie, is white. We never see her adoptive father, but we know he is a college professor and that lately he's been suggesting to Katie that she was robbed of her heritage by the imperialistic Americans who adopted her. Thanks a heap, Dad.
Maggie has to deal with all this in the short time the playwright allows her, and she faces an identity crisis of her own: With Katie almost grown, Maggie's job as her mother is nearly over. So, on this particular night she is baking a pie, quite possibly for the first time in her life, as a statement of…what, exactly?
And how was your New Year's Eve?
Ashe' Lewis (Katie) and Stephanie L. Nichols (Maggie) generate tension with an undercoating of understanding in David L. Regal's production at the Theatre Company. The play is akin to an athletic competition, with Katie on offense and Maggie playing defense. Any parent, not just one whose children are adopted, might see that as a metaphor for the teenage years.
What gives the play its momentum (and title) is the subject of the college application. Katie must write about something from her own storehouse of memories.
Mostly what Katie seems to have stored up is anger and resentment, and not just at her own history. How could Maggie have given up an exciting career for motherhood and an ordinary office job? Lewis plays the rage with full-bodied obnoxious and a hint of something deeper at its core. Nichols is the mom you wish you had – or could be – no pushover but taking the (figurative) blows and never striking back, keeping kindness in her voice and manner, no matter what.
"Memory House" seems more a matched set of character studies than a fully realized play, but the characters are genuine, their situation understandable and there are times when the proceedings seem more like real life than something taking place on a stage.
And can there be a New Year's Eve without some resolution?
REVIEW:
'Memory House'
UDM Theatre Company at Grounds Coffeehaus on the Livernois campus of University of Detroit Mercy, 4001 W. McNichols Road, Detroit. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday through April 6. 1 hour, 5 minutes; no intermission. $10-20. 313-993-3270. http://theatre.udmercy.edu
